Magazine

A sideways view

Famous quotations can often be not as accurately cited as they should be, and it turns out that the well known phrase “A week is a long time in politics”, famously attributed to Harold Wilson, doesn’t actually have a direct reference attached to it. My Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations tells me that it was thought to have been said at a lobby briefing during the 1964 sterling crisis. Given today’s Eurozone crisis and the volatility that is generating, it is a turn of phrase that may be more appropriate than ever.

In any case, it has stood the test of time as an expression of how quickly major events move. In our world of waste and resources, events don’t tend to have an impact in that kind of timescale, but it doesn’t mean that the week as a measure of time lacks significance.

Of course, I refer to the continually rumbling issue of weekly waste collections. It would appear that this interval of time takes on an almost religious significance for some when applied to the frequency of removal of residual rubbish from households. Now, I recognise that the seven-day week has a very long association with Christianity, but there isn’t an obvious seven-day cycle in nature from which this length of time as a measure could have been derived. It is a construct of humankind.

That got me thinking. Lots of people are getting exercised about weekly, or indeed fortnightly, collection of residual rubbish from homes. There is a degree of obsession with the week as a measure of time in relation to bin collection, regardless of natural cycles, resource efficiency or even logistics and economy.

Eric Pickles MP is the most prominent figure on this issue, but he clearly has support from a proportion of the population that subscribe to the Daily Mail worldview of things – and like it or not, this has to be taken seriously. At the recent LARAC Conference, ex-Mail journalist David Derbyshire told a packed audience of recycling officers about the massive response (by mail and online) that his former paper receives every time it runs a story about bins. Ignore it at your peril.