WE'LL come to the election result later. Anyone wishing to read that section alone can be as rude as they like and hop straight to the end. All you will be missing is some rubbish or other.

This column is generally in favour of recycling. It's surprising how easily an old grumble can be brushed off and used again. Various old beliefs and prejudices clank about in the bottle bank that passes for my brain, ready to be crushed, melted and recast into something nearly new.

To complete the picture, these words are written on newsprint that has been partly recycled. As for which part, well, I'm not sure. Maybe some pages are recycled and others are virgin new. Anyway, a nice mental image arises about reusing newsprint, concerning all the old words and pictures hidden away beneath the new editions.

You may think you are reading today's paper, but below the surface there is another world of used news, old stories, yesterday's pictures and columns lost even to the mind of those who wrote them.

Recycling looks set to be an incandescent topic in York after City of York Council's proposal to reduce weekly refuse collections for 60,000 York homes with gardens.

We live in one of those. It has a nice garden but not a big one. If the council cuts the rubbish collection to every other week, our garden will soon feature more black rubbish bags than those flowery things my wife loves to grow.

According to the useful information printed in this newspaper, one option would see those with gardens given two wheelie bins, one for the usual old rubbish and one for recyclable rubbish. But what about houses with gardens but no wheelie bins?

It is going to be lovely in the summer at our house, sitting out in the sunshine atop a pile of two-week-old rubbish, swatting flies and holding a handkerchief to the nose to ward off the plague.

We did have one of those green boxes for newspapers and bottles, but it was stolen, as too was its replacement. That seems to be taking recycling a little too literally, but never mind. Well, I do mind because now it's back to tramping round to the bottle bank with wrist-snapping carrier bags. Or loading everything into the car, which is convenient but somewhere at the back of my mind I've a notion this is not terribly green.

Recycling is fine in itself and modern life is certainly rubbish in the sense of producing tons of the stuff.

The trouble with the Liberal Democrat solution in York is that something green - and therefore, in theory, to be welcomed - is being brought in mostly to save money.

No longer will too much rubbish be tipped into a big hole in the ground - instead it will hang around in our gardens for an extra smelly week.

THE election result was just about right. A tired, and vaguely irritable, Tony Blair was voted back in for one last go after receiving a bloody nose and a sharply reduced majority.

The Tories didn't deserve to win after Michael Howard fought a simplistic and mostly nasty election campaign, and, thankfully, they did not. And Charles Kennedy got more votes in the Lib-Dem wheelie bin than usual (although, in the end, I didn't chuck mine that way).

Lame ducks have been bussed in from the People's Dispensary For Distressed Political Clichs to describe both Blair, who will go sometime in the next four years, and Howard, who says he'll be gone by Christmas.

Limping he may be, but Tony Blair was up to his tricks immediately, elevating a favourite political adviser, Andrew Adonis, to the Lords so he can be made a junior education minister.

I thought Tony Blair didn't believe in the House of Lords, so why he is using the second chamber to slip a crony into government?

The old idea used to be that would-be politicians submitted themselves to the electorate rather than being raised by whim or favour.

Updated: 10:32 Thursday, May 12, 2005