94 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019
THE GOOD LIFE
A
nother week, another
exciting trip to the rub-
bish tip.
When we moved from
town to country, I had no idea
I’d be spending so much time
working as an unpaid dustman
carting our garbage to the local
dump, sorry, “transfer centre”.
One of the old-fashioned reali-
ties of life at Lush Places is that
we can’t just chuck everything
into convenient council wheelie
bins and drag them out to the
kerb like townies. For a start
there aren’t kerbs in the country.
Also, our driveway is well over
half a kilometre long, so even if
there was a council waste service,
dragging the rubbish to the road
would almost certainly dispose
of me, too.
So, once every couple of
weeks, I drive to the tip and deposit,
in the appropriate bins, our recycling
and refuse. Every other week, I make
the same journey to get rid of our
garden waste, like all the godawful
blackberry I cut out, packed into old,
wool bale sacks.
And here’s the curious thing, I like
doing it. It gives me a warm sense of ...
well, for some time I couldn’t quite put
my finger on it. Eventually I decided
it was something like pleasure, and at
first I thought that was because of the
cheery folk who man (and woman)The familiar
fragrance of waste
disposal takes
the author back
to his roots.
Hankering for treasure
GREG
DIXON
the toll booth at the main gate. They’re always up for
a chinwag about the weather and the snow on the
hills, even if there’s a queue behind you.
But it wasn’t the cheery chinwags. It was the
smell. If it isn’t quite a Proustian petite madeleine,
the reek carries me back to the adventure of child-
hood visits to the Invercargill dump.
Before so-called transfer centres, there was a
time when the dump wasn’t some hidden, off-
limits landfill, but something you could climb likea mountain and explore. And plenty did. In the
1970s, I remember the Invercargill tip seeming like
a giant second-hand goods exchange, only stinky
and dive-bombed by seagulls. On a Saturday, you’d
find at a least a dozen locals prospecting the vast
rubbish pile for discarded treasure.
Dad was a Rotarian, Mum wore her hair in a
french roll, so the Dixons didn’t scavenge like the
gulls. But their small, timid son still got a small,
timid thrill from a trip to the dump.A
nother week, another disappointment. No
one here at Lush Places has been announced
among the contestants for the reboot oflocal reality TV classic Celebrity
Treasure Island.
I’d had my hopes. Admittedly
I’m no celebrity, though not being
a celebrity didn’t harm the chances
of the bunch of chancers who have
been chosen for the first local series
of the show since 2007.
My principal qualification for
Celebrity Treasure Island is that I’m
now irrefutably fine with
humiliating myself in front of
strangers because, for two weeks,
I walked about in the world in
jeans smeared with sheep shit.
Okay, it’s only a bit here and a
bit there. But there’s no disguis-
ing it; I’m now the sort of person
who knowingly walks around
in public with sheep shit on his
jeans. I would like to offer my
sincerest apologies to anyone
who saw me doing so between
July 23 and August 8, possibly
at the Masterton Public Library,
Mitre 10, the Masterton transfer
centre, the Post Office, Seeds
and Cereals, Moore Wilson’s or
the northern end of Queen St. I
don’t know what came over me.
Despite such public out-
rages, the producers of Celebrity
Treasure Island passed me by. I
suppose they’d filled their “from the
Wairarapa” quota with Zac Guildford,
who was born in Greytown. Unlike
Zac, I have never appeared in an All
Blacks jersey. Also unlike Zac, I’ve
never appeared starkers in a bar in
Raro while three sheets to the wind,
allegedly or otherwise.
Still, who do you reckon would
make the better reality TV contestant:
a thankfully now-reformed Zac Guild-
ford, or a man who knowingly gets
about with sheep shit on his jeans?G The tribe has spoken. l
RE
G^
D
IX
O
N
It’s a long way to the road at Lush Places.Dad was a
Rotarian, Mum
wore her hair
in a french roll,so the Dixons
didn’t scavenge.