Wheelie bin wars, 'live' on YouTube

Of course, the real reason why the Lib Dem city council distributed wheelie bins throughout Oxford was as part of our ‘recycling revolution’. But the people of Headington are an inventive and subversive lot, as befits this Arezzo to Oxford city’s Florence.

So it was wholly in character that one of the highlights of yesterday’s Highfield Residents’ Association should be that newest of traditions, the wheelie bin tag-team race. Happy viewing:



The second highlight, at least for me, was the unveiling of the latest community notice-board by that most distinguished of personages, Oxford’s deputy lord mayor. Though I successfully lowered the tone by joining in the rain-sodden limbo dance.

All captured here:

Pimp your wheelie bin

Here in Oxford the Lib Dem ‘recycling revolution’ is being rolled-out with the aim of doubling the city’s recycling rate. Good news for the environment and all that jazz… What I hadn’t appreciated was the limitless opportunities for self-expression that arming every citizen who wants one with a wheelie bin would provide.

It was my ward colleague, David Rundle, who first alerted me to the infinite creative possibilities of which Oxford’s denizens can now avail themselves by directing me to the website of the Wheelie Bin Cover Company. Tasteful, I’m sure you’ll agree.

(Reminded me of the brilliant Linda Smith’s description of her Brummie grandmother’s house: “everything that could possibly have a cover had a cover” - the Radio Times, toilet roll holder, etc.)

But Oxford residents, quite rightly, don’t want their creative juices staunched by corporate designs imposed upon them from above - they relish the freedom to explore the artistic side of their personalities, and good on them say I.

So I was delighted to be e-mailed this exemplum of the species (right) by one of my local residents, who runs the exemplary www.headington.org.uk.

She conveys - with admirably subversive pith, I feel - her sentiments about the proposed new ‘recycling revolution’, while at the same time promoting one of Oxford’s most famous landmarks, Bill Heine’s Headington Shark.

(She is wrong about the wheelie bins, by the way. But such differences of opinion over matters this weighty is just the kind of thing I imagine Voltaire had in mind when coining his famous aphorism.)

If you now feel inspired to personalise your wheelie bin, here’s the site you need: www.pimpmybin.co.uk. I imagine this one (left) might appeal to many in the Lib Dem blogging fraternity.

But for added meta-subversion, why not decorate your wheelie bin with a picture of… a wheelie bin? If that doesn’t freak out your neighbours nothing will.