By her own account, Andrea Good has a ‘very feisty’ temper, is a ‘very strict’ mother to her three children, is ‘upfront and straight up’ and appears to keep her IT contractor husband Rob on his toes at all times.
So it goes without saying that when she saw two men in hi-viz jackets hurling rubble, broken tiles, plastic buckets and a loo from their white van by one of the gates to her smallholding last Friday, she wasn’t going to sit tight and wait for the police.
Fly-tippers have been dumping rubbish on her land, and all around her village in a New Forest beauty spot, for years — mattresses, tyres, anything.
A video of two men fly-tipping near a woman’s house (pictured) has gone viral. The pair tried to cover up their actions by putting their rubbish back in their van but they had already been caught in the act
And, during lockdown, it has been far worse.
But, despite studying CCTV images, this is the first time she has managed to catch someone red-handed.
‘I was determined they weren’t going to be leaving all that stuff in my way,’ she says. ‘And I have a habit of getting what I want.’
So she abandoned her coffee and strode out in her wellies to confront them with a cheery: ‘You all right, boys? What are you doing?’ and then listened to their excuses:
‘We’ve just picked up some stuff and it was all muddled and we’re sorting it out. We’re not fly-tippers.
‘We’ve taken it all off to sort it, my love. We’ll make sure it’s all cleaned up, my love.’
On and on they blathered, until she cut through with: ‘You’ve given me a cock-and-bull story so I’m going to wait here for you to clean it all up.’
The woman who took the video was Andrea Good (pictured), who is described as havin a ‘feisty temper’ and being a ‘very strict mother’
Then she waited while they started collecting it and putting it back in their van.
She also filmed the whole encounter on her phone, including a few lingering shots of the extremely dirty interior of their LJ Waste & Maintenance Ltd van, then had a good laugh about it at home over her now lukewarm coffee.
‘They were like Dumb and Dumber or the Chuckle Brothers!’ she says.
‘I thought a couple of my farming friends might just see the hilarity, so I put it on Facebook.’
Since then, her video has had more than 500,000 views and she has received thousands of messages of support from all over the world.
‘It’s clear a lot of people feel very strongly about fly-tipping — I’ve learned that much!’ she says.
Of course they do. In recent months, the coronavirus crisis has caused its own fly-tipping pandemic and rural areas have been hit particularly hard.
In some places, The Countryside Alliance has reported a 300 per cent increase.
In London, there are boroughs where the problem has doubled while, nationally, the rise in fly-tipping is put at 76 per cent.
The problem was triggered when most local authorities decided to close tips and recycling centres, to allay social distancing concerns and allow council staff to focus on bin collections.
At the same time, charity shops closed just as the nation was ordered to stay at home.
And with time on their hands, millions embarked on long-postponed house or garden DIY projects, or decided to clear out their attics, garages, sheds and wardrobes.
Mrs Good revealed that fly-tippers have been leaving their rubbish lying around in the New Forest area for several years
Which, of course, creates rubbish. And far too many selfish people ignored instructions to store their waste until restrictions were lifted, choosing instead to dump it.
So unlicensed refuse collectors have thrived, picking up waste for cash, then fly-tipping instead of disposing of it properly.
Others have filled their car boots and dumped unwanted items wherever they thought they could get away with it — or even taken their rubbish on family outings.
‘People have been combining exercise with fly-tipping,’ says Martin Montague, whose ClearWaste.com fly-tipping reporting website and app has been able to chart in real time the soaring scale of the problem in recent weeks.
‘When some people go out of towns and cities to walk in the countryside, they are loading their cars up with stuff and dumping it while they are out.’
Among those to have suffered most are farmers, in part, because they are responsible for removing any waste dumped on their land.
But also because farm animals are naturally curious and can easily choke on, be poisoned by, or get entangled in dumped items.
No wonder Andrea is now hailed as the farming community’s heroine and ‘a total bloody legend’.
But having watched the video myself three times — go on, treat yourself — I suspect many are just in awe of a woman who can catch two grown men red-handed and, somehow, without being rude, aggressive or remotely shrewish, get them to pick up every last bit of rubbish, from the loo to old nails in the long grass, and make them feel like naughty schoolboys.
‘I was well aware that I was on my own and there were two men, and if fire meets fire you’ll only get a bigger fire,’ she says.
So she hosed them with sarcasm, instead.
So when, after a lot of scrambling about, they asked, ‘Happy now, my love?’ she replied: ‘No, not really. That bit. There. Under your heel. You’ve missed a bit.’
And back to work they went, muttering: ‘All right, my love. Sorry, my love.’
Andrea used sarcasm to taunt the fly-tippers, who were very apologetic after being caught red-handed
The cherry on the cake was when she said to them: ‘Problem is, you get so many people fly-tipping these days, don’t you?’
‘Even I was a bit surprised how sarcastic I was when I watched the video back,’ she laughs today.
I bet her husband Rob, 49, wasn’t. As we speak, he is hovering in the background, so I ask how he would describe his wife of 18 years.
‘She’s in the room… a bit scary!’ he jokes. ‘Let’s say she’s determined. She knows what she wants.’
They met 24 years ago, when Andrea was 18, and working as a barmaid. ‘He was the first customer I served and I poured his beer wrong, overcharged him and forgot to put his food order through to the kitchen,’ she says.
‘I knew she was a keeper,’ Rob says with a smile.
They have been together ever since and were married in 2002.
Today, she juggles being a full-time mum with her horse-grooming business and running a ten-acre smallholding.
They have four horses, 16 sheep, a cow, chickens and five pigs, and she is up at five every morning to attack the day.
‘I’ve got no time for idiots,’ she says, simply. Yet, Andrea is also surprisingly empathetic.
‘Personally, I think it’s the system that’s at fault,’ she says. ‘If it was easier to access tips and they weren’t so restrictive about what you could dump, most people wouldn’t choose to fly-tip.
‘And, in fairness to those men, they could have handled it differently. They knew they’d been rumbled and got themselves out of it as quickly as they could.’
Mind you, they have been red-faced and squirming ever since.
First they denied it. Then they posted photographs of receipts from all their trips to local dumps on the company website.
Yesterday, another statement went up, insisting it was all an ‘honest mistake’ and apologising to Andrea for ‘any upset and inconvenience’.
They clearly had no idea who they were up against.