FARMER Ray Bryant found he had the wrong sort of cooker when he took a number of unwanted domestic appliances to Williton's recycling centre. Mr Bryant, who runs a beef and sheep enterprise in Huish Champflower, is currently putting in a new kitchen at his home, Higher Brown Farm. But, when he started to offload the appliances from his old kitchen at the Roughmoor centre last weekend, he found one of them apparently did not quite fit the bill. "After asking me where I lived, one of the staff at the centre told me that I could leave my old fridge and fridge-freezer but not my cooker," Mr Bryant told the Free Press. "When I asked why, he said it was because the farm was classified as a business and that the centre did not take commercial waste. "But the cooker is an old double oven affair that fits into a kitchen unit - it's clearly not a catering cooker and it was obvious it had come from a kitchen. "I just couldn't believe my ears and I couldn't understand why, if he thought the farm was a business, he was willing to let me leave the other appliances." Mr Bryant was forced to take the old cooker back home but rang up Somerset County Council, which runs the centre, the following day to complain. "They said they would look into it but I have never come across anything so ridiculous in my life. "The mind just boggles - if I had been trying to dump half a tractor, I could have understood. "No wonder we are getting so much rubbish dumped in farm gates and in the open countryside if this is the sort of reaction people get when they try to get rid of unwanted stuff responsibly. "It just made me so annoyed that I had even bothered to go down there." A county council spokesman said the site worker's reaction had been " an oversight". "We would like to apologise and Mr Bryant will also receive a full apology from the site manager. "If he would like to take the cooker back to the centre we can assure him that the staff will accept it."
