Fidel Gastro’s

Have you noticed that the London Lite has actually created new pretendjobs? Menial jobs that never existed before. The ‘Free Paper Hander-Outer’. The ‘Free Paper Clearer-Upper’.  It’s like in Japan where you can reduce unemployment by applying a Adam Smith-on-meth mentality to all jobs - subdivide endlessly. ‘I am the man that helps get 10 Yen, and only 10 Yen coins from Train Ticket Vending Machines.’ ‘I am the man who covers the same coin vertical but for Soda Machines’. Or in your local Subway - ‘I am the Cheese man’. ‘I am the Olive, Chili and Gherkin woman’. ‘I am the same sandwich no matter what you chose - I taste the same. You have no choice’

Occasionally I wish the Hander-Outer and the Clearer-Upper were the same person for each individual paper. Making them hunt down each and every copy they gave out, I want them to feel the futility of their overlords mission statement, the nothingness of the advertising message that paid for the paper, the hours of target audiencing and AdAgency masturbation which merely limpwristedly stroked the cerebellum of a drone-like zombie office worker for the ten minutes it took to digest the un-news and panic mongering of the day and then discard and repeat; I want them to scream ‘THIS IS AN ILLUSION’ and then quit to head up Offline Marketing for the Subway Group.

‘This week with 30% fewer syllables. and 20 per cent more hot pop goss.’

I also believe the London Lite is a black ops side project for the Guardian. By seeing the piles of free papers on train seats at the end of the day headed straight for the furnace, your Recycle heartstring is tugged. Recycle to heal the planet. Recycle to save your soul. Recycle to save pelicans. Pelicans are recycling for us. Lies. I hate Pelicans and I hate recycling. Yet, resistance is futile. After a solid Sunday morning of paper-based lifestyle lecturing, I feel pre-programmed to take my copy of the Guardian, which has spent a few hours explaining how to recycle my own hope, and recycle it. But I am recycling the very oracle which teaches me to recycle, oh sweet irony. It feels like taking a copy of one of Jamie Oliver’s books and cooking it.

And how the wannabe-hip local councils try - oh they try. From asking you to take your plastics to the tip with your dad on the Saturday morning (no SMTV and that saucy Cat Deeley for you my boy), to teaching you to tirelessly self-sort baked bean tins with an eBay-bought electromagnet, through to your balancing a mountain of assorted crap and unread Timeouts in the precious green boxes.

(Anyway are the green boxes recyclable? If you put a green box in a green box what happens? Does it create anti-recycle? Does it create a liberal wormhole straight to the Features Editor of the Guardian’s backyard wormery? Or does God reach through the wormhole and slap you in the face saying - ‘it didn’t help the dinosaurs, you think it will help you humans? You, you are the worms of my wormery’.)

Worm. Wormer. Wormery.

Yet the only way to make sure we even attempt to recycle is to offer us the laziest option possible. Just dump everything into the magical green box and one of their generic Indian unpaid illegals will come to sort it for you, take it to the nearest port, and ship it to India to be buried in the Fairtrade approved landfill behind the Taj Mahal.

Next thing you know you’ll be in Jodphur on a carbon-offset yoga retreat and a lurid leperous local will smack you in the face with an empty cardboard box of farm grown savoy cabbage with your name and N1 address on it which washed up in his backyard. The same cardboard box you thought you’d seen the last of 2 months ago after a ‘locally sourced’ dinner party with Constance and William where you decided to microfinance a human methane powered powerplant in East Angola or East Anglia, but you can’t remember which because you were like, totally messed up dude, on organic anti-depressants, and a $35 bottle of Pinot Noir you drank in or maybe out of the toilet, but you really can’t remember which as you were between not eating courses and making yourself vomit with those handsome bamboo chopsticks you brought back from that amazing ‘05 holiday to Xi’an.

(Anyway on the subject of previously lesser known dark green vegetables - what the jeep is Purple Sprouting? The name is a verb! And the verb can’t be done by that noun! Purple sprouting what?! Purple sprouting new appendages? Purple sprouting indigo? WTF? Ok -I’m done.)

Be careful of this purple sprouting.

So my recycling point is this. Let’s actually do even less, make even less effort, and leverage the true underbelly of society to clear up after us. No, not Foxton Estate agents - their moral betters and slightly less odiously odorous brothers, yes that’s right - tramps.  And no, not an army of MySpace camgirls but our happy hungry homeless homies. Forget the option of blasting ourselves into subspace in 100 years time and letting the cuter but gayer cousin of Jonny 5 tidy up our crud – let’s get the real life Oscar the Grouchs out of their trashcans and cleaning our streets for us. This is happening already in the US, where the key fact is they still have the old deposit system for cans and bottles getting a few cents back for each used item.  (It’s a bit like the current housing market. You buy a house, you enjoy it for a period of time, and then are treated like diseased scum trying to even get 1% of the value back for it.)

But I’ve seen the Web 2.0 inspired ‘trampreneurs’ in San Francisco leaping on this business opportunity. After reading a 150 slide PowerPoint from Bain they found in a dustbin about the unrealised Short Term value in the deposit funded garbage market, it seems they are all set to beat their Q4 targets for crap collecting and revenue growth.  You see them wheeling around these crazy homemade rubbish sorting vehicles much like the official council sorting vans but on crack.

This years tramp race will feature a Le-Mans start

Yet these are also their homes, kitchens, toilets, dog on string kennels as well as the mobile advanced waste processing centres at heart.  Where once an avuncular old lady with a shopping trolley full of empty soda cans was the norm - now the alt.aunty ante is upped and these tramps trundle the thoroughfares, wheeling contraptions looking like the DIY effort of the dropped-on-headlove child of Mad Max and ‘Pig Pen’. Here you have now a city which recycles itself using the power of 5 cent deposits and the cider-fueled brains of the modern day, undiscovered and unwashed Thomas Edisons.

He said that he loved me.

My next proposal is to supply all these tramps with uniformly bright green uniforms to make it look like an ‘Official Government Program’ for potential 3rd party sponsors or just a piece of Trinny and Susanna fashion charity

“Yes - the green nylon and tight waist really accentuates that terrible, terrible smell of yours”.

The other upside is allowing the City PR department to invest $500m in outsourced IT infrastructure to digitally remove the tramps when creating promotional videos of the city to broadcast on Al-Jazeera Travel +1. Using green screen technology, all the undesirables can be CGI replaced with luscious monkey puzzle trees, cast members of Sex in the City or 23 year old dotcom millionaires - all wandering around pushing Heath Robinson-esque garbage mobiles around parks and city wastelands.

Furthermore taking our greenclad grunts, we can simplify the art of making the next self-referential, horror blockbuster; you just CGI the tramps into zombies and you don’t even really need actors, a script or even CGI. Just edit hours of CCTV footage of the shuffling, dead-eyed, tramp undead being politely ignored and ‘opposite-side of the street’ed by silently disgusted and petrified civilians. See the horror in a mother’s eyes as her son gets too close to the inappropriately cute zombie dog-on-string. See a young girl’s terror she sees a krusty old man wearing her last seasons bargains from Primark. Quietly gag as you notice them sorting and touching your empty Fiji water bottles. Instead of human brains, they consume our detritus. We shed our skins and they gather it. They are the snake eating our tail.  Today we are the free London newspaper. Tomorrow they are the 80% recycled woodpulp.

The dead have risen and are offering fashion advice.