I arrived home last night, parked and did what I believe is known as a double take.
The skip, that has been in the drive for the last few weeks, and which was far from full as we unclutter at the pace of a sleepy snail, had gone.
“What’s happened to the skip?” I asked Julia, who had arrived home slightly before me.
“Nothing, as far as I know.” she said. “Have people been putting things in?”
“Look for yourself.”
She ambled to the door muttering.
“Aaaaaargh!”
It was the heartrending yell of a woman who had been planning to fill a skip on Bank Holiday Monday. Skipless and bereft, she stood on the doorstep wailing and rending and doing whatever thwarted declutterers do…
She had, in case you haven’t guessed, been in a world of her own when she returned home, and had completely missed the fact that a large steel rubbish receptacle had disappeared from the drive.
And that is not the strangest thing.
The skip company, when we finally got hold of them, deny all knowledge of the skip being taken away, which means that we have clearly been the subject of a skip robbery.
It’s an unusual crime, as it’s hardly the same as slipping an unconsidered trifle into your pocket. You need a lorry with the correct lifting gear for one thing. So it’s either been stolen by a rival company, or we’ve hired it off a company staffed by incompetent idiots who have collected it at random. . Julia has been looking at the feedback on their site. Some of the feedback is slightly more forthright than my comments.
It is looking likely that we have hired a skip off a company of incompetent idiots.