More from the writing:
My grandfather had a long flat tarmac driveway at the bungalow that he shared with my grandmother. On the day when the bins were collected, the bin men would simply take the bins that were left at the end of the driveway instead of being left up at the house. This was the 1980’s and there were no wheelie bins at this point. Instead, some people simply took their black bin bags and took them down to the end of the driveway for collection. However, there was a problem. Seagulls and foxes would get to the rubbish and it would be strewn across all of the street. The binmen wouldn’t take it then either, because it wasn’t their job. That would be a street cleaning job I guess. Their union probably did not allow them to clean streets. They were strictly a bin emptying service.
I digress again. My grandfather, who we affectionately called Gugga, decided that he could invent something that meant he could take his solid bin to the end of the driveway, even if it was full and heavy in his old age. He stuck a skateboard underneath it. But that was a little narrow and sometimes mean that the bin was a bit pecariously balanced. So he went into the garage and developed the prototype a bit further, by creating a larger base that could match the bottom of the bin, and then four wheels that could spin in all directions as opposed to the locked wheels of the skateboard. His second attempt was still pretty crude, but it worked. And that was only one example of many things that Gugga did to be creative. He didn’t wait around for someone to come along with a wheelie bin; he had fashioned one for himself long before hand.
I have adopted Gugga’s approach of function over form. I am never too concerned about the aesthetics or the ‘finish’ of a project or a product if it serves its purpose. This really frustrates some people and it even frustrates myself on occasion. I am not a perfectionist. I don’t perfect the function and then the form. I am just interested in the function. I am a pragmatist. I’m happy if it works. If it could work better, then I’ll continue to work on it. But tidying something up for aesthetic reasons can rub the character off of some projects in my opinion. I like the fact that Gugga’s bin wheels did not look like a wheelie bin. The originality and individuality was endearing. It was effective. Why spend more effort when it was going to take rubbish to the end of the driveway?
