David Sedaris Just Had A Garbage Truck Named After Him
Today, in Fantastically English News.
You know David Sedaris as a great many things: essayist, humourist, OCD sufferer, podcast contributor, and the award-winning author of a number of essay and short story collections — including Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family In Cordoroy And Denim and, most recently, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls.
But to rural West Sussex where now he lives, he’s known for something else entirely: picking up basically all of the trash.
Sedaris has written extensively of his hobby before; just last month, he told The Globe And Mail that it keeps him humble. “Every day I pick up litter. Some days when I’m home in England I’ll do it for nine hours. There’s a lot of rubbish in England.”
But his past-time has finally been acknowledged by the local council, and in perhaps the most English of ways: they named a garbage truck after him, and unveiled it with a whole ceremony and everything.
David “Pig Pen” Sedaris standing with various council luminaries. Photo credit: WSCountyTimes.co.uk
The article published yesterday in West Sussex’s local paper is hilarious for many reasons. For one, there’s the following sentence, delivered without a trace of irony: “In recognition for all his fantastic work and dedication and as a token of Horsham District Council’s appreciation, the council has named one of their waste vehicles after him.”
For another, the journalist responsible seems to have had no idea Sedaris is anything other than a “South Downs litter picker”, a “familiar and very welcome sight in the lanes and by-ways of this lovely part of Horsham District” who “tirelessly and painstakingly goes about gathering up the litter so thoughtlessly discarded”. You can imagine Sedaris’ only slightly tongue-in-cheek refusal to reveal his actual day-job.
“I’m angry at the people who throw these things out their car windows, but I’m just as angry at the people who walk by it every day,” Sedaris says. “I say pick it up yourself. Do it enough and you might one day get a garbage truck named after you. It’s an amazing feeling.”
Don’t know which is funnier, David Sedaris getting bin lorry named after him, or local paper not realising who he is. http://t.co/F11DCDNPsj
— Steve Doherty (@SteveDoherty1) July 28, 2014
It took a day for the paper to publish a follow-up which recognised his status as a New York Times best-selling author. But that article is nowhere near as popular as the first.