W - Womble

They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Yet, when I’m found rifling through the rubbish collections at Buckingham Palace, for some reason this is seen as an awful, illegal thing to do.  I’m always dismissed as some crazy homeless guy, merely because I once found a plastic tiara in the trash and wore it for two weeks straight.  I hate that I’ve been pigeon-holed in this manner.

The Wombles never had this kind of image problem.  They were the cuddly face of vagrancy; the Fraggles of freeganism.  Because they resembled cute teddy bear/fox hybrids, people didn’t care that they literally built their homes with dog turds and wank socks.  I needed to reinvent myself in a similar fashion in order to stop the jibes and stop people pissing on me in the street.  Perhaps they’d think twice before reliving themselves on me if I was dressed as Orinoco. 

In order to become a Womble, the first thing you must do is move to Wimbledon Common.  I took my belongings with me, moved to London, and sat about on the grass waiting for the Wombles to discover me and assume me into their collective.  I waited for three days and I didn’t see a single Womble.  There were a few hedgehogs who seemed to get a prickly when I asked them to take me to Great Uncle Bulgaria.  I couldn’t rely on the Wombles to come to me, so I would have to go to them.

Taking my shovel to the grass, I started excavating the Womble hideout.  I dug hundreds of holes across the entire park, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of them.

Remember you're a... weird... fox-like thing

That’s when I saw an exterminator van parked nearby.  I approached the guy who said he was there to remove moles (apparently, loads of holes had mysterious appeared that day, which indicated a huge mole problem).  I figured that if this guy was killing moles, he’d probably killed the entirety of Womble civilization while he was at it.  I was initially saddened by this, but then I realised that someone would have to continue the Womble lineage.  That person could be me.

I assembled a Womble outfit by wearing a fur coat and a party hat over my face, and then started to collect people’s rubbish.  Within my first day I had amassed a rusted tricycle, several reams of old newspaper, a dead horse, 2 packets of tungsten-tipped screws, a deflated lilo, a squelchy thing, and a large pile of mud. I had assembled a trash heap so large so it would be a castle in hobo real estate terms.  I invited the homeless community to join me in my not-so-humble abode, and they began adding to the refuse fortress.  By evening I had a new East Wing, a barracks, and a helipad.

Eventually, the homeless people began having an existential crisis.  They were no longer homeless people since they now had a home, which completely scrambled their brains.  They began dismantling my litter empire, and promptly committed seppuku en masse.  I had to flee the scene before people starting asking questions.  A hundred dead hobos in a pile of mud is a little difficult to explain.