Brian Viner: Country Life

The enthusiasms of a middle-aged man, number 347: a good municipal tip. I really can't find sufficiently high praise for the tip in Leominster, our nearest town. Indeed, the word "tip" itself scarcely does it justice.

There are separate skips for general rubbish, cardboard, scrap metal, wood and garden waste, as well as further recycling bins for bottles, newspapers, cans, plastic, cardboard, shoes, tyres and even fridges. As you leave, a sign tells you how much waste was recycled the previous month, and how many tonnes were thereby saved from being landfilled. It's most heartening. I've had holidays in places that have pleased me less.

Leominster tip even has an energetic young woman in a donkey jacket who at peak times will help you unload your car - the domestic-refuse equivalent of those bag-packers you sometimes find in particularly busy branches of Waitrose.

When she lends me a gauntleted hand, I am sometimes reminded of the Caroline Aherne character in The Fast Show, who sits at the supermarket till passing irreverent comment on the contents of people's trolleys.

The woman at the tip must see all sorts coming out of the boots of cars. When I was there the other day I saw a man dumping a lifesize cardboard cut-out of Cilla Black, which begged a number of questions that regrettably I didn't have time to ask, since I was slightly behind schedule on the way to collect my sons from school.

I quite often call at the tip en route to picking the boys up. In fact, if I am brutally honest, I regard the school run as a bit of a chore, yet a visit to the tip as an unalloyed pleasure, when it really ought to be the other way round.

The only explanation I can find for this curious mindset is that I arrive at school with an empty car, which is then filled with boys who are always hungry, sometimes a little bit smelly, and either tremendously over-excited or excessively grumpy, whereas I arrive at the tip with a full and often decidedly smelly car, yet drive away with it empty and much less malodorous.

Also, I find that there is something almost emotionally cathartic about chucking away a dozen bulging refuse sacks and dumping 20 empty bottles and a stack of old newspapers into recycling bins. Maybe it's a guy thing. Or maybe it's just me.

But I think it's the former, because I've noticed that when certain male friends visit from London, they are eager to come with me to the tip, whether I happen to be going or not. In the capital, as a general rule, the only people who will help empty your car have usually got into it with a crowbar.

Now, I wouldn't claim for a second that small rural towns don't have their drawbacks, not least the drug and binge-drinking problems. And the eating-out options after 6pm are distinctly limited unless you have a tireless appetite for cod and chips or chicken jalfrezi. But last Saturday I saw rural small-town England at its best.

First of all, I was at the tip, where everyone was recycling cheerfully and even chattily; rarely have I emptied a boxful of bottles into the bottle bank without someone asking whether it was a good party (which admittedly can be disconcerting if you're just binning your usual weekly intake).

Anyway, there I was, sorting my bottles into the brown, green and clear bins, when I stupidly rammed the jagged edge of the single broken bottle into the back of my left hand, gashing it badly and drawing an alarming amount of blood.

I wrapped a handkerchief around my hand and drove myself to Leominster Community Hospital, which was so quiet that it reminded me of the hospital scene in The Godfather, when Michael Corleone turns up to visit his father, only to find the place deserted.

Within less than five minutes a charming nurse was giving me four stitches, while we chatted about her daughter's chemistry degree at Bath University.

It would be wrong of me to say that I can't think of a better way of spending a Saturday morning, but the whole experience was about as pleasurable as it could have been.