There you go, I've said it. I know we're facing ecological armageddon and I realise we can all prevent it. Unfortunately I just can't be bothered.

It's a disgusting stance but I have tried, really, it's just not that easy when you sense that whatever you do will be utterly futile.

Small wonder when we read this week about how thousands of people in Leeds carefully separate paper from their domestic waste so it can be recycled – only to find it might not be.

That's right, Leeds City Council contract chunks of the reusable rubbish off to companies who supposedly do the right thing with it. And most of them do, but some of these companies, it seems, don't.

Which would go some way towards explaining why investigators found a load of British rubbish being dumped on wasteground in India – including a letter originally sent to some bloke in Leeds.

Brilliant.

Now can someone explain to me why I should carefully pile up my newspapers, my kitchen roll, leaflets, wrappers and all the shredded junk mail (which I don't ask for but have to destroy) so it creates an eyesore and fire hazard in the corner of my nice new walnut and brushed steel kitchen?

Maybe I could spend £70 on an appropriately chic chrome bin to store it all in, which is probably the annual incomes of the impoverished Indians who have to bury the stuff when it arrives on the edge of which unfortunate shanty town the landfill site borders onto.

For not much more money I could probably pay to fly one of those poor souls to my house and pick out the take away fliers (the ones have I unwillingly pushed through my letterbox) I accidentally throw in with my regular household trash.

They can scrape off the egg yoke and old porridge and put it in the recycling pile and they'll probably make it home just in time to see it buried outside their front door.

In all seriousness though, it's not just this which makes me reluctant to get green with my rubbish.

There's anecdotal accounts of binmen tipping recycling bins back in with regular rubbish when it's collected. It's the fact that I'm not made very aware of when my recycling bins are emptied and, according to other anecdotes, they're sometimes not emptied at all.

But above all else it's the fact that local authorities still haven't come up with some ingenious way of separating all our rubbish after it has been taken from our homes.

This, I realise, would probably involve lots of people being landed with the thankless task of taking to our household waste with rakes and hoovers and all kinds of other things but, heck, we already have our waste water and sewage taken away for cleansing and separation – which is worse?

Here's my pledge to the preaching authorities: I'll do my bit for the environment if you prove you're saving the planet too – until then save your breath.


Othello made that bit more tragic

You have to be joking, right? Lenny Henry playing Othello?! I mean, it literally sounds like a joke doesn't it? Unfortunately it's true.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that we'll get to witness the spectacle first hand because he'll be taking to the stage in the Bard classic right here in Leeds. What a proud moment for the city.

Relaunch

I know we should wish him the best of luck and give him the chance to prove himself, blah, blah, blah, but, I'm sorry, what do the big theatre chiefs in London think when they see what Leeds has to offer the cultural world?

The RSC gets crowds queueing round the block to see David Tennant perform Hamlet while we get Lenny Henry using West Yorkshire Playhouse as his guinea pig to relaunch his career as an actor.

It's just insulting, the only consolation is that this play will probably be the first time Lenny Henry has ever made me laugh.


Leon offside

LAST week I was invited by the management team of Leon Jackson to interview the X-Factor winner during a brief stop-off in Leeds.

Sure, it was a flying visit but at least he appeared to have made the effort. So we agreed to have a chat with the Scots crooner IF we could hook up in the centre of town and have some pictures taken of him with the city centre in the background.

"Well, no." said the PR lady. "We don't think we'll have time, he's visiting Radio Aire in the morning."

I replied "What, all morning? For three hours?!"

"Erm, I'm not sure, I'll get back to you," she said. And that was the last I heard from her.

What's irking about this is not so much the fact that we didn't interview little Leon, though that would have been nice. It was the fact that his management's idea of 'stopping off in Leeds' was to drive him to a radio station's studio in suburbia.

From there he tells all his fans he's in the city to visit them (as part of a drive to get them to buy his records) before disappearing having not met a single Loiner or set foot outside. Sweet.