Some time ago, around two years to be precise, there was a whole lot of shenanagans in our town about rot.

British people have a troubled relationship with their refuse.

We are wedded to a thing we call, here, a Wheelie Bin. It is a large push-around cannister which holds a prescribed amount of a prescribed type of rubbish.

As the drive to reduce un-recyclable waste gathered momentum, in those heady days of the early nineties, we eschewed our dustbin bags and opted to fill one green bin with rubbish every week

The green bin has become an icon round our way. It represents everything that is both civilised and uncivilised about Britain. The council gives little barbie-sized ones away during promotions. All the kids have them in their dolls houses.

People are covetous of their space, and tussle with anyone who tries to dump their trash into someone else’s bin. Neighbourhood disputes break out. A man’s bin is his own domain, a nether region no-one wishes to view, but which is the undisputed right of every English person.

Every Monday, in those halcyon days, we would wheel our bins down to the end of the drive. At that time, the children were young enough to marvel at the dustbin lorry, with its simple, cheery operatives and its iron lethal jaws. It would pick the bins up, without the aid of even simple human hand, and empty the undesirable contents safely into a lorry. Then it would bear it away to where we could not see it any more.

If it were up to us, it would have stayed that way, but mercifully it was not.

Councils have their green quotas, and ours chose stringent cuts in the amount of rubbish we threw away. They’re getting national plaudits. And they are the talk of the town: but not in a good way.

Just over a year ago, they informed us they would only be collecting green-bin rubbish every fortnight.

Here, in Little Britain, we love our queues and our colour coding. As a sweetener they introduced azure recycling wheelie bins. If you can recycle it, you can throw it in there, and it will be spirited away with discretion worthy of Jeeves.

And in the land of Somewhere Else, it is recycled, thus preserving the world for another day.

Completing our organisational rainbow we were offered flashy brown bins-for garden waste. Now there was a veritable feast of colourful places to put your waste.

But, like the good people of Hamelin, we had a few concerns about this scheme.

What about meat? We cried. Before you know it, we will have unspeakables in our beautiful bins, and unspeakables attract unutterables, generally with a long wiry tail and four boney pitter-patters.

The Council paused, and placed the tips of its fingers together. It rubbed its proverbial chin in deep thought. And then it said: Here, try these.

Reader, it was a green cone.

A plastic 3D miracle.

This is what we were urged to do: queue. up for hours at Sainsbury’s supermarket car park, and use a voucher to get your green piece of plastic for just £10.

Then, dig an obscenely large hole in your garden: a clay pit which collects water and attracts all under fives to come and mud wrestle.

Remove said under fives. Give them a bath.

Then put something which looks for all the world like a washing basket in the hole, and plug the round, open end with the bottom of the cone. Fill in the earth to cover up the washing basket, and put a lid on the cone.

When you have a roast and the bones need somewhere to go, fear not: they go in the cone.

Scraps which even the dog will not touch: these pop into your friendly neighbourhood cone.

Even unsightly doggie doings can be dispatched safely. It is a modern miracle.

Some of us, myself included, shook our heads darkly and didn’t hold with it all. And Time, that great leveler, has proved that there are things about The Cone which are earth-fostering and eco-friendly: and things which are dark and dastardly.

You’ve got to say one thing about it: it can hold its smell. The gases expelled by the unthinkable contents do not make their way into the outside air.

Right up till the moment you take the lid off. And then, bejeezus, it knocks you flat. Unless you are a small connoisseur, with triangular ears and four legs.

We play a daredevil game, Phil and I. It’s called How Full Is Your Scraps Jar, and it entails refusing to accept that the jar is full on your shift. When Phil enters the kitchen with a proprietorial air, I run like the wind, away from the kitchen, anywhere.

Because discovery of the scraps jar, seething with recycling potential, is imminent. Phil will be forced to empty the jar.

I think we are both secretly hoping that the sorry receptacle will become such a teeming source of life that it will simply take itself off, out of the kitchen door, down to the green cone, and hop in to join the party.

In the warm months it does just about take the primeval slime that is produced by a nice average family of four.

My sister, who has Big Al contributing liberally, gave up using it sometime during August, just as the first morsels began to peep over the top of the cone in a grotesque parody of Pandora’s Box.

We have continued bravely on. Until yesterday.

Because with November come the freezing temperatures, and no self-respecting bacteria is staying around here to be abused. They have packed their microscopic little suitcases and headed off for warmer climes.

And so that living, breathing thing is suspended in gruesome stasis. And the food is simply piling up hopefully. Maybe, it thinks (for surely by now it has a consciousness) now is a good time to stroll around and take the air. By storm.

Phil stomped in from the garden, shoulders hunched. I had stuck it out, once more, until his shift.

“That food out there’s piling up a bit”, he muttered gruffly.

I agreed with grim acquiescence.

“Better stop using it for a while”, said the man who styles himself High Emperor of Recycling.

“Yes,” I concurred. “We better had.”

So out there The Big Idea sits. It would work in a rainforest, where warmth and humidity play their part like David Garrick: but here in my freezing, misty less-than-mellow back yard?

Not a chance.