On my twice-daily walk between my flat and the tube station, there has been, for the last week, a clear plastic bottle half filled with clear yellow liquid. It’s sitting propped up against a tree surrounded by various bags of rubbish, and since the bottle and the other rubbish aren’t in black bags, the rubbish men are clearly ignoring them and not taking them away in their nice big orange truck.

I have developed a morbid fascination with this bottle of yellow liquid, because, let’s be honest, there’s about a 95% chance that it’s a bottle of somebody’s urine. I’m not actually going to unscrew the top to take a sniff, but it has been getting steadily cloudier through the week, and if it was pop or something that wouldn’t happen. Clearly somebody got caught short, and rather than piss up against the wall decided to be tidy and do it in a handy bottle they found in a pile of rubbish. And you know, I applaud that kind of public-spirited consideration, except would it have killed them to put the bottle in a bin when they’d finished, rather than propping it up against a tree?

So, everyday I walk past the tree, and everyday I am a little bit disgusted, and a little bit pleased, to see that the bottle is still there. And it makes me simultaneously love and loathe living in London all at the same time. Who knew that a bottle of pee could cause such conflicting emotions?