It has been described as “a buffet for rats”. Since the end of June, Birmingham’s bins have gone uncollected because of a dispute between the unions and the council over changes to pay and working practices. Brummies have been forced to clear bags of maggot-ridden rubbish from their own streets and sluice out the bin juice from their gutters as a city-wide strike enters a fifth week.
With industrial action promised until 1 September, the Labour-run council knows it must act fast. Wisely, it has hired private refuse collectors to do the rounds and pledged to get to every road by the end of the week. The British do not easily forget anyone who messes with their bins. Voters in the country’s second biggest city recently elected a Tory mayor: Labour can take no chances.
Cut the social care budget to shreds, close the Sure Start centres. But interrupt waste disposal arrangements at your peril. I will never forgive Trafford council for introducing a weekly surcharge for collecting my garden waste, and if I find out which of my neighbours has pinched my grey bin (the best one! It’s for all the non-recyclables!) I cannot be held responsible for my own actions.
In September 2015, Hounslow council leader Steve Curran called in police after demonstrators piled wheelie bins outside his house in west London in protest at a decision to introduce them (because they don’t roll properly on gravel paths, apparently). Some years ago I spent a few days in Sheffield’s Page Hall after the then local MP, ex-home secretary David Blunkett, warned there could be riots if integration did not improve between the local population and Slovakian Roma incomers. It quickly became clear that at least half of the locals’ beef was about rubbish, and the fact the new arrivals did not come from a culture of bin use, let alone an accepted recycling etiquette.
I went back two years later to much cleaner scenes and have no doubt that the Roma would be on the frontline with everybody else now if Sheffield followed Birmingham with a bin war.
Kinema paradiso
I have a few firm rules when I go to the pictures: nothing over two hours, please, and do not make me suffer a film about war. The fact I willingly agreed to go and watch Dunkirk was testament not so much to Christopher Nolan’s reputation but because it meant a trip to Britain’s most charming cinema. The Kinema in the Woods in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, has been in business since 1922 and is one of the very few picture houses left to still use rear projection. The roof trusses in the former sports pavilion are too low for an image to be projected from the back of the auditorium, so films are projected from behind the screen and on to a mirror to flip the image. I thought Dunkirk was a snooze – flimsy characters and a curious failure to present the truly epic scale of the rescue operation – but I adored the Kinema. A silky curtain rose to signal the start of the main feature and during the interval an organist rose from the stage to serenade us, joined in a duet by a self-playing piano, stage right. Tickets are just £6.80 a pop.
The art of bike maintenance
I remain obsessed with Manchester’s dockless bike hire scheme, Mobike , which had a rocky start when much of the fleet ended up in the canal. I was delighted, then, to hear about the mother who dobbed in her son when she saw him on the front page of the Manchester Evening News trashing one of the Chinese rental bikes. She was so ashamed of her boy that she rang the police, who prescribed a dose of restorative justice: a bicycle maintenance course, to teach him how to fix the bike he broke.
• Helen Pidd is north of England editor of the Guardian
