Tuesday is an important day in this household. It’s the only day any kind of garbage is picked up. Actually, my Tuesdays begin on Monday evening when I haul one or possibly two of our wheelie bins into the street. And if I forget, woe everso betide me, because I’ll have to wait another 14 days for the next collection.

When we moved in to this house I noticed a certain whimsical randomness to the colour of the bins our neighbours were putting out. So I asked a couple of them what the rules were and, to a woman they both replied, ‘I don’t know. I leave that kind of thing to my husband.’

Ha! Well this is an Equal Opportunities marriage, so I went on-line, studied a very complicated website and went through my diary marking every Monday with the colour of the bins I should put out. Organised, huh?

This week is green and brown week. Which is a great pity because the black bin is bursting at the seams. Green is for paper, cardboard and non-yucky plastic. I’m not sure if the Garbage Police run a yuck-detector over it before hoisting the bin into the truck but I’m going to assume they do. We have a barcode and everything so they’re going to know exactly who has transgressed.

The brown bin is for compostable waste only. But the thing about vegetable peelings is they shrivel and dissolve and occupy very little space. Really I only need my aircraft-carrier sized brown bin emptying about three times a year and I’d like to trade some of my superfluous compost pick-ups for extra black bin pick-ups, but that isn’t allowed. There seem to be a lot of things that aren’t allowed these days. Like questioning the whole smug, hectoring Holy Writ of Recycling. 

Right now we have three different trucks taking away garbage in any 14 day period, instead of one truck every 7 days. How green is that? Added to which there’s the environmentally damaging heat I produce every time I have to rescue banana peel from the Non-Organic Yuck bin because Mr F hasn’t quite got the hang of the brown bin. Frankly I don’t see why he should. I mean, we’re not exactly Union Carbide.