Acrylic
8 x 5.5 inches
2009
We steal each other’s wheelie-bins. For some reason our street has one less wheelie-bin than it does houses. So every second Thursday, after we’ve left our wheelie-bins on the backstreet all day and the bin men have emptied them, we play the wheelie-bin version of ‘Musical Chairs’. First ones to get home from work and claim their wheelie bin will have it for the next fortnight, the last one home will have nothing, nothing but an empty back street, nothing but an opportunity to get creative with waste management for 2 weeks until they get a chance to steal someone else’s. Our neighbours paint their house numbers on their wheelie-bins as proof of ownership. To deter theft. So what happens when a wheelie-bin is stolen for 14 days? Simple. The thief simply takes a pot of different coloured paint and slaps their house number on instead. I have never seen even one of these paint jobs cover the old number up. Some wheelie bins have several house numbers on them, so that you can easily trace which neighbours have stolen them and in which order. The most amusing thing about all this is that a quick call to the Council would probably result in a new free wheelie-bin, maybe even ten of them. So, as the problem could be remedied very easily, I can only assume that we are all OK with stealing each others wheelie-bins and tattooing temporary proof of fake ownership on them. Maybe we all LIKE this game. Perhaps that is what it means to be a neighbour. To be as tolerant a thief as you can be to those thieves that tolerate you.
