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Tuesday 23 September 2014

Blog 102. I really know how to have a good time.

Call me a total party animal – a social butterfly – a hedonistic thrill seeker. This week, in the post-referendum greyness, I feel it’s my duty to let the rest of you in on my ultimate wild-time-having secret.

To be sure this may be an acquired taste but trust me, once you've tried it, all your recreational drugs, booze binges and wild nights of passion with strangers (ehh, the GERMS) will seem as naught.

Maybe you spend hours reading up on recipes to impress your friends for a Saturday night culinary extravaganza or you are one of those people who is planning the next holiday before the baggage is off the carousel. I don’t know. But I do know I am about to blow your mind. I am going to show you the three steps to heaven the zinging excitement kick to end them all.

A trip to the municipal tip.

I know what you are thinking. The woman has gone bonkers; she’s unhinged after the disappointment of last Thursday/Friday. She really believed that there was a chance for more egalitarian government. Albeit that she has not a nationalist bone in her body – she actually thought the establishment was going to get a shake up, that at least for Scotland there would be some hope for those who understand that not everything is about profit. She’s such a naive twit she thought the people who really wanted change could stand up to an alliance of the comfortably off, the cowards who were taken in by all the bogey-men-under-the-bed stuff and the cynics from the main parties who realised that a Yes vote would be disastrous for them personally. Really. Does brown girl not realise the establishment is called The Establishment for a reason? (I hear you sigh.) So now she’s lost it.

Well – you are wrong.

Having spent my first few months in Scotland stressed by mind numbing hassle with my energy provider and their subsidiaries who needed to do some stuff to make the place usable and did it horribly badly – I only recently got to the point where the flat actually looked like a home. Therefore, the trip to the tip took on Xanadu type significance.

For days I have been looking longingly at the rotting junk ripped out of the kitchen and stacked kind of neatly by the bike shed. My partner and I who take our weekend on a Monday decided that this would be our Monday treat. We debated which of the available municipal tips to attend and decided on the one by the shore near Portobello. We charted a route that would take us the scenic way and we debated, in detail, which coffee shop we would visit for a bun, should our trip be successful.

It was all more wonderful than I could possibly have imagined. There was almost no one else there as we edged to a halt next to the huge skips with their labels and side walkways to make chucking easier for the uninitiated. As it turned out, the three different skips we needed were actually adjacent to each other – wood, hard plastic and metal. Clearly it was one of those zeitgeist, Zen, feng shui, karma thingy situations.
One thing we had not discussed before hand was who would empty the vehicle and who would do the chucking. Now I didn't want to steal all the fun but I really REALLY wanted to do the chucking. As it turned out my guy seemed remarkably sanguine when I bagsied the chucking job. There was a little argy-bargee about the tarpaulin which we won’t go into because it nearly spoiled things. Suffice to say that little hiccup was overcome.

Then it was time to chuck. I was magnificent. At one point I nearly hurled a bit of moldy chip-board too far and it was in danger of flying over to the skip earmarked for metal. I shudder to think what could have occurred if this had indeed happened. Thanks to a corner clipping the edge of the skip it flipped and fell with a satisfying thwump into the correct skip. Then I went crazy, hurling and chucking and throwing – even some overhead moves and quite a lot of skimming and flinging. Probably if there had been a lot of people there I’d have felt inhibited but there weren't and I didn't.

Honestly – I cannot recommend it highly enough.


Next time you are stuck for exuberant entertainment – forget gaming or gambling or drugs and alcohol or bungee jumping or skiing or late night clubs. Take a hop ‘n a skip - go let rip – I mean man just flip – get hip - zip down on a tip trip.