Varying degrees of loss

It was two years ago tomorrow my Granpa Reid passed away. It's quite strange that it has been two years already. Part of me still expects him to be there when we go round to my Gran's place. Sitting in his armchair, watching the telly. It was usually the horse racing that was on. Engrossed or in a trance like state, he'd sit there watching until the race ended, then get up and offer drinks and argue with Gran. Sometimes I can still feel his whole weight on my shoulder, from when I was younger, whenever he got up from his armchair and he'd plant one of his giant hands down on my shoulder for some unnecessary support. He'd also sometimes stand heavily on your feet as he passed you by on his way through the living room. You'd have a sleep over at Gran and Granpa's some nights and wake up with carrots and onions in your shoes like some kind of strange non seasonal Veggie Claus had visited during the night. I still find it odd that Granpa did pass away at all. There was nothing wrong with him! He was only 81? He could have easily done another ten years. Such is the way with life though.
Not quite as unfair but still a complete p**ser is the fact I've been robbed. Last night I decided to check out our accounts online and discovered that someone has nabbed £35 from one of our accounts. Last week I purchased a tenners worth of petrol at a garage in Rutherglen. On the statement this is listed alongside another item which was apparently £35 bought from the same garage the next afternoon at approximately 1pm?! Ka and myself were both at work when this purchase was made and the credit card in question was, as far as I know, in the right arse pocket of my trousers. How did the thief do that then? Was my card scanned by some piece of evil card scanning equipment whilst in the garage the night before? Had somebody been watching me type in my pin? Who knows. All I know is we're £35 poorer with no sign of a return and my card has now, once again, been cancelled. So now I'm having to wait on another cash card coming through the post, preceded by another new pin. The third new card in a year. The last one being lost in T in the Park last year whilst dancing to The Wombats and, almost immediately before that, when I had nipped up to the Spar outisde my work to withdraw some money. On plugging my card into the hole in the wall the whole industrial estate decided to conk out. The whole site lost it's electricity supply for around two hours leaving me with no cash or cash card. The only plus point being we sat at our desks in the office with nothing to do for two hours (I think we ended up having a paper ball fight).
On a brighter note, one of our blue wheelie bins has mysteriously appeared at our door. Yes, one of the previously thought long lost wheelie bins has turned up safe and well. One of the other neighbours welcomed it home on Monday evening. Somehow, this wheelie bin escaped the ned bonfires and has survived?! Unfortunately there is no knowledge as to where it has been the past month or so but I'm looking into it... nope nothing in it either.

The naked neighbour's doors and ironing boards

There's some action in the block tonight as raised voices echo throughout the close outside. The guy downstairs, or the naked neighbour, as he was described in a previous post, has had many a female 'visitor' over the years. Many of them generally not giving much away except the noise of their heels echoing in the stone close. Tonight, however, one of them is going mental downstairs. Shouting and cursing at a male, presumably the naked neighbour himself, her ned like voice screeching and squawking. Ka and myself are, of course, up against the front door listening in as she yells at the foot of the stairs outside. Not that we revel in the goings on of our neighbours' lives. We were merely a little intrigued by the loud commotion... (nothing is on the telly). A few moments ago, however, he asked her to lower her voice which, of course, it being a woman and all, had the opposite effect and made her screech even louder. She was then, from what we could hear, deliberately muffled and pulled back into his flat, where the argument goes on as I write. These things are so much more interesting when it's somebody else.
We're just back from Uddingston, where we welcomed the future In-laws, Dougie and Grace, home with one of Ka's beautiful lasagnes. Unfortunately, on Saturday night, Grace fell in their hotel in Salou and fractured her foot which ended up with the pair of them having to make a visit to the local hospital. Fortunately they were able to get a good, temporary covering over it until an operation back home, which will hopefully happen in the next few days. So now Grace is hopping around on one foot, the left foot being in giant bandage form, with Colin and Dougie acting as crutches for navigating the house. Not a great thing to happen nine weeks before her daughter's wedding.
Other exciting news is that we got a new ironing board yesterday (yes, this is, as good as it gets!). We lost our ironing board around two weeks ago in a tragic ironing board guitar playing incident and had to say a fond farewell (I think it was 'Crosstown Traffic' I had been playing). Anyway, on taking our ironing board down to the bins I discovered another, sad looking, neglected board covered in cobwebs propped up against a wall, behind one of the wheelie bins. Feeling sorry for it I decided to give it a new home and brought it upstairs as a replacement to our dilapidated old one (which I set fire to later as a sacrifice to the ironing board playing god whilst high on old Easter chocolate and Jack Daniels). Unfortunately, however, after using this old board for a few days I discovered it was growing lumps and after a few irons felt like I was ironing shirts on a cobbled path. It was no good and also had to be disposed of. I suspect it was probably the naked neighbour downstairs' board. He also has other things lying about the close outside and around his front door and the wheelie bin shed. An old lamp stand sits outside his door together with an old, golf bag, ripped and torn and an old front door lying on it's side. All cloaked in a thick layer of dust. The old front door lying on it's side outside the naked neighbour's flat was most probably from his last war from one of his other former girlfriends. Maybe he'd wanted to go golfing and asked her to iron her shirt to which she threw a lamp at him and stormed out the flat slamming the front door behind her, which came away from it's hinges and collapsed to the ground in a cloud of dust. Sometimes I'm not sure why the naked neighbour bothered to get a new front door as he often goes out during the day leaving it wide open. Before heading to the shops yesterday for our shop, and a new ironing board, I took some rubbish downstairs and was surprised to see the naked neighbour's entire hallway, lying open before me. Clothes horse, hoover and drying washing all perfectly visible complete with a semi new looking ironing board propped up against his wall. How easy it would have been to nick. Being too honest for that kind of behaviour (or boring) I carried on, in my way to the bins and then on to the shops, for my food and the new ironing board.

A final burning place

Well, I think I've found the aforementioned wheelie bins. In a clearing further into the forest, around forty metres beyond the entrance to the allotment, the trees thin out and five or six burnt circles of ground lie at different spaces throughout. Lying between the high fences of one side of the allotment and the high fences of the back end of a sewage works lies this, the hoodies, secret night time getaway. Walking the path down to the area, it was immediately apparent this was our bins final journey. Ka's empty Morrisons' passata boxes from her most recent batch of meatballs lay at one side of the path, wet, soggy and adandoned. Collapsed trunks and tree roots lie over the leafy floor in and around their bonfire remains. Small piles of thick melted blue plastic, the blackened remains of old newspapers, magazines and plastic containers all dotted around the black cinders and ashes. One lone wheelie bin wheel protruding from one pile. The bone like remnants of the streets' waste disposal units. So my idealistic visions of jumping in to a major bin smuggling operation have disintegrated some what. Apparently some folk nick these bins to sell them on. Apparently the cost can be as much as £60?! Makes me even angrier that the bins are now mouldy, misshapen blobs of plastic. I could have nicked the bins myself and made some money out of it?!

The case of the blue wheelie bins

I've been dreaming of wheelie bins for the past two nights. Recently our neighbourhood has been terrorised by the return of the bin nickers. A while back, before Christmas, all the wheelie bins for our block of flats, disappeared overnight resulting in me having to phone the Council for replacements. Now, once again, it is happening again. A number of our blue, recycling, wheelie bins went missing over the weekend there and on returning home from work, late on Monday, I found an attempt had been made on our three remaining bins. Disturbed in some way in mid theft, the robbers had abandoned the bins half way down the street. After retrieving the bins I had no other option but to bring them inside to our close and store them there. It was then I decided to investigate. I walked down to the bottom of the street, in the general direction the robbers had been heading, and into the dark entrance to the Calderglen forest. On entering the forest you first meet the gate to the local allotment before the path veers down the hill to the right, through the trees. It was here, at the allotment entrance, that I found my first clues. An empty milk carton and an empty cardboard hankie box. Not much in the way of clues, you may think, but they were our milk carton and hankie box, along with other extraneous recyclable rubbish from our bin that had been nicked over the weekend, lying in a heap of debris at the allotment gate. Could it be that an allotment member was nicking our bins in order to create a new manure pot or compost heap?
On Monday night I dreamt of a Fastasia like extravaganza with wheelie bins marching in procession, shuffling along a giant arch, singing in a low, monotone voice, by opening and closing their lids. Streams of water flowing up and around them against a navy blue, cartoon like, background.
"Wheelie bins...dun dun dun, wheelie bins...dun, dun dun, wheelie bins...dun, dun, dun"
On Tuesday morning I took another stroll down to the allotment before work. Fortunately I was able to gain access as a keen gardener had already arrived and left the gate open. Making my way inside I started looking around for any signs of rogue recycling bins but was almost immediately disturbed by someone poking their head over an old fence, further up into the allotment, beadily eyeing me suspiciously. Realising this had to be the chap who left the gate open, I made my way up to him, greeting him a cheery good morning. Now, I don't know why I did this but instead of telling the true reasons as to why I was sneaking around an allotment I was suddenly telling the man how I was a keen gardener and was interested in obtaning one of the plots of land. He told me a Councillor named Jim Fowler was the person to talk to (not Arfur). So I asked my new found fellow horticulturist if I could I have a quick walk around the allotment, to which he hesitantly agreed and I had a good look about only finding one clean, blue bin. No sign of all the other numbered bins that had been nicked from us out in the street. As I walked back down towards the gate to leave, the same gardener stepped out infront of me and offered to walk me out. His suspicions must have been raised somehow and my own suspicions settled. The bin thieving was not an allotment operation.
Once again, the robbers struck last night. Being at work I managed to get the low down from Ka on my return. A couple of guys in hoods had managed to get one of our bins from inside our close and another from one of the other blocks. The hoods then disappeared into the trees at the same dead end of the street that leads into the entrance to the allotment and the depths of Calderglen Park. Approximately five minutes later a fire engine roared down the street and, sure enough, skidded to a halt at the dead end, it's incumbents jumping out and getting to work. Ka and Chris (who was visiting for a coffee at the time) questioned one of the firemen to see if there was any sign of the wheelie bins but the fireman only gave a short, irritable response and got on with his work. Unfortunately it must be the same old story. Neds. The hoodies are nicking our recycling and burning them along with the wheelie bins. Why? What kind of deprived, boring lives must these guys lead to find this kind of behaviour entertaining? Even at a young age what do these guys find appealing about nicking peoples wheelie bins. Perhaps we should be grateful it is only the wheelie bins and nothing more... but then maybe that is just a matter of time.