Guardian: There are days when I feel my only achievement has been a successful trip to the recycling centre. It’s an age thing. “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills,” as William Empson insisted in perhaps his best known villanelle, Missing Dates. We need to get it out of the system. At the end of the year, it weighs more heavily upon us. Christmas means rubbish, piles of rubbish. Cardboard, paper, polystyrene, bubble wrap, plastic, the withering leaves of sprouts and the scraggy bones of …