Skipping and hopping

From the kitchen window I see the rubbish bins of the estate. Always overflowing, and usually surrounded by more rubbish. Stuff you can always find on the streets. Like ironing boards. Laundry racks. Broken plastic containers. Clothes hangers. Prams. Mattresses. Stuff that gets broken and then has no use. The dead plastic skin shed by mass-consumption society. In a city of affluence, even the poor can afford to throw away.

Among the rubbish zoo mattresses are especially miserable creatures. Cheaply made and easily thrown out, mostly for a reason, although I have found good futons on the street (but left them there). A day or two outside and a reasonabley good mattress becomes a sad soggy piece of filth.

On Sunday there were two mattresses outside the bins. For some hours they laid there sadly, but then they were reclaimed by the kids as trampoline. They were led by an extremely eager 6-year-old girl, who kept encouraging the rest. The miracle of staying up there in the air! It looked like the springs were in good shape. I followed them from the kitchen window and thought about the dump as East London's multicultural melting pot, where children of all colours and backgrounds meet, halleluja. There aren't many places to play around the estate, with most of the place taken up by car parking.

The next day I looked out of the window to find the bins empty again.