the red recycling box has risen from the grave

It isn't often that an entry on this blog musters up an actual sequel, but here it is. After posting my recent entry on the red box, I returned home to look out the window and see that, on Recycling Eve, nobody nearby had placed a red box outside their house. It was as if they were trying to foil my plans to hijack their recycling. The next morning, however, there were two of them out there, and since they were both still full when I left for work I took the opportunity to discreetly offload a few bottles.

On my return that evening, a red box (empty) was sitting outside my door!

There was something uncanny about this, and I was not inclined to touch it. Besides, it had 36a written on it, as opposed to my 39a. Perhaps it had merely gone astray – there had been a strong breeze - and someone had mistaken my unnumbered door for 36a, and left it there. Perhaps 36a had seen me 'borrowing' red boxes and were giving it to me, either in a spirit of kindness, or out of resentment at my taking advantage of theirs. It was impossible to tell.

I left it, and there it remained, a sinister splash of red in the frosted glass of the door. The next day, I noticed that it had inched closer. It was like something out of a horror story, probably one written in diary form ('May 3^rd. It is there again!'), one which ends with the narrator furiously writing right up to the moment ('It is in the hall!') that the red box gets him ('Aaarg - ')...

Eventually one morning I took it across the road and left it outside the unnumbered door which I presumed to be 36a (not the one where the man came out and saw me interfering with his rubbish).

I returned at evening to find that it had moved, but only a fraction. I began to feel sorry for it. Perhaps it had only been looking for a home, and I had rejected it. It might have been abused in some way. Someone might have put plastic in it.

Nevertheless I began to dread returning home to find that it was back. The truth is, I don't really need a red box – I don't get through that much wine (no, really). And in fact the red box finally disappeared, but on the evening that this became apparent I got home to discover clods of earth outside my door! What did this mean? Perhaps, I thought wildly, it was a reference to my blog entry about funerals. But that would imply a more bizarre possibility – that someone is actually reading this!

There is only so much that the human mind can take. But perhaps it's true. Maybe everybody's reading it. Like so many other people nowadays, I could be a celebrity no-one's ever heard of. But I'm sure Google would have told me by now. I feel that my celebrity is more likely to be of the kind that attends the woman from the documentary Dreams Of A Life. You know, that woman who died and they only found her two years later when they broke down the door, a skeleton watching TV in her flat. How cool is that? This always struck me as a feelgood story, with its implication that you don't really need to pay your bills – that no-one will even notice.

Thus far, I have not seen the red box again.