Originally published by The Clifton Courier, April 28, 2021

I recently had to relocate my kitchen bin and it’s really not working for me. 

My bin or, as Mum refers to it, kitchen tidy, used to live in the gap between the wall and the fridge, but due to life being the unpredictable, shifty bastard that it is, that all changed last week. 

The fridge that previously chilled my milk, kept my frozen mango chunks frozen and hosted my many novelty tourist magnets (which not only serve the very practical purpose of sticking important papers to my fridge, they also inform visitors to my home that I’m worldly enough to have been to a bunch of different places, but still trashy enough to buy tacky fridge magnets) had to go. 

But thanks to the guttural-sob-inducing kindness of a friend, her parents and her grandmother who no longer needed three fridges, a replacement appliance was soon shunted into the void. 

And void is the right word. Because I’m living in a townhouse, space is a little… strategic. The kitchen shares a wall with the stairs and rather than just turning the space under the stairs into a cupboard for an orphaned wizard to live in, the designers of this townhome decided to use the gap as a dedicated fridge space. The old fridge was narrow enough to leave a space between the wall which was big enough for the bin. 

But this new fridge is a wide set old girl and there’s just not enough room for the bin. 

Again, the kitchen’s dimensions are… strategic, which means there’s no floorspace for the bin. 

And not that I want to pass judgement on anyone’s lifestyle, but I just can’t get around the whole bin-in-the-cupboard thing. There’s nothing legally wrong with keeping a bin in a cupboard; that’s a choice everyone has the freedom to make for themselves. It’s just the wrong choice for me, as I’m not a monster. 

So, with a lack of bin-appropriate real estate, I’ve moved said kitchen tidy/crud keeper/trash taker into the laundry for now. The laundry is just off the kitchen and, given the specific dimensions of my place, it’s quite a short commute from A to B. As the crow flies, it’s probably four steps from the kitchen to the laundry. But, again with those specific dimensions, there’s an angular kitchen bench that gets in the way, adding probably three steps to the journey.

Of course, seven isn’t a lot of steps. And it’s not like I have to go outside, step over puddles, dodge cane toads or brave icy temperatures and pouring rain to get to where I’m needing to go. I’m not trekking through Middle-earth to dump my garbage. 

It’s literally right there. 

But within the first few hours of the bin’s relocation I became a weary traveller. The journey seemed more and more arduous each time I embarked on it. Like, I had to stop what I was doing in the kitchen, turn my body towards the laundry, take a few steps, successfully navigate around the spit that is my kitchen bench, open the laundry door, put the rubbish in the bin and then retrace my steps. 

It’s kind of like when I’m doing something on the computer and I use a keyboard shortcut in a bid to avoid going to all the extra effort of lifting one of my hands a few centimetres until it reaches the mouse, manoeuvring the cursor and then returning the same travel-worn hand to the keyboard. 

I know that’s lazy. In fact, that’s the laziest thing I’ve ever heard. And I’m disgusted at myself. But I still go to extreme lengths to use only the keyboard, even when it takes more mental effort or uses up more time than using the mouse. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can be a real piece of poo.

And I’m beginning to worry what the bin equivalent of a keyboard shortcut would look like: a plastic bin bag hanging on one of the kitchen cabinet door handles? A pile of rubbish in the sink? A bin in the cupboard?

Clearly I need to work on myself.