I can’t bear it

This is quite different from annalog /Jean Hagen Lives ! and not a phrase Wal admits to. 

Not much Wal can’t bear including a recent argument with a concealed tree root which took him A&E where a woman in a white coat, presumably a doctor, kept asking him what drugs he had taken and the nice enough black nurse asked him if he believed in Jesus or God and invoked Sodom and Gomorrah.  Out, Jewish and exotic, Wal is proud of his secular antecedents.  Being what Dame Edna in that old interview with Michael Parkinson (sleep sweet, love) called a homeopath is his business.  He bore the woman in the white coat till she went off duty, the nurse by refusing to be drawn and when Howard came to rescue him, he was fascinated by a group of 7 doctors, all at computers, but not examining patients for hours. And he was then asked to wait to be seen by a consultant – and declined.

Sometimes, someone makes you think again about a phrase.   I have borne a number of things I thought I couldn’t, including pain and fear, largely because I couldn’t see round, I could only see through. Couldn’t always see through either –  I clung to  “This too shall pass.”   .      

But there are one or two things which madden me.

There is the local contingent of a wider tribe I can’t bear.  They are all female, mostly of medium height, wearing variants of leggings and all with the same hairdo – pulled back off the forehead into strands or falls or a sort of bush.   Without exception they carry a lot of extra weight, mostly where you can’t miss it, and they walk little snappy fluffy dogs.  If one of them should sit down in error on the fluffy, that animal would be impacted if not defunct.   And the sisterhood all carry poo bags which, filled, they leave in the street.

I am by nature a picker upper, a tidier, one who asks “Do we need this ?”    I have been teased about it, but so be it, I am.  And I can’t bear picking up and disposing of the excreta of other people’s animals.  It seems like the ultimate in the insulting raised finger, nastier than sandwich and sweet wrappers, discarded cigarette packs or vape bottles, tissues, paper bags and all the rest. 

Long ago somebody referred to his mother in law as “minlaw”.  Let me introduce you to binlore.  I live in the mostly private rental and owned end of a long road and I have referred before to my block (shades of NYC) where everybody has the money to rent or pay mortgage, but a significant number don’t have the brains God gave a turnip when it comes to bins.  

They don’t use bin liners which have been rebranded as big bags, presumably because you can sell more. They don’t use the free bags for recycling the council provide.   They don’t stand their bins up, they don’t drain them of rain water, they don’t rinse them out and they leave them uncovered with rubbish inside to rot and stink.  

I have written before about local waste disposal services and always favourably.   And I am so irritated by the lack of thought – not more than 30 seconds max at a time – that would make this if not Bin Beautiful, at least Bin Bearable.

Yes, I worry about the fires in Canada, about the decline in sea ice in Antartica.   I bet there have been fires in Siberia too – there were last year.   We’ve had punishing heat in continental Europe and fire there too.  Starvation in the Horn of Africa, decline at every level.  I know it’s too much to think about, I know it’s frightening, destabilising and comes back to tug at your imagination as does the image of a nurse killing children, mass graves in Ukraine and every other bit of bad news which is  horribly effective even when badly put together and repeated with little variation for hours at a time (what used to be called propaganda).

But I can’t bear these two things because they are something you CAN do something about.   No Governmental inquiry or international summit required.  The cost in time or money is minimal. And that all these people can’t think of dog shit disposal and lids on drained bins is the most unbearable thing of all.