It's grim up South Liverpool

Last Thursday the street where I live got new blue wheelie bins for recycling newspapers and other such things. As I missed out on getting a recycling box, for reasons to tedious to recount, I'd been storing newspapers (Guardian and Daily Mirror on Saturday, Observer and News of the World on Sunday) up for months rather than throw them away, and happily transferred them all into the wheelie bin.

Today was collection day (which happens once a fortnight) and I spent literally hours agonising over whether to put out the bin the night before (advantage: I don't have to get up so early to put the bin out, disadvantage: it might blow over and scatter newspaper down the street because of the high winds), or this morning.

Anyway, the point of this is that I think those little plastic bag inserts in newspapers which they put the Guide and the magazine bit in are a Bad Thing and ought to be banned. This is an insight which came to me after going through seven months' worth of newspaper to remove them, and then realising that as the bin also took plastic for recycling, there wasn't any need to do so.