Go Green

The garden bags are on the move again. You know the ones, usually given out free by the Council and now a standard addition to the sunday trip to the tip and gracing many a back garden. After a blustery day I usually have to retrieve them from the driveway, trapped under the front spoiler of the car or tripped up and trapped by the front offside wheel. I am sure these early attempts to escape the garden  are just to test the system, reconnoitre the immediate vicinity and a pre-cursor to the main breakout. The bags can be suppressed by filling them, as intended, with green waste. That is their role and they are pleased to do it, sitting open mouthed and docile. They relish the moment when they are loaded awkwardly into the back of the car and I swear that there is an audible sigh when their contents cascade into the huge waste container as allocated at the Civic Amenity Site. I have, fearful of their disappearance, taken to storing them when empty inside the new brown bin  but in the darkness, amongst the pungent odour of vegetation and the wing beat turbulence of the insects  I am sure that the master escape plan was devised. What were they waiting for?
It had been a good summer for growing but not sitting out and enjoying the garden. Always things to do, cut back the hedge, trim the lawn, massacre the wild thorn, pull up the weeds. Soon the brown bin was full and, not thinking, I wedged and weighed down the green bags under a loose paving slab. I did not allow for the last but still powerful gusts of the North Atlantic hurricane sweeping across the country from west to east. It had lifted houses across neighbourhoods in Mississippi, left boats in trees in Alabama and generated a tidal surge in downtown New York. In my back garden it inflated the green bags just enough to raise and tip up the restraining paving slab. A further Gulf Stream warmed bulb of air filled and lightened the natural weave and they were off. Clear of the brown bin acting as sentry, brushing in contempt over the bonnet of the car, just sweeping over the driveway gates, dodging the airstream of the mass of the 66 bus and they were away and free.

That week the Council received an unusually high number of requests for replacement bags.