The Tip

Going to the landfill

“Kids! It’s Sunday tomorrow. We’re going to do a tip run.”

Boy, did my parents get excited about this kind of itinerary. It wasn’t church or a nice lunch somewhere: it was tip-time in our house. We kind of normalised it. Going to the tip meant a trailer borrowed from Uncle Paul, in the “wop-wops”.

This meant a drive to Uncle Paul’s and back (and then back again etc.) but it was apparently cheaper to do that than buy one from the Trade & Exchange like a normal person. Once the trailer was backed into the driveway, all our old shite went straight on. We stood in amazement and sorrow.

Dad had obviously been planning this for ages, as half our childhood toys and beloved material goods were already packed up and ready to go on the pyre of destiny. It wasn’t all bad, though.

I sometimes wondered about consumerism, but back then, the tip was like a kind of community shop. A living embodiment of “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. I sensed that dad (in particular) was hoping to score something in that landfill. The landfills of yore smelled like the earth had been ripped apart by something unspeakable, as if the ground had been opened in the wrong place.

In reality it was.

The seagulls above were black-backed and were far away from sea; some of them had never even fished until they came to fish here in the hills and valleys of rotting flesh. I wondered how they would sustain their own, but wait there’s more. Maybe they could nest at the landfills and be renamed a different bird.

Meanwhile humans would pick out treasures in the mess. One story is that there were Penthouses in perfect condition. Another was that we would come home with complete shoes and an FX-82 calculator but by society’s standards we never shoulda been there.

The refuse stations of today are a sanitary affair, with orange-vested folks shooing you onwards, past the brown glass to the green glass, to the cardboard. There’s no spontaneity or joy, it’s sifting and sorting.

Reminds me a bit of staying home and sorting my own rubbish with all its known quantities and none of the excitement of finding a Teletubbie or a set of Trixie Beldens.