Dawn Patrol, Passports and the Case of the Missing Poster.

Another bin day. It doesn't seem like a week since the last one. Actually it's more than a week as I missed last weeks, being en route from God's Own County of Durham. It was a blessing in disguise really as last week was a "green" bin day. On a green day I have several assorted bins, boxes and sacks or bags to place carefully and precisely outside Chez Kojak, as directed by the Uberbinfuhrer of my Borough Council. Failure to be careful and precise will result in some dire penalty just this side of hanging, drawing and quartering. It should be noted that this care and precision only applies to the placement of the receptacles. A free-for-all is apparently acceptable for the return of the empties. That's not to say that today's "grey" day was not without incident. Noting with rare approval that that the bin had been dumped loosely within my borders I spotted the diktat below pasted on the bin.

In a fiendish move to halve the extra hour in bed my bins must now be in situ 30 minutes earlier!  For every winter to come my Dawn Patrol must now become a nocturnal one. If it gets any earlier it will hardly be worth going to bed. Perhaps I should charge them for torch batteries. An eve of bin day placement is not reliably feasible since, living near the coast, a fresh Irish Sea breeze would probably dump the bin and box and certainly blow the bag or sack into the next borough. Municipal red tape being what it is they'd no doubt spend more in carefully returning the foreign and therefore unemptied articles with an admonition than use commonsense and just empty them.

The Uberbinfuhrer is nothing if not active. At the cost of several dozen trees every household has received a notice proudly proclaiming a new, free service to remove heavy and/or metal, electrical, clothing, shoes, textiles etc. etc. This amazing new service is available 24hrs a day, 7 days a week "ensuring your peace of mind, direct from your property" and you won't have to lift a finger"  All we had to do was phone the given number. As if this wasn't enough they would put on an introductory service on Saturday 30th October. Overwhelmed by this astonishing offer and having excavated the cupboard under the stairs in a previous blog I duly placed a neat but quite substantial pile outside my front door. Well, they didn't ensure my peace of mind and I did have to lift a finger - several times in fact. By dusk on Saturday the pile was still there and despite lifting my finger to phone they didn't come. They didn't come on Sunday or Monday. "We're running a bit late". I wonder if I should delay next months direct debit for my council tax as I frequently run a bit late too...

And so to passports. Noting that my nasty EU style passport is due to expire shortly before a holiday next June I have decided to apply well in advance in the hope that I get the new one in time. Having been a Government employee for most of my working life and even been responsible for rewriting various leaflets  in "plain english"  I never cease to be amazed at how difficult these forms are to fill in. Having been exhorted at the Post Office to keep within the confines of the boxes I found the said boxes for payment details coloured in such a pale yellow that they were quite hard to see. Most forms today consist of little boxes and invariably the boxes are very little. Now Malvina Reynolds sang a song called "Litttle Boxes" back in the 1960s. If she were alive today I'm sure she'd have ticky-tacky'd a verse on about very little boxes. At least I have, for the first time, succeeded in getting a passport photograph which looks vaguely human. The previous one, taken in the ubiquitous photo booth, looked as if I'd just sat in something nasty.

On my third visit to Symi I was greeted on the quayside by a line of friends wearing "Kojak" masks drawn by an artist friend. The artist himself brandished a full-sized matching poster. We all hastened along to the Meltemi Bar for the usual welcome drink or five. My pal Michaelis, who ran the bar, grabbed the poster and immediately nailed it up above the door. There it stayed for many years, gazing down at the clientele until the bar's sad demise.
The whereabouts and indeed the survival of the poster have been a mystery to me since then. Various people have hinted that it was "safe", others thought it no longer existed. The man himself told me only this year that as he'd given up the bar at short notice all the fittings etc. were taken out while he was away and he didn't know what happened to the poster. Imagine my surprise then when a photograph of it appeared in a Facebook group.

The poster is obviously not in it's original surroundings but the visible background isn't quite enough for me to immediately recognise it's location. Further investigation, dear reader, is necessary...