Wheelie Bins

Alice Takes on the Pudding Van

My Housemate's a Mermaid (Alice E. Bennett) Baking, British, comedy, Coronavirus, Culture, Event, Everyday Occurances, food, House, Humor, Humour, Mellennial, Mermaid, Nonfiction, Prompt, Social Media, sophistication, Swindon, Uncategorized, Wheelie Bins, Work, Young Professional , , , ,

Someone abandoned their catering van on my housing estate. And I was not happy.

Look at it! It’s massive!

Naturally, I applied a very level-headed attitude to this. That’s right, I sent a ranty email to estate management. It went something like this:

WHY IS THERE A MASSIVE CATERING VAN PARKED IN A VISITOR SPACE? I’VE CHECKED THE REGISTRATION PLATE (“XXX XXX” for your reference) AND IT’S NOT TAXED OR INSURED. IT’S UGLY AND CLEARLY BEEN ABANDONNED. I PAY MY MANAGEMENT FEES, SORT IT OUT!

(The caps are a reflection of the shouty voice in my head…I may have also left the last bit out.)

Estate management responded, saying thay they’d located the vehicle’s owner and told them to move it within the next 48 hours.

48 hours came and went, the van unmoved.

I wish I could say I became tolerant of the pudding van’s presence, but when you’re facing onto something like that every time you go to make a cup of tea, it’s very hard to let go. (Plus, you know, me.)

Whilst waiting for the owners to be chased up again, I did a little investigation of myself. By in investigation, I meant be super nosey.

There weren’t any company details on the van and the only online presence seemed to take me back to a deactivated Facebook page, from when it operated out of Pershore some 56 miles away.

Instead of hard, concrete information, I had to deal with statements like this:

It reads: “Feeling stressed? Stressed backwards is desserts”

I don’t know what bothered me most; the font, the words or the fact that it’s annoyingly true. Everything about it grated on me more than the sugary sweetness of the food it claimed to provide.

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Update: I drafted this post in September 2021, however in June 2022 the van disappeared altogether. I assumed it was at local festival but it never came back and I haven’t seen the van since. No idea what has happened but the problem of the Pudding Van seems to have sorted itself!

I’m totally putting it down to my ability to moan, that or my top-notch judgemental stares out the window.

(And as for why I’m not posting this until now…well, I forgot I’d written it.)

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The Curious Incident of the Wheelie Bin in the Night-Time

My Housemate's a Mermaid (Alice E. Bennett) Everyday Occurances, Minor Crime, Swindon, Wheelie Bins , , , , , , , ,

My second post was intended to act as a fill-in from Graduation to the present day, however that’s going to wait. A scary development has occurred on our housing estate, something that should be treated with the utmost severity.

Our wheelie bin has disappeared.

(I’ll give you a minute to regain your breath).

Better? Ok, let me explain. I left the house to go to work, wheelie bin was there. I came back to the house after finishing work, said bin was still there. Go to bed, and the next morning, woah! The black, cuboidular (it’s not a word, but it should be), Swindon Borough Council wheelie bin was gone!

I don’t know who did it or why they did it, but I can only assume they are a criminal mastermind. I’ve walked up and down the street several times in the pitch black (in a mildly creepy way) and I’ve found no clues as to the whereabouts of no. 12’s wheelie bin. The whole situation has me baffled. I mean, why does anyone on a housing estate need a second wheelie bin when we have a designated area for rubbish bag overflow? Where can one subtly hide and store such an awkward, large object? Most importantly though, why our bin?!

It can only be described as the Swindon crime of November 2014. I don’t wish to scare monger, but I fear this problem will get worse before it gets better. Don’t fret though my fellow Swindonites, I’m on this. I’m composing a letter to send to Sherlock and I’ve been practising my fist shaking all day in preparation for the next attack.

To the bin-stealing culprit, return the bin and we shall speak no more of this. However, be warned, my housemate is a crime journalist. If you continue this charade I will nag him senseless until he reports on this. The deepest depths of hell do not compare to a page 15 paragraph in the Swindon Advertiser.

Now, many of you might say I’m taking this a little bit too seriously, that I need to calm down a bit. At the end of the day, I’m a middle class professional. I’m cool as a cucumber on most things. Loud music at 2am, not offering me tea when I visit, I’ll put up with that. Mess with my waste disposal though and you mess with me. You, me and my black belt in fist shaking.

So bring it in on my friend. Bring it on.