If, like me, you have been led by sundry children’s motoring programmes to believe that, when it comes to practicality, flexibility and all-round indestructibility, the Toyota Hilux pick-up is the absolute bee’s knees then I am, sadly, about to wee on your firework.

Entirely won over by the threat of an endless supply of Desperate Dan pies, I recently succumbed to the missus’ request for a freezer in the outside shed. Not, you understand, the sort of chest freezer in which one might conceal an aged relative whose last words were: ‘What are doing with that hammer?’, but something of more modest size.

This, nonetheless, still necessitated what those in my family heading for the smallest room in the house (and old enough to remember the January sale advertising) know as a “Queensway” – a massive clearance.

Happily, said shed clear-out coincided with the presence on the drive of a spanking double-cab Hilux, into the flat bed of which I ruthlessly lobbed everything I could find that failed the six month test (use it or lose it); an old door, a disassembled cot, rafts of tired, sun-bleached plastic toys, dog-chewed booster seats, wok-sized spiders, enough diverse paint to turn the Titanic’s funnels psychedelic…

By the time my neighbours all got wind of my impending tip excursion, the hapless Hilux’s leaf springs were working harder than a longbow at Agincourt. Still, small price to pay for fulfilling the recycling needs of an entire lane.

Now, our local Mudfordshire “Household Waste Recycling Centre” used to be just an old stove’s throw away. Sadly, and just an unfortunate coincidence no doubt, the tip closed the instant our local MP became Prime Minister.

Absurdly, its local replacement may never open. In a hilarious and all too predictable display of bureaucratic pomposity, incompetence and general snit, our local town and county councils cannot agree on the amount the latter should pay the former for access to the potential site.

As a result, my two nearest tips are both sufficiently distant to require the construction of a packed lunch. The nearer is actually in another county so, strictly speaking, is off limits to Mudfordshire residents. But it never came to that.

‘Sorry,’ came the cheery greeting as I pulled up. ‘You can’t bring that in here, it’s a commercial vehicle.’

‘No it isn’t,’ I spluttered. ‘It belongs to Toyota, and I borrowed it specifically to bring all this stuff to the tip. Besides, I know loads of people who own these because they so practical, flexib…’

‘That’s as maybe. But if you want to bring it in here you’ll have to apply for an annual permit.’

‘But it goes back tomorrow, and I’ll probably never see it again,’ I griped. ‘What good is an annual p…’

‘And that’s paint,’ came the riposte. ‘We don’t take paint. You’ll have to go to Leamington Spa and put it on a weighbridge. Might cost you a bit. Now, if you had an old freezer on that lot I could take it as general household waste.’

‘It is general household waste. And I’m getting rid of it to make way for a new freezer, for Christ’s sake.’

And so the morning wore amicably on. To accompany the flea in my ear, I was given a leaflet explaining that the new permit scheme was designed to tackle the “illegal disposal of trade waste” and “increase recycling”. Oh really? The only truth in the entire sorry tale is that the scheme is also “helping to reduce congestion”. Because unless you can fit that old Welsh dresser into a small family hatchback, you’re unlikely to be allowed anywhere near the site.

My point is this: why should car manufacturers spend a fortune on painstaking engineering advances to inch fuel consumption and emissions ever lower whilst numbskull bureaucrats simultaneously engineer ever longer, costlier and potentially fruitless journeys for those of us who merely wish to offload the occasional dead door?

No wonder so many owners of the suddenly surprisingly useless Toyota Hilux simply lob their household detritus into the nearest hedgerow. 

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