Dying days of 2018

It's the end of the year, supposedly time for reflection on the year that was.

And from a global climate perspective, the year certainly wasn't is encouraging; it's been a litany of bad news from beginning to end, with melting ice, heatwaves, wildfires and other extreme weather, continuing denial or lukewarm policy from politicians worldwide, both incumbent and incoming, and emissions going up instead of down, the doomsday clock has certainly been ticking towards midnight.

And today, with one day left of 2018, there was even bad news on the local front. The doorbell ringing this afternoon turned out to be the death knell of the compost experiment we started almost two years ago: our downstairs neighbours explaining that there are fat grey larvae wriggling under their kitchen door, and did we know anything about it?

Exhibit A

We knew there had been a population explosion of Black Soldier Fly larvae on the terraza, as the girls discovered a wriggly exodus going on yesterday. I was feeling good about it, actually; relishing the prospect of rescuing a whole bunch of maggoty friends from a parched fate, so they could speed the transformation of our food scraps into fertile earth for my secretly-planned potato patch. But it seems that some of the critters, desperate to escape the baking sun, managed to climb the wall and drop into our neighbours' patio below.

Alas, we had to confess that yes, we did know what that was about, and promised we would stem the flow of very hungry wrigglers into their apartment. The only way, of course, is to get rid of the smelly putrefaction that draws egg-laden Black Soldier Flies from miles around: the compost.

Goodbye compost :-(

So gloomily I lugged the putrid buckets, one by one, down to the skip on the street, while the girls stood by, mourners reminiscing about that time they touched a larva to see how squishy it was, and that other time they gathered bunches of worms to add to the freshest bucket...

I'm still numbly putting stuff in the compost bucket in the kitchen, a vestigial ceremony that no longer has any function, as those scraps will be going straight to land-fill, to remain unrotted for years to come. I'm surprised, actually, at how sad I feel about this; it turns out that taking that tiny, absolutely ordinary step to reduce waste had an outsized importance to me.

Returning to the daily routine of schlepping a plastic bag full of mucky rubbish to the street seems like a depressing prospect for 2019.

Goodbye 2018, and good riddance.

Homage to the Black Soldier by my sketchy wife