Musings from the Hart District Council Household Waste Recycling Centre

You know that you are a forty-something with a beard when you get up especially early on a Sunday morning, pack your car with garden waste and drive it to the local rubbish tip just in time for them to open. There is a certain smug satisfaction as you arrive at the gates with only a few cars in front of you, knowing that you have beaten the Sunday rush of stay-a-beds who will be queuing for hours later in the day.

You also know that you are a forty-something with a beard as you tut to yourself watching the recycling centre workers having to clear the gates of fly-tipped rubbish, left there by the kind of slacker who arrived too late for the previous night's more-than-reasonable 7 o'clock closing time, and damned if they're going to drive all the way home with a car full of rubbish.

Then you remember that some thirty years ago you were one of these people, leaving the gift of an old kitchen worktop outside the gates of the tip in Reading, and statute of limitations or something.

It was as I sat in the short queue to get in, slapping down the insects that invariably come with a car full of tree, that I mused on certain things.

I mused on the fact that I had shouted "Get out of the road, coffin dodger!" at a little old lady who had witlessly stepped out in front of me while driving through Hartley Wintney five minutes previously; and were it not for the fact that I am a forty-something with a beard driving a Nissan Micra at 10mph below the speed limit, I would have been contemplating which bin at the rubbish tip to dump her body.

It's a tough choice. There's no bin for dead bodies (an oversight that Hart District Council really ought to correct for the hard-pushed council tax payer with spare cadavers on their hands) so, it's either household waste or garden waste, neither of which fit the bill.

If there's a dead granny in your car boot, however, your best bet would probably be the metal cycling bin. Odds-on she's probably got a replacement hip or two, and the metal in those don't come cheap and they're crying out for that sort of quality scrap in the People's Republic of China.

Then I drove home feeling smug in the knowledge that the queue for the tip was already halfway back to Fleet, and that I had disposed of an unwanted skull in the garden waste skip.