RUBBISH SERVICE

The Danes are big on sorting rubbish. Every small town, including the one I live in, has a municipal dump, where an impressive array of containers (around 35 in our case) stand ready to receive our assorted - and sorted - detritus. The local council does collect your rubbish in a dustcart, once a week in the summer and once a fortnight in the winter. But you pay for the service by weight, which gives you a big incentive to take as much as you can yourself to the dump, which is free. Saturday morning is usually the busiest for traffic in town, as a procession of husbands - and, let's face it, it is nearly always the husband - heads for the dump with a small Brenderup trailer behind the car piled high with "stuff".

The council dump has two employees, whose job is to keep things in order, and advise citizens on what to put in which container. In the old days, when the kommune was pretty much just the town, these two employees were proto-fascists, who delighted in the exercise of absolute power over their carefully demarcated little kingdom. Many is the time that I have been hauled over the coals for (eg) putting the old planks from the barn in "large and burnable" instead of "wood" (even though there was no real wood left in them), or dumping plastic wrapping in "hard plastic", instead of the plastic bags specially put out for the purpose.

But then the kommune merged with five others from the beginning of 2007, and the personnel changed. I don't know whether the proto-fascists were sent to another part of the now larger kingdom, or were fired; but it was certainly a very good decision to get rid of them. The new guys are young, cheerful and even give advice instead of muttering, criticising or just looking surly. When I was up there this morning, I mistakenly put my plastic wrapping in the special plastic bags. I say mistakenly, since there is apparently so much wrapping that a new container has been established to take it all. However, instead of chewing my ignorant ear off, the young man explained the situation with a smile, and even offered to transfer my deposit from the one to the other. Rubbish rubbish service has apparently been transformed into good rubbish service.

Walter Blotscher