THIS week I entered a totally alien territory: the world of landfill, a world as terrifying in its rules and regulations as EU Law.

It isn’t that I haven’t ever been to the tip before, because I’ve driven up ramps and lobbed old carpet into dinosaur-sized skips with the best of them.

However, I’ve never before undergone a total immersion in the workings of local recycling stations or been endowed with so much of the landfill operatives’ individual attention.

Resettling Mr Sundae-to-be into Oxfordshire, we’d accumulated a good pile of previously loved possessions that would have provoked less than charitable thoughts if taken to a charity shop. So I popped down the recycling centre to throw them away.

But as I started shuttling back and forth with my boxes, two silent figures appeared on my flanks as if from a Harry Potter movie, only in neon.

And then the interrogation started: what was in the boxes, because apparently I looked like ‘trade waste’. As I was on the way back from work in a glamorous ‘Arts-Delegate’ outfit, this seemed remarkably rude until I realised the day-glo officers were referring not to my appearance, much-loved raspberry-coloured coat and matching lippy, but to my rubbish.

Naive about the stringent recycling categories as the cardboard bin clearly rejected any form of paper, I’d begun hurling boxes of old magazines into the landfill abyss.

The Neons were keen to point out paper recycling, tucked behind the large appliances container in the lower tier of the site, and the boxes I’d already lobbed into the middle distance should be retrieved.

Fortunately, as the raspberry velvet jacket clearly proclaimed me to be a refuse novice rather than a hardened fly-tipper, they took pity on me and helped reload the car. I was then escorted to a letterbox sized slot, into which I spent an hour feeding Triathletes, Pop Stars and the Bash Street Kids. By the time I was returned to ‘cardboard’ with the squashed exteriors, the boxes were not the only thing that was crushed.

Next time, I think I’d rather investigate the EU regulations on hoarding.