My gran's coal...
Grandad was a miner in the valleys, and grandma got free coal for life after he died. Eventually the Coal Board paid for her to switch to gas, but even into her seventies she still had a weekly delivery of coal and would head out to the coal shed and come back to the kitchen with a scuttle full of coal for the boiler.

One day, though, when we were staying with her, she went out on the morning to get some coal, and found the door open and (she reckoned) some coal gone. She was so shaken she woke my dad, who suggested she'd left the door unlocked the night before.

'Michael - I do NOT leave things unlocked!'

OK, so we played along and tried to calm her - maybe she thought she'd locked it and hadn't. Maybe kids were messing around. But no, she had her own theory - it was the binmen.

'Well, Michael, one of them was Gwen's boy who was thrown out of the social for fighting, and one of them was in school with your cousin and didn't turn up for his O-levels. They're a bad lot, and the bins are right next to the coal shed, see....'

We tried to reassure her it wasn't the binmen, but she didn't believe us.

Next week, when the binmen came round, she told them that she knew what they'd been up to and she wanted to be there whenever they came to empty her bins. They were confused, at best, but sure enough, every week from then on they'd turn up at the crack of dawn on collection day and find my gran waiting for them next to the bins, wearing her dressing gown and smoking a fag, to watch them unload her bins and make sure they stayed away from the coal shed.

As time went by, and she got older, she couldn't always be sure to be up in the morning to watch them, so she came up with a great idea - she got her "gentleman friend" Ron to padlock the bins to the wall. This now meant that if she'd slept through the alarm clock, the long-suffering binmen had to hammer on the door until she got up and threw the keys out from the bedroom window. They were then required to unlock the bins, empty them, re-padlock them, and post the keys back through the letter-box under grandma's watchful gaze from her bedroom window.

This went on until she went into a home aged 87. Even though by then there'd been no coal in the coal-shed for a decade. I'd like to think the binmen miss her...
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Fri 28 Aug 2009, 12:28, Reply)