'What if?' has been a staple of fiction - and particularly sci-fi - for centuries. Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle described an alternate history where Germany and Japan won the Second World War, whereas in The Plot Against America Philip Roth imagined a world where the US didn't enter the war. Planet Of The Apes depicted a society of simian ascendancy, while the recent film remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still wondered what might happen if an alien race visited our planet and warned us of its imminent destruction (although the movie stretched credulity too far by asking audiences to accept Keanu Reeves as an actor).

The recently deceased novelist JG Ballard imagined a number of altered realities, including a drought-ridden Earth, one consumed by water and another devastated by hurricanes. Ballard was very aware that all the world's a stage, to coin a phrase, and a reality-shifting set change is never too far away. Recent events in the UK in general and Hove in particular have brought this fact sharply into focus. News of the swine flu potential pandemic has swamped the airwaves, filled acres of print and generated sensationalist headlines like no story in recent memory. 'Flu Pandemic Could Kill 94,000!' screamed London's Evening Standard. All of a sudden, if the headlines are to be believed, life as we know it is under threat and we need to look at the world in an entirely new way. Schools have closed, people are taking personal hygiene precautions that Howard Hughes would have considered excessive, and face masks are no longer the sole domain of surgeons and members of Slipknot.

In my own street, normality took a sideways shift a couple of weeks ago when a fault on a high-voltage underground electricity cable knocked out power in the area. Thousands of homes were plunged into darkness and our sense of reality was forced to change. Candles could be seen flickering in windows, obsolete kettles made beads of sweat run down the foreheads of caffeine addicts and television sets lay dormant as life without Dog The Bounty Hunter and Diagnosis Murder started to seem like a terrifying possibility. Before long, marauding gangs patrolled the streets and previously peaceful Hove was transformed into a post-apocalyptic wasteland teeming with rats the size of cats and cats the size of a fat-cat's pension. OK, maybe that last bit didn't happen, but what if the power had been off for more than an hour?

Confronted with its own what if? scenario recently, Brighton & Hove City Council was found seriously wanting. You're probably aware that 500 or so streets in the city are being equipped with communal rubbish bins to replace traditional doorstep collections. There's been quite a lot of opposition to the scheme, with objectors claiming that valuable parking space will be taken away. They also predict a negative impact on recycling because people will no longer be personally accountable for the contents of their rubbish, as well as the difficulty some elderly or infirm people will experience accessing the new bins. However, the main question everyone wanted answering was documented in the council's own information leaflet about the scheme. 'What if my communal bin is full?' it asked, in a helpful and reasonable manner. The answer was: 'Communal bins will be emptied regularly to prevent them from overflowing.'

Does that answer the question? Not really. It seems to imply that the bins will be emptied before they get full. In other words, it's an unimaginable what if? because it can't happen. So imagine the reality-warping sight that confronted me last week when I lugged a couple of bulging bin bags to the nearest communal bin to find it was full. I tried the next one, with the same result. A marauding gang of seagulls patrolled the immediate vicinity of the bin and the scene was teeming with carrier bags the size of rats and bin bags the size of... Well, you get the picture.