Spring is here.  We renew, we refresh, we clean, and we recycle. I have to say that I find recycling a bit of a pain.  It’s complicated and our house is full of boxes and bins.  In theory, food waste goes in one and other organic waste in a second.  Glass, tins, paper and card are separated.  There are three recycling containers and an old-school dustbin outside.  Food and organic waste is collected once a week on a Thursday; recyclable household waste once a fortnight on a Tuesday and non-recyclable waste every other Wednesday.  As I say, this is theory.  I’m not good at it.

I know I shouldn’t complain. According to WRAP, the Waste recycling action programme, we throw away seven million tonnes of food and drink every year – most of which could be safely consumed; we generate 290 million tonnes of waste every year and only recycle around 18% of it.  On the up side, we sent more than 40% of our household waste to recycling in 2011 compared to just 11% in 2001, and the amount of waste each of us produces every year fell by 88 kilos between 2006 and 2011.

It’s not just recycling though.  I am assured by my family that I am generally a cantankerous and mardy old so-and-so who states opinion as fact and believes a simian grunt to be a statesmanlike conversational gambit.  So perhaps it’s time to straighten out my attitudes more broadly.  St Paul advised the early church in Rome to ‘be transformed by the renewal of your mind’, knowing that our outward behaviour is only going to improve when we’ve done something about our inner life.

Maybe, then, that’s what I need this Spring Equinox – not just to recycle my rubbish but to recycle myself.  So I plan to read a bit more and watch TV a bit less, to try to make my opinions a bit more informed and to listen to other people’s more respectfully; in short, to examine how I think and how I behave. Hopefully, that’ll do more than just reduce my greenhouse gas emissions.

Ironically, given the content of this blog, my inner life remains distressingly unexamined. And I am fairly sure I still watch tv more than I read.