With gin o’clock arriving earlier every day, and on most days arriving twice, Colin and Carla’s glass recycling crate is filling up with alarming speed. Carla says they need to do something. Colin looks wary: ‘You don’t mean drink less?’
‘Good God, no,’ says Carla, equally appalled by such a prospect. But she’s alert to the fact that universal self-isolation has kiboshed any pretence to have had fifty people round for a party. ‘The bin men will think we’re alcoholics.’ Colin points out that the bin-men really won’t care, but Carla hasn’t finished yet. ‘Also I saw the Robinsons stop at the end of our drive on their walk yesterday and peek into our crate. I’m sure Liz was counting – I saw her lips move.’
Now this does have Colin worried, not about the quantity of bottles in their crate so much as the quality. Lionel Robinson is a notorious snob and Colin doesn’t want him noting the inferior class of booze being consumed in the Smith household. He wishes he could wean Carla off her £4.50 Pinot Grigio and onto something more discerning. Meanwhile he has a brainwave. ‘Next week I wont’ take the crate out until just before the bin lorry arrives.’
So the following Tuesday Colin lurks by the kitchen window until the refuse chariot hoves into view and then sets off on his mission. Peering over the brimming bottles as he staggers down the drive, he sees that most of his neighbours are engaged in the identical activity. As they all deposit onto the pavement the weighty detritus of their dissipation, the cacophony of clanking glass can be heard in space. They sheepishly acknowledge one another and scamper back indoors.
A tactic of greater subtlety is required. After much brainstorming, Colin and Carla devise a new plan: Colin will take the crate out in the middle of the night before collection-day and sneakily distribute half the bottles into neighbouring receptacles. But the night in question turns out to be strangely unquiet, with fleet black figures darting about in the gloom and the silence broken by the occasional tell-tale tintinnabulation. It’s 3am before Colin has a chance to offload his own incriminating evidence. The next morning everyone happily tells everyone else that some cheeky sod has filled up their almost-empty glass recycling crate with imposter bottles. And so the nocturnal cuckoo-crating becomes a weekly custom. Watch the wall my darling, while the gentlemen clink by.
© C P Jenkinson 26/04/2020
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