The motion passes as a group photograph while the sycamore remains the horizon
Sunday. The residents’ association met regarding the bins, and I attended, as promised, and I can report that the poster undersold it. Lively does not begin to cover the events of the church hall, which ran two hours and eleven minutes, produced one resignation, two reconciliations, a splinter faction, and a motion so amended that by the vote nobody, including its proposer, could state what it contained, and which passed unanimously. Democracy is alive in this postcode. Feverish, but alive.
The substance, for the record, is the council’s new three-bin regime, with the food caddy, the collection days changing, and the wheeled bins to be presented, and I quote the leaflet, with the handles facing outward, a stipulation that has divided the street into constitutional scholars. Mr. Okonkwo at fifty-eight opened proceedings with a close reading of presented that Westminster would envy. Presented to whom, he asked. Presented how. Are we to curtsy. The hall was with him. The clerk from the council, a young man sent alone, visibly the office junior, sat before us with the courage of the Somme and explained the handle protocol assists the automated lifting arm, and the hall absorbed this, and a voice from the back, never identified, said, the arm should adapt to the community, and the applause lasted a full minute. I have seen governments fall with less.
The Factions Emerge
The debate revealed the street’s true political geography. There is the compliance tendency, led by the Pattersons, who have already laminated the new schedule and affixed it inside their cupboard door, and who spoke movingly of just getting on with things. There is the sovereignty caucus, Mr. Okonkwo presiding, for whom the handle question is the thin end of a wedge whose thick end they can describe at length. There is Margaret, ninety-one, cross-bench, who observed that we have changed bin regimes six times since the war and the rubbish has gone every time, a statement of such devastating perspective that both factions claimed it. And there is Trevor, there is always a Trevor, who rose to speak on an unrelated matter concerning the sycamore, was ruled out of order, appealed to the chair, lost, and sat down satisfied, having achieved his actual aim, which was the rising. The sycamore item has stood on the agenda since 2014. It is not meant to be reached. It is the horizon, and a meeting needs one.
The resignation was the treasurer, over a point of principle no two witnesses describe identically, and the reconciliation came at the tea urn twenty minutes later, as it always does, because the urn is where this nation actually governs itself. Positions held fiercely at the lectern dissolve entirely at the urn, over custard creams, and the treasurer un-resigned before the biscuits were out, retroactively, minuted by consent. The department for communities, whatever it is called this year, could save itself every white paper by simply studying the urn. All British consensus is brewed. It has never once been debated into existence. It steeps.
The Vote and Its Aftermath
The final motion, as amended, as amended further, and as amended in a friendly manner that the chair accepted while visibly praying, resolved that the association notes the new arrangements, supports the community’s proud tradition of adaptation, and requests clarification on the handles, a text which commits everyone to everything and no one to anything, which is why it passed unanimously and why everyone left content. This is the secret of English local governance, the motion is not an instruction, it is a group photograph, everyone arranged to look their best, and it will hang in the minutes forever, and the bins, per Margaret, will go out, and the rubbish, per Margaret, will be collected, and the arm will lift what it lifts, handles notwithstanding.
I walked home with Margaret, who confided that she has attended this association since its founding and that the bins debate recurs on a roughly nine-year cycle, like a comet, previous apparitions in 2017, 2008, and famously 1999, when the introduction of the recycling box produced what she calls, still, the Christmas of the Two Newsletters, a schism whose rival publications she has kept, and which she has promised to show me, and diary, I intend to hold her to it, because somewhere in those newsletters is this street’s Iliad.
Filed the full report with the satirical desk at The London Prat, and sent the account to Bohiney Magazine in America, whose correspondent replies that their equivalent institution is the HOA, which can fine a man for the wrong mailbox, and asks what powers our association wields, and I have written back truthfully, none whatsoever, it wields the urn and the minutes and the collective need to have been present, and it is stronger than his HOA, because you cannot resign from it even by resigning, the treasurer tried, it lasted twenty minutes, the biscuits reversed it.
Tally, one motion photographed, one schism deferred to the urn, one Iliad promised, the sycamore safely unreached for another year. The bins go out Tuesday, handles facing wherever they face. The arm will adapt. The community, as the voice from the back understood, always was the arm.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk