I recently took a whole load of rubbish to what I still call the local dump, but which now calls itself a re-cycling centre. I went through the rigmarole of separating stuff and depositing it in the correct bins. Then came some bags of stones, earth and grass.

‘Stones, earth and grass,’ I said, ‘where d’you want it?’. The re-cycling ‘technical support’ officer was called to my bagside by the fluorescent-jacket cladded bin loader who was more interested in tut-spotting.

‘Stones, earth and grass?’ I repeated. ‘Chuck it in the skip, mate,’ came the expert’s reply. Well it made sense after all it WAS landfill originally!

In Ireland things are a bit different. You can lob whole yachts into landfill sites or at least GRP deck plugs, like this one spotted by blog reader Odette Kelly’s dad in Dunboyne, County Meath.