No blog since last Saturday. The week has been torturous - hangovers and lack of afternoon powernaps have left me feeling exhausted and pining for the weekend, when it's more natural to drink and behave like a pirate. Bottle city has developed rapidly under the kitchen table, which is where we keep our empties. The house recycles, and we get our wee trash-category baskets from the council. The baskets live in the hallway entrance to the building, and we used to take our emties downstairs to dump in the basket designated for glass . We decided that it would be a better idea to plant one of the baskets in our kitchen, that way we could just take it down on Sunday night for recycling on Monday morning.

The idea to take one of the baskets up to our flat came about at a neighbour's housewarming party. The people below us, no 6 - were a group of interesting wine drinking classical musicians (they have since moved out). Their mouths were permanently stained and purple from the vin rouge, strained, yet pleasant sounds of piano and violin would wrestle out from behind the yellow no 6 door. The other neighbour is a Japanese gentleman who lectures at the University of London - he is a specialist in Afro-Asian relations. I tried to find out exactly what that meant, to no avail. But it was at the housewarming party where the topic of the recycling baskets came under discussion. The Japanese fella bounded to his feet and in amazement cited a list of all alcohol we drank - for example, we had purchased a couple of cases of rioja some time during the summer - he announced to everyone in the room 'ahhh, you dlinking reejohaa people, yes'. To our shock and horror, we realized that he had been scouting the recycle bins, piecing together the puzzle of other people's lives through scrutiny and analysis of their waste. I began to wonder if the wonderful pepper, garlic and ginger aromas that often wafted from his flat didn't possibly contain human.

So it was more out of embarrassement that we decided to keep a recycle basket up in the flat, and quietly sneak it outside on a Sunday night. It didn't take long to fill the basket when the thought of having to bring another basket up left us thinking that there might be cause for concern. A period followed whereby beer was bought in cans. That way we could crush the can and throw it in the regular rubbish. A pleasant side effect was that along with the can, any residue guilt from a small mountian of bottles also ended up as rubbish in the bin, not to be recycled.