Heaven is a day spent sorting a cow-box full of rubbish at a Derbyshire recycling centre

Rubbish has always fired my imagination and set my pulse racing. I don’t know why; it may be an inherited trait. My late father used to rifle through our bins lest anything useful had been thrown away, and in unhappier circumstances might in old age have extended his research into the streets, parks and railway stations. Perhaps one of our ancestors was a vulture in another life.

Little gives me greater satisfaction than my old flip-flops — rescued (broken) from a crow-patrolled tip in Rurrenabaque in the remote Bolivian lowlands and lovingly repaired using some bailer twine and an old nail in place of a needle. The repair took most of an afternoon but I do not regret a minute of it: Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, and nothing useful survives long on a tip; I simply got there first. A sadness for me last year was when, in my absence abroad, my partner threw away and replaced my old washing machine, which was just short of its 30th birthday and worked perfectly well so long as you knew how to secure the door whose broken catch I had, with devilish ingenuity, replaced with a swivelling jam-jar lid bolted on to the pressed steel plate.