Disposal

Virginia Woolf, Totteham Hotspur and Richard Henry Biffa: 1882 was a good year for English literature, football and waste disposal as each crawled out of their literal or metaphorical wombs to take their place on this earth. Thirty-seven years later, as England enjoyed a respite from the First World War, the trio each started carving their own little space in history. Woolf released her first work, obscurely entitled Modern Fiction; Spurs were enjoying a season that would see them promoted to the top flight for the first time and Biffa was on the cusp of launching the business that would become a leader in the world of waste management and would obsess a small group of men in a train-spotterish way another 73 years on.

Founder of Biffa, Richard Henry Biffa had a son, Richard Frank Biffa who had a son, Richard Biffa who is the current man in charge of the Biffa empire. It is refreshing that the Biffa name wasn't chosen because of its aggressive connotations, but merely because it was a bloke's surname. There is a danger that we fulfil our names and I imagine the pre-1882 Biffas were playground bullies who graduated to become boxers. Grandad Biffa stopped the cycle of violence with his entrepreneurial venture and the succession of Biffas have seen Biffa transformed from a London-based company collecting clinker and ashes to a forward-thinking national company leading the way in waste management: "It's time to change the way we think about waste," claim the Biffa website, "to see it as a resource with real value that can be secured through recycling, recovery and the generation of energy." They certainly seem to talk the ethical talk. This is less biff and more biffy-wiffy.

As uninteresting as their waste management is, it hasn't stopped some friends of mine whipping their mobile phones out of their pockets to snap a Biffa bin/lorry/skip/worker every time they stumble across one. Their obsessive behaviour has led them to clamber inside bins and has got the most passionate of Biffa-lovers (although the rest of the group will probably claim that they deserve this crown) to get himself into a spot of bother after a company took umbrage at him sneaking around their property snapping rare Biffas. Last night I was at a party and not even my riveting conversation could keep two of these obsessives from scampering out the door when rumour of a Biffa bin up the road met their ears.

As you can probably guess, the gender of the Biffa Barmy Army are predominantly male. There seems to be something in the male psyche that is able to get disproportionately excited about something relatively meaningless. I am not immune to this, with my fondness for badgers and perhaps even this blog residing in an obsessive area of my brain, but the Biffa-love seems to take this a step further, somewhere completely outside the area of interest-value. And yet while I recognise the ridiculousity of their fetish, when I drove past a Biffa bin today, a thrill of excitement burbled somewhere within and I wondered whether their enthusiasm had infected me. We shall see.