Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or dry recycling – it’s only ever the smelly stuff. I give my neighbour’s brown bin a little kick. Emptied! This feels personal. I call the council. ‘Look, this is a nightmare,’ I say. ‘This is the second week in a row. Are we on a blacklist?’ Pause. ‘Our operatives are too busy to keep lists,’ says the lady. Hang on – you mean if they weren’t so busy, they would?
Things my husband and I have bickered about this week: my devotion to an ugly but comfortable pair of rubber pool slides the colour of NHS hearing aids; a particular sort of belch he does; a particular sort of cough I do; whether or not I am ‘cruel’ to confine our spoilt, idiotic cat to the ground floor of the house at night, thus making her ‘sad’.
My husband, Giles, is the restaurant critic of the Times, so we eat out a lot. This week we go to Pinna in Mayfair. Eating out is now a necessity if nothing else: cooking at home is out of the question as the unemptied food waste bin overflows with no room for even a single extra potato peeling. More than ever I wish I owned a pig. Left to our own devices my husband and I will argue about anything – the pool slides, the cat – so we often invite friends to distract us. On this occasion we take with us Sadie Holland and her husband, the history podcaster Tom. Sadie and I discover a shared fascination with ladies on Instagram who video themselves clearing up other people’s hopelessly untidy houses. I then discuss with Tom what we would do in the event of an apocalypse. He has clear ideas for reactivating castles in the north-east of England: it’s all very on-brand.
A photoshoot for a newspaper feature I am writing. Groan. I don’t mean to sound like a diva but I am in my forties and would prefer to get old and fat in private. Colourful frocks and kabuki make-up were fun when I was 26, but these days they make me feel like Grayson Perry. This particular picture set-up needs human props so I text my friend Charlotte to ask if she might do me a favour and be in it. Charlotte is the daughter of the late Stuart Wheeler, who made a mint in spread-betting, bought a castle in Kent, gave five million quid to the Tories, then very publicly changed his allegiance to Ukip. Enormously tall, he drove about in a lavishly dented car with a massive purple Ukip sticker on the side, while often wearing novelty T-shirts with things like ‘I’m the king of the castle’ written on them. Charlotte, also blessed with height, is dementedly passionate about two things: netball and running the Camden ‘Bike Bus’, an initiative that seeks to teach children to cycle to school safely. While cycling with her charges, she blows a whistle like a motorcade outrider and wears a luminous onesie in day-glo yellow, pink, green and orange. Sometimes she paints her fingernails to match. She texts back quickly that she is bang up for being a prop in my photo. ‘I am VERY excited to have my picture taken,’ she texts. ‘I am like my father. All media is good media.’
Monday again. I’m going to lie in wait for those recycling bastards. It’s laundry day so I am wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms with a hole in the knee, a hoodie from Plymouth Aquarium, my son’s Queens Park Rangers football socks and the hearing aid pool slides. After four hours of lurking at the window I finally hear the rattle of the approaching council pig bin. I scurry outside with a broom so I can sweep leaves as a cover for my surveillance. I want to see what’s going on but I don’t want them to know that I am snooping, or I may find my food waste not only not taken but posted back to me through my letterbox. Along comes a young man with a nose ring, wearing overalls and ambling past one brown bin in every five. He sees me and stops to take my food waste. Hallelujah! ‘Thanks,’ I say. Casual, like I haven’t been fantasising about this moment all week. ‘No worries,’ he says kindly to the strangely dressed old lady standing in the street, sweeping at nothing. I reach for my phone and make a note of the time. Get used to this face, kid.
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