Joe Bennett: New waste paper bin delights

The failures of Philip Larkin and a square waste paper bin have given Joe Bennett a vestigial sense of youthful infallibility.

I have a new waste paper bin and it is square and it is the best I’ve ever had and I shall tell you why.

The first function of a waste paper bin is to be a target. And not just for waste paper.

“Watching the shied core, striking the basket and skidding across the floor”, wrote dear old Philip Larkin, and thus, typically, he captured an unconsidered event in a dozen words. Then he considered it.

Throwing an apple core accurately into the bin gives us a momentary thrill, a sense of fitness, youth and animal precision. It’s the sort of feeling golfers get when they catch one right, or basketballers when they hit nothing but net.

But Larkin is not the poet of fitness, youth or animal precision. He’s the poet of failure. “Deprivation is to me”, he once wrote, “what daffodils were to Wordsworth”. For him the truth of a throw is not hitting, but missing. And he’s right. We miss more often than we hit.

And when we miss we feel a tiny anti-thrill, a micro blow to our self-esteem, a grain of bitter self-awareness. We shrug it off, of course. It doesn’t matter. It’s just an apple core going astray. But it is more than that and it does matter and we know it. It is imprecision. It is imperfection. It is coming up short.

And as we grow older it gets worse. The skidding core represents more than itself. It shows, as Larkin puts it, “less and less of luck, and more and more of failure, spreading back up the arm, the unraised hand calm, the apple unbitten in the palm”.

Joe Bennett’s new square waste paper bin makes it an easy target for disposing of his trash.

Which of course takes us back to Eve and the apple. We are the creatures that fell. We are able to imagine an Eden in which every core flies true, but we have been banished from Eden and sent to live in the actual world where most cores go astray. Growing older, Larkin suggests, is the process of stripping away delusion and coming face to face with the reality of our imperfection. And the ultimate stripping of delusion is death itself. We are frail and we are mortal. And all of that truth is to be found embodied in missing the waste paper basket.

But my new basket is a boon of sorts. Being square it sits snugly into the corner of my study, with a pair of walls at right angles to act as backboards and steer my missiles home - be they apple cores, scrunched papers, or, most unaerodynamic of all projectiles, used tissues. Better still, the square bin leaves none of the irritating tangential gaps between bin and wall that a round bin leaves, gaps that swallow throws you thought were true. And thus my bin increases my percentage of success and enables me to nurse a little longer some vestigial sense of youthful infallibility.

And there’s a second boon. As an easy target, the basket is like a nestling’s beak, gaping bright and wide and greedy, encouraging the parent bird to feed it. So I throw it more stuff than I would a less satisfactory basket, and that is a good thing. We should all throw more stuff. Our lives are too cluttered.

I love to clear my desk. It helps me write and think. But the desk attracts papers as a lamp attracts moths - letters, fliers, scribbled notes - and I struggle to biff them.

R.K. Narayan, the Indian writer, was better at it. He saw his waste paper basket as an instrument of fate. He threw everything at it. What went in went in, presumably for a reason. But what didn’t go in, what struck the basket like Larkin’s core and came to rest on the floor, he’d pick back up and re-examine, because there had to be some cause for its survival.

I lack Narayan’s faith in fate. Instead I keep a pile of papers in one corner of my desk. If I can’t find the courage to throw a paper away, believing it might have some undefined future use, I place it on the pile. I think of the pile as limbo. When limbo grows too tall I pull out the bottom third and riffle through it and find that time has worked its magic and sucked every paper dry of all importance. And I can sit and biff them one by one at my new and rectilinear waste paper basket, with the ghost of Philip Larkin laughing when I miss.