Last updated 05:42, Friday, 22 August 2008

His cheeks flushed with an intake of breath matching the suction action of a Dyson. It was so fierce his eyes bulged – and I’d an idea I might be in trouble.

Brows lowered, head shook slowly and from determinedly set lips, three dreaded words escaped... and I knew I was in trouble.

“Health and safety,” he declared in utter confidence that there would be an end to the matter. “Can’t do that. It’s health and safety.”

“What is?”

“What you want. Not possible now ... because of health and safety.”

I was shopping. Not for a nuclear reactor or Challenger tank – wouldn’t know where to find those items in Carlisle – but for a three-piece suite. Very nice it was too. More than I’d wanted to pay but never having been one to resist temptation, I was, as they say, up for it.

A couple of sofas and a chair, each warranting its own health and safety regulation, apparently – and there’s no resisting that. With deep frustration, I’d reached a bemusing and infuriating impasse.

It was going to be possible to have new furniture carried into my home – all part of the deal – but impossible to have the old stuff carried out. Mere mention of the possibility of the old suite being taken away sent the vacuum cleaner imitator into a swoon.

“Haven’t been able to do that for years.”

“Not even for a fee?”

“Out of the question. Health and safety.”

He hadn’t been the first salesman to crash naive notions that an exchange of money for goods and services was going to be simple, like it was in the olden days. If I manage to reignite interest in spending to ease local business credit crunch blues, he surely won’t be the last.

Once upon a time women like me – who frown on keeping a man in the house solely for purpose of occasional furniture lifting – could rely on assigning heavy jobs to expert shifters. They brought the new, whisked away the old, charged a fee and Bob was the uncle for a job well done. How now we are supposed to dispose of the health and safety blighted is anybody’s guess.

Council shifters shift only from outside, charity shifters similar and then only if all conceivable health and safety risk boxes – along with some inconceivable ones – have been ticked. So, where on earth do sofas go when they die and who are the pallbearers who will take those once loved by single women to their graves?

“There’s a dump down Botcherby way – plenty dead sofas down there. And you’ll see more at the side of the road as you drive out to...” This not from a salesman, it must be stressed.

“Isn’t that a health and safety breach?”

“Only if you’re caught.”

And so the vicious legislative jobsworth circle turns, whirling like a Dervish intent on disappearing up his own fez – by order of health and safety rulers making legitimate disposal of anything cumbersome well nigh impossible.

American author, countryside chronicler and rural protection campaigner Bill Bryson reckons our small island is in danger of sinking into the sea under a burdening weight of fly-tipped rubbish. He’s right. It’s awful. But the answer to that is...?

His is to fine litter-bugs heavily and fly-tippers painfully. Might it not be an idea to set up some kind of workable waste disposal system first?

Fortnightly domestic rubbish collections and the mad-cap restrictions that go with them have undoubtedly led to more unsightly bags of refuse being hurled into hedgerows, dumped along roadsides, appearing as if by magic overnight.

Mattresses, old chairs and dead sofas blot rural landscapes quite routinely now but with one set of rules directly contradicting another, how is that surprising?

It might well be a step in the right direction if retailers of new large items were encouraged to set up systems to remove old ones with safety and environmental sensitivity at delivery time. They seem to manage it with fridges.

Bill Bryson is right to make noises about our burgeoning rubbish problems. They’re fast approaching insurmountable. But fault doesn’t rest entirely with those who are penalised in every way, at every turn and increasingly stringently, however hard we try to dispose of waste with sympathy for and keenly mindful of the pressures on our environment. There are others who carry – and shun – responsibility to make sofa dumps and fly-tipped bags of waste things of the past, the way they were when disposal was taken seriously enough to warrant some joined up thinking.

Over legislated and overruled, even when offering to pay for a disposal service, we now have fines, prosecutions, health and safety barriers, mounting piles of rubbish, a hard-pressed furniture salesman who lost a sale and a disappointed householder thwarted in her spending plans. Even Mr Bryson would probably agree, there’s not much joined up thinking there.