Rubbish!

What the local pol needs for than anything else in chutzpah.

The ability to know for certain that you own the keys to the kingdom. To be aware that it is your song that they’ll be singing. Might not be next week but they’ll come round. And there will be no triumphalism. Self deprecation works so much better in the long run.

Having the ideas is a brave act of extreme confidence. Articulating them is of course ten times braver, and requires a degree of skill both in the speechifying but also in the wider realm of getting the message out. Press Releases, letters, leaflets to supporters all need to hang together intellectually, all need punch, all need precision.

But the major test comes a little later.

It’s the defence, stupid.

Strange to relate, all, or even most ideas take time to become accepted. Many of them attract reactions of scorn and ridicule first time around. When the Wright brothers ran their number about flying aeroplanes, it didn’t go down all that well in the Dog and Duck. It was much the same with ol’ John Maynard Keynes when he had the rather clever notion that we should spend out way out of recession. Didn’t seem right at the time.

So when Dr Rob suggested Wheelie Bins to the honest burghers of Sutton Coldfield, he could have been ill prepared for the emotional meltdown that followed.

The letters page of the Sutton News was bowed by an instant whirlwind response. Was it five or was it six letters straight off the bat. They are probably saving a vast number more for next week. We wonder if a Special Supplement has been planned. The Advertising Department were said to be absolutely delighted.

You may be surprised to learn that none, not one of these occasional correspondents shared Dr Rob’s enthusiasm for said Wheelie Bins. In fact WBs were self evidently a major threat to civilisation as we know it. WBs are unsightly, unwieldy, cut out the light, sit obscuring front windows and have a savagely deleterious effect upon the general morality of the community’s youth.

There can be no more catastrophic step envisaged by the old and wise than casting one’s lot with the Wheelie Binners.

It’s not easy, sitting amidst the shot and shell and smoke eviscerated by the flat earthers, to discern why they are so worked up. Any proposal to move civilisation forward, even in Sutton Coldfield, should surely deserve at very least a hearing.

One wonders whether the invention of the Circular Brush for Victorian Chimneys was similarly vilified by the middle classes of the day. This, after all, blighted the prospect and careers of countless tribes of undernourished sooty boys.

So we wish the good Doctor well. His mission to move the Town forward is a testing yoke indeed. His defence, I have no doubt will be stout. I am confident he will wrong foot the Neanderthals with a clever feint toward the third way. (do not rule out the mini wheelie bin). But the underlying message will be uncompromising.

Wheelie Bins are our future.

Do not stand in their way.


Nightwatchman