The question posed in your last line is a most important one and is the subject one of my pet hates.

I am frequently preached at – rather, gaslit - by my local authority and various entities, about being “environmentally responsible”.

Yet the very same so and-sos encourage my missus to to put the so-called “waste”, produced by weeding and thinning out flowers, into a special green bin, to be then transported by road to a processing centre, where, yes, you’ve guessed it, someone will will make a tidy profit out of selling it back to…members of the public!

In exasperation, I inquired at the Town Hall as to the reasons for this lunacy; whereupon the Desk Sergeant sent for a kind young lady, who, he assured me, had a Masters in Bovine Secretion.

Ellie patiently explained to me that, millions of years ago, before Homo Sapiens appeared on the scene, little creatures in all the forests in the whole wide world would come out at dead of night, to tidy up all the fallen leaves and dead flowers and other debris, and transport them away to a special place, known by the Disciples of Gaia as “The Mycelium”.

She further explained - whilst staring at me accusingly - that diseases spread by Homo Sapiens - “yes, people like you” she said, gradually caused the little creatures to become, not so much extinct, as transmoggrified, by the time of the Victorian Era, into what we now know as the “Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden”; the last surviving members of that species, she informed me, were last seen at Cottingley Beck, and were known as the “Cottingley Fairies”.

Ellie excitedly explained to me that students at Bradford University had heard reports of what might possibly be such creatures, and that they were engaged in a project to extract their DNA with a view to resurrecting their species: “…it would be ever so good for the natural environment” she said.

“Then”, she continued, “what with the coming and going of the Industrial Revolution, whippets and flat caps and all that, society witnessed the advent of those awfully noisy metal bins, which, as you well know, have thankfully been replaced by plastic bins, which are coloured very very very green indeed!”

“Well, thank goodness for that…at least they’re not bright red”, I thought, as I made my way back up the garden path.