Wheelie Bin Warfare

Never a dull moment round here. We make our own drama in this street, and nothing, no matter how mundane, escapes our steely gaze and vivid collective imagination. In case war between the neighbours does break out and there are casualties, here in brief is the build-up to any future Bin Incident:

• A few years ago, Lesley lost her 1st shiny, new but still ugly wheelie bin. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued.
  
• Council eventually replaced it, albeit grudgingly.
• Hostilities almost broke out when neighbours were seen to put their rubbish in Lesley's bin - a social crime in our genteel neighbourhood - but Lesley chose lifelong resentment instead and said nothing.
  
• Lesley accidentally (she says) set fire to wheelie bin 2. Smoke, leaping flames, some flustering; Sandra extinguished the flames amidst scenes of high drama; only the axle remained, along with the shreds of Lesley's credibility as a sensible person who knows how to handle hot ashes.
  
• Council, told that hooligans must have set the fire, replaced Bin 2, very slo-o-o-o-wly. (Council, tiring of the high rate of attrition in the wheelie bin world, is by now recklessly threatening residents with charging for replacement bins. Little do they know how high feelings can run on the subject of bins.)
• Lesley repeatedly loses wheelie bin 3, but it reappears without warning, on a number of occasions. Is this a back lane bin-poltergeist? Should we mount an Extreme Haunted Vigilante Group?
• Lesley, who is more like her suspicious mother than she cares to admit, starts to suspect N next door, now in his 90s but fit as a flea and with an overtly lecherous attitude towards her, of intermittently taking and returning her wheelie bin, for reasons too arcane, and possibly too disturbing, to fathom.
• Sandra the Grass, who can see over N's wall from her bathroom, tells Lesley that a) N does indeed swap his old wheelie bin for Lesley's newer model, but also that b) he has another bin concealed in his back yard. The plot thickens. Lesley now believes that this secret hidden bin is her long-lost original.
• She retires to plot revenge. Lifelong resentment is not going to suffice this time. IMO, ninja-style night-time action is clearly called for; Lesley is lithe and fit, more than able to shin up high walls, also practical enough to improvise a rope and pulley system to retrieve the long-lost wheelie bin, and slap her house number on both it and Bin 3 in brightly coloured gloss paint. This is a more melodramatic course of action than confronting N with his clandestine activities, and is more in keeping with Lesley's fitness regime and the tight-lipped but seething approach to conflict resolution in Bacteria Gardens.
  
• Don't miss next week's exciting instalment: what we do about other people's cat poo in our back yards. You know you want to hear it all....