KEY POINTS:
When you begin a relationship full of hopes and dreams for the future, you very rarely think to yourself: "It'll all end badly over the recycling".
Which is just the thought I had the other evening watching a gorgeous friend marry her wonderful partner on a stunning evening overlooking the Waitemata Harbour.
"If only you knew," I found myself thinking as we listened to the string quartet play a Paul Weller arrangement. "In years to come you won't talk to each other for days on end because of the recycling."
Such is the dilemma of the modern couple who finds themselves slowly being buried under a mass of paper and bottles due to the Auckland City Council's recent decision to encourage people to recycle more by placing a limit on how much they can do it. Which surely contravenes the Kyoto Protocol or one of those other save-the-world schemes the Labour Government signed us up to. While the world recycles, we in Grey Lynn can only recycle one large wheelie bin a fortnight.
We have been forced to discover that we are unusual in our habit of subscribing to a daily newspaper, magazines and indulging in a healthy consumption of alcohol and milk because we never seem to be rid of the bottles. They pile up on to our deck giving the firm impression that we have hosted two 21sts, a large wedding and run a daycare centre in the last fortnight. In fact it's just been business as usual, mounting up on a daily basis for months.
The spare bathroom has been sacrificed as a storage room for our paper recycling and is now closed to through traffic. Anyone who chooses to use the facilities must find them first, although they don't have to worry about finding something to read when they finally get there.
And my husband hasn't helped things by being overtaken by a strong case of denial. He's the man, so he's in charge of the rubbish and he's failing on every front. In the old days Dad simply burned the paper in the incinerator. Beer bottles went back into their crates and were returned, milk bottles got swapped over, wine bottles were re-used as vases, especially those lovely Chianti ones with the wicker around them.
"Just what is it you have been doing every second Tuesday night for the past six months?" I asked him as I biffed another wine bottle out the window to land on the mountain of un-recycled glass.
"Do you just pretend that you're putting out the recycling, because there is no evidence whatsoever that you are dealing with it."
I was then requested to accompany him outside to the wheelie bin, invited to look inside and discover that it was full and overflowing.
We then descended into a full-blown argument about the merits of recycling - I did my speech about plastic bottles being shipped to China which makes a mockery of the whole process, he did his speech about how the world has too much packaging and we debated into the wee hours in a heated fashion and went to sleep, not talking apart from me muttering something about the counsellor saying you should never argue in bed, especially about recycling.
"Bed is for sleep and sex."
Which is when he suggested we throw our recycling overflow into the neighbour's bin. The neighbour lives alone, is of moderate habits, and you can hear his bin begging to be given a useful purpose in life.
"Do we really need to inflict our waste on his very tidy life?" I grumped.
The next morning I offered to buy an incinerator, just like Dad used to have, but the non-recycler claimed it was illegal to burn your own rubbish unless you were doing an umu, a hangi or a brazier.
"So we'll do a big umu - whatever!"
The next morning he suggested I ring the council and lie about how many people live in our house. I quite rightly refused. I support recycling, but not lying to do it. You have to have some principles.
And then it was over. For an annual fee of $60 and another wheelie bin, our marriage is back on an even keel, saved by a faceless bureaucrat in the Waste Department who will never know the part he has played in bringing romance to the inner city.
