Overflowing Bin Outside Co-op Hailed As Art Installation

The black bin outside the Co-op has been accepting coffee cups, a bottle of something red and the greasy paper bag from somebody's lunch since a date nobody can now establish, and on Tuesday it was reviewed, at length, by a visiting arts writer who had come out from Haddenham and Thame Parkway.

She has titled it, "My Week", and says it sits in the tradition Tracey Emin opened, with the improvement that Emin's bed held one woman's regrets and only lasted a season, whereas this holds the whole village's, plus a yoghurt, and has been up so long it now counts as permanent. Permanence, she explained, is normally the hardest thing for an artist to achieve, and here it has been achieved by nobody doing anything at all.

"The lid is the argument," she said, crouching on the block paving with the expression of a woman reading a will. "Everything we meant to hide is sitting on top of the thing built to hide it, and it has been curated by nobody, which is the only honest curation there is." A man standing by with a banana skin waited through this, then put the banana skin back in his coat and walked off towards the green, which she described as his contribution.

By three o'clock the village had done what the village does, which is turn up and stand near a thing. Two women brought folding chairs. A dog walker said she had gone past it every morning for two years and never once found it raw or unflinching, only full, and now worries she has been walking past other meanings as well.

The parish council has expressed no view, though a councillor was seen at a respectful distance with his hands behind his back, doing the slow gallery nod of a man who has no idea and is determined not to be the one who says so.

The Herald would like to state, as the village's paper of record and as the only outlet to have sent anybody, that it is a bin. It is a bin that wants emptying. We put that to the critic and she said that is exactly what the bed said too, right up until somebody bought it.