The evil scourge of the brown recycling bin

A break from the usual subject matter. Do you have a brown bin? A while ago, our local council provided a brown bin for scrap food and organic waste like grass cuttings. They also gave us a wee small "caddy" bin for the kitchen that sits beside the sink, and when it's full it gets emptied into the brown bin (which is a mingin' job that none of our weans will do). The brown bin sits outside for two weeks between collections, festering away to the point where the stench would make you cowp (keel over). In the summer, the heat makes it ten times worse. The smell of ours was so bad the other day that I needed to (once again) bleach it and hose it out. Absolutely rank - I am convinced that the brown bin constitutes a health hazard and is indeed an evil scourge.

The only answer for the nation is for everybody to buy half a dozen hens and feed your leftovers to them. Hen dung isn't that much of an aroma improvement, but at least you can put it on your strawberries and also get fresh eggs every day - and when the hens get past their lay-by date they save you a few £ at KFC. A wee jar of this stuff and away you go.

I'm sure brown bins are great for the environment. As are the blue bins for cardboard and tins. As are the black bins for normal rubbish. And of course the various colour-co-ordinated bottle banks. My wife is a zealous recycler, and disapproves of my objections.

My main worry (apart from the smell) is that in our household the rubbish is now better looked after than the stuff we want to keep!