Something new has hit the shelves over here; wine bottles made of paper. Temporarily, I was somewhat concerned by this. My worry was not, as you might initially imagine, that the container would go all soggily porous before the wine inside had been consumed.

This is not likely to be an issue in my house unless they use tissue, and even then it would be touch and go. No, it was something that occurred to me when I was at our local recycling centre, standing in front of the bottle bank.

Should paper bottles go in bottles, or paper? Should they not tell us? I later asked Mrs J and she suggested they probably left it to the individual’s common sense. I said that was a jolly dangerous thing to do, and she wholeheartedly agreed with me, nodding silently but supportively.

But wait. Why was I at the bottle bank, you ask. Surely our recycling is collected along with the rest of our rubbish? Or has our government, which promised to be the greenest ever, maintained political tradition by reneging on its manifesto pledge?

Well, no to that; because with all the problems in the UK at the moment, the whole front bench is looking decidedly queasy. So why, then? I’ll tell you. Three reasons. Firstly, there’s the sound of breaking glass.

It borders on a guilty pleasure, poking the empty bottle half way into the hole, then whacking it so that it hits the back of the bin and aurally rewards you with multi-faceted tinkling. I love it.

(As an aside to my explanation; they’ve developed a new light-bulb recycling machine, featuring a ‘soft landing’ mechanism to reduce breakages. Where’s the fun in that? And the bulb-saving gubbins inside costs hundreds of thousands of pounds! I have already patented my own version; it’s a large metal container with a hole in the front, and I’ve put an advert in the local rag; “Small urchin wanted, must have own stool and safe pair of hands”.)

Anyway, secondly. Secondly, the council, no doubt having read the ‘throwaway society’ column a couple of months ago, have introduced a new ‘recycling-centric regime of refuse collection’. And it isn’t just the gobbledygook that I find confusing.

Previously, once a week, I used to chuck everything into a bin liner, then just left it outside. Next time I looked it had gone, removed by some tight-fisted cousin of the tooth-fairy. But now? Now it all has to be pre-sorted and left according to a strict schedule.

Every other week we have to put the paper into a green box and leave it outside. Every other other week we have to put cans and bottles and stuff into a blue box and do the same. Every single week we have to leave out a black box of food waste.

And every two weeks we have to collect all the stuff that isn’t in the green, blue or black boxes. This goes in a bag with, I believe, the colour scheme left entirely to our own artistic proclivities. Then there’s the garden waste – in transparent bags – which I’m pretty sure is collected every full moon when Jupiter aligns with Mars.

Woe betide you if you mistake your weeks, use erroneously coloured containers, or misjudge your planetary alignments. More than woe, in fact. I’m guessing they probably tip the rubbish all over your front lawn and place you on their ‘idiot’ list.

Fortunately, since it took ages, patience and a tin of boiled sweets to expunge my name last time I upset the Council, Mrs J manages the logistics, while I look after transportation and recovery of empties. That way I don’t have to carry and think; which for me are best kept separate.

Therefore, secondly, when my better half was away visiting, I went to the bottle bank. Perfectly logical. And thirdly, if, on a weekly basis, you take your empties down the road, the recyclers don’t know how many you get through in a fortnight. Though, writing this, I’ve had another thought. Split my wine purchases between glass and paper bottles, and they go into different containers on different days.

Problem solved!