Be patient with me. There’s a point to all this. I’d just got back from a brisk morning workout on my mountain bike as the bin men were passing my house. They’d carefully left unemptied about a third of the recycling bins outside my neighbours’ houses.

“We can’t collect anything that isn’t within a foot of the edge of the property,” they informed me gravely.

To save money, there are now four not five collectors with each truck. One collector used to go ahead and pull bins into the street. Now they are one short and so cannot step a further one or two metres up short front paths to retrieve bins. An elderly neighbour was there looking at her full recycling bin. Her bins were exactly where they have always been – very neatly in front of the house. Everyone is getting to grips with the new blue wheelie bins, but to have your bin not collected two weeks before Christmas is really annoying and will put people off even trying.

I mean, what will the mountain of overflowing bins look like after Christmas?

The binmen gave me the evil eye as I marched down the street ahead of the truck and pulled the rest of the bins to within their statutory 304.8mm from the edge of the properties. When I got back to my house, they were staring at me, arms folded. My bin was too heavy and had nearly toppled over. What could I say? I’d had a clear out and it was full. What next: “We won’t take any bins that are full?”

On the roads, we’re used to this sort of rubbish (and here, ladies and gentlemen, IS the point). The county council has long had a policy of NOT gritting cycle paths. Go figure.

It’s important to grit cycle paths as cyclists can and do fall regularly in icy conditions. A car has four wheels and so can’t slip over like a bicycle. A right-thinking council should look after its most vulnerable road users first. Added to which, when things really freeze up cars can’t move and the bicycle is the only way to move about independently. Of particular concern are routes used by schoolchildren.

An NHS survey (http://tinyurl.com/cyclistinjuries) found the leading cause of hospital admissions for cyclists is not crashes with vehicles, but incidents such as slipping on ice, which caused about four times as many serious injuries in 2008/09.

That’s why the council should start to grit, in event of any ice: 1. all routes around primary and secondary schools; 2. all routes where there aren’t main-road alternatives; 3. busy city centre routes, such as National Route 5.

Holistically, it would save the county council money. The outlay and time spent on gritting key cycle routes will be small compared with the great savings in A&E admissions for cyclists with broken bones, or savings in congestion because people had to drive instead.

On the cycle paths where no alternatives exist or where hundreds of schoolkids cycle, there can be no argument against the sense in gritting.