Colour blind

Mr Blethers has just been taking the New Year bottles to the recycling. On this gale-shredded morning, he had an interesting encounter with the recycling operatives, whom I used to call "rubbish men", in my old, non-pc days. He was, in fact, reprimanded for being on the point of posting a green bottle into a brown bin.

And this revealed the difficulty posed by such a well-run site for someone who is as colour-blind as the afore-mentioned Mr B. Clear bottles - nae problem. But we rarely drink anything from a clear glass bottle - our preferred tipple comes in either green or brown glass. The receptacles for recycling them are also, logically, green and brown respectively. But Mr B cannot distinguish between these colours. Apparently he often stands musing over a bottle, holding it up to compare it with the bin into which he is about to chuck it. Sometimes he can feel the eyes of other denizens of the recycling world on his back. Today he was nobbled. How many green bottles have gone the way of the brown on a gloomy evening?

I shudder to think. But even more I shudder at the prospect of having to take over the bottle-binning.