Tales of the City: We don't have the technology to recycle technology

I'm suspicious of any new scare stories emanating from the European Commission, after the awful warnings about "harmonisation" we heard in the mid-Nineties – we'd be allowed to eat only straight bananas, we'd be forbidden to drink certain mineral waters with too many bubbles – stories that failed to materialise. But the impending crisis about televisions is a little hard to ignore. It is a tale, like Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry, of the impossibility of getting rid of a corpse.

The British apparently get rid of two million defunct televisions every year (and if you're surprised by this figure, because you, O supine suburbanite, just send dodgy TVs back to the rental company, think how many they must send out on the scrap heap). They dispose of them through Waste Service companies, which usually bury them 10ft down in landfill sites. Now, because of an EC ruling in January, you can't do that any more. Televisions have been categorised as "hazardous waste" and must be put in licensed "hazardous landfill" sites. But first they must be "recycled". That means removing the lead content of TV screens (bet you didn't realise that idiot lanterns are stuffed with lead) from the glass, and the dangerous phosphorus stuff from both.

This is where things start going wrong. First, there aren't any "hazardous landfill" sites, because you need to get a special licence to designate such things and the Department for Environment people haven't finished doing the licensing paperwork. And even if they had, you couldn't "recycle" TVs along the EC's lines because there's no technological method in existence for removing lead and phosphorous from glass. We are in Alice in Wonderland country, where EC directives and commissioners say, "See to it!" and, "Get it done!", while the gardeners and builders stand around trying to point out that it just ain't possible.

Instead of dead TVs being buried underground, therefore, they will be left to fall apart in sheds and attics, on roadsides and in fields. The same problem occurred with refrigerators, which now lie in a million-strong, unrecyclable herd all over the countryside. Mmm, that's a nice prospect, two million old TVs and a million fridges lying among the cowslips and primroses in the meadows of the Home Counties. And it won't end there. The EC is working on a directive that all devices containing an electrical circuit must be recycled in the same way. So, alongside the TVs and fridges, make room for old Amstrad computers, mute Casio electronic organs, démodé GameBoys, PlayStations, Dyson washing-machines, Samsung faxes, electric board games... Most of them will need to be recycled, in a way that's currently beyond the range of our technology. They can't be mended and they can't be got rid of.

It's a nightmare scenario: an army of moribund labour-saving devices and obsolete gadgets spreading across our green and pleasant land like a white-goods rash. Maybe there's a design solution, some way of converting millions of lumps of ex-machinery into pour la maison conversation pieces cunningly trailed with clematis – but I wouldn't hold my breath...

A fruitful encounter with tabloid tradition

I paid my annual visit to Dulwich College on Monday, to talk to the boys of Year 8 about journalism. They have just done their exams and are being gingerly introduced to the concept of having a career. They seem hazy about exactly which employers are coming to lecture them, but are looking forward to the flatfoot from Dulwich constabulary who's coming in to do drugs, as it were, on Friday morning. (Hang on. Perhaps I, too, was meant to give Year 8 an awful warning against acquiring a pernicious and mood-altering habit – but with any luck they'll never be offered a copy of the Daily Mail by a pusher in the street...)

Anyway, there I was, flicking through the pages of the four main broadsheets and five tabloids with an audience of 86 suspicious 13-year-olds, when I flipped over a page of The Sun and discovered the curvy form of Zoe, 21, from London, with the equivalent of a punnet of strawberries embedded in her crotch. Their noisy appreciation of this often-maligned fruit was enthusiastic and sincere.

Their questions weren't exactly hostile but didn't suggest they regarded the newspapers as the fountain of truth. "Do you get hate mail?" "Has anyone ever actually hit you over something you wrote?" An earnest chap at the front asked: "In what circumstances do you think it's all right to lie in an article?" Even as I verbally whacked him round the head, I was embarrassed to recall a conveniently fluent Old Lady in the Street, whose fervent but fictional "Gawd bless 'em" quotes at a royal wedding were crucial to the story. Others asked, "Do journalists like wars?" (God, yeah) and, "Should young people worry about rumours [of terrorism] in the papers?", to which the answer is: "If only governments worried a little more when it mattered."

But as I danced about and harangued the chatterers and glared at the chronic yawners, I was floored by a watchful boy who asked, all innocence, "Do you consider yourself a celebrity?" Good lord, no, one cries – merely a simple hack who goes to the odd premiere and interviews the odd rock star. Me? Don't be ridiculous. And as I explained, and waved my hands self-deprecatingly, I watched them watching me as I foundered in a sea of my own conceit. A worrying sight, the pubertal smart alec.

Making politics cool

When young, I was always being offered bribes and inducements by book clubs anxious to sign up the illiterate young for £100-worth of classic novels in something called "hand-tooled Skivertex". Along with the cheap initial offer ("Your illusions about Russian women shattered for only £2.95," was the pitch for Anna Karenina), you'd be given a free wall tile or amusing jug, or (in the case of Dostoevsky) a free "religious icon". They were worthless, but you were quite pleased to have them, like the plastic bits of nonsense in cereal packets. Now, I notice, the free giveaway has reached the seraphic world of politics. In Italy, the right-wing Forza Italia party is giving every new member a new electric fan. It's true. Signor Berlusconi is exploiting the current heatwave and offering anyone who joins the party before August a £28 desktop fan as a bare-faced inducement. "We're giving away the chance to subscribe to Italy's leading democratic party and get some relief from the heat," said the Forza's head of spin, Fulvio Martusciello. How inspired these Italians are, how practical, how clever at harnessing the zeitgeist to their own requirements. Can we not follow them? It's not too late for Iain Duncan Smith to offer every new Tory party member a free umbrella, a free jubilee mug and a free "Come on, Henman" flag, is it?

An irresistible offer

The Gallagher brothers from Oasis are having a run-in with the Army, I see. Hundreds of copies of a recent recruitment video, made by the Highlanders regiment in Kenya and featuring lots of brawny squaddies exercising in their fatigues and running around with guns, had to be withdrawn because the regiment had failed to ask the Gallagher brothers for permission to feature two of their hits from the (What's the Story) Morning Glory? album on the soundtrack. Very embarrassing.

But, good grief, what were the Highlanders thinking of, co-opting Liam and Noel G to their recruitment drive? I can't think of two human beings less appropriate to army life, to uniforms and regimental tradition, to concepts of duty and honour and the parade ground. "Wonderwall" may be a good song, but the line, "I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now," doesn't seem a sentiment likely to be shouted in your ear by a whiskery sergeant-major.

The rest of the Oasis songbook is hardly more promising. I suppose "You gotta roll with it, you gotta take your time... don't let anybody get in your way" could be a fair accompaniment to bayonet practice. But "Don't Look Back in Anger" is an absurdly pacifist doctrine in the theatre of modern warfare.

The Army should think again. The first big hit by Alabama 3 ("Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun") would surely be more the ticket...