Freecycle?

I’m normally a Freecycle skeptic. Advertising junk available for free is just pandering to people like me who are natural (or is that unnatural?) hoarders of clutter and other people’s garbage.

But than the man came around tonight with his trailer to pick up the pile of wood in our back garden.

While I know that concreting the suburbs isn’t a good idea. Witness how flooding so severely affects city streets as the excess water runs from one back garden to the next with no opportunity to be soaked up by grass or soil.

Yet some of the trees in the middle of the back fence just had to come down. Rotten. With large branches beginning to break off in the winter storms. And blocking much needed sunlight from the rest of the garden.

Having not been involved in the felling operation, I helped saw up some of the wood. (Can I mention the blisters on my fingers from all that sawing? A white collar wimp with soft hands and a fear of anything physical or close to DIY!) And so a small pyre was created in the back garden, awaiting a few trips to the dump.

But by the miracle of the Belfast Freecycle group, the doorbell went tonight and someone came took away the wood, and plans to dry it out for use in the wood burner next season.

(A quick PS: Logging onto Freecycle myself for the first time ever, it was funny to recognise a few names on the first screen on messages, one of whom is on the blogroll at the top right, and the other someone I went to Queen’s with and was part of the crowd of us who learnt too much about Unix from the DECstations and MIT’s Project Athena. Just glad I don’t get all those emails into my already overflowing inbox every day.)