I am confused about eco-issues. Like you, I have a printer and it needs cartridges. Cartridge World, which recycles them established a local outlet and it is an uncommonly pleasant shop. Their product is cheaper than the grossly inflated prices printer manufacturers charge, and there is a bowl of sweeties on the counter. Also, you get the warm feeling that you are doing a little bit to save the planet. A local supermarket undercut the recycled product and I bought from them. I hate to say it, but it was the green thing to do.

The cartridge goes into the basket along with the potatoes and hard liquor. I do not have to drive round to find a parking space. My city was built by the Romans and 1st Century town planning does not sit well with 21st Century traffic. As Shakespeare nearly wrote, 'Parking is such street sorrow.'

The supermarket buys from China so the cartridges come halfway round the world and, like everything which comes from China, and is sold in supermarkets, the packaging is excessive.

That puts Cartridge World back on top except for the fact I have to drive there.

The reason why I am supposed to be eco-bothered is because my government wants me to be, though I have not built golf courses in deserts. Governments are screwing our minds, they are instilling guilt where none needs to exist. Dear Zeus, I am beginning to sound like a Mississippi survivalist.

I am not suggesting a sinister conspiracy. It is the nature of governments to lag behind social reform, or anything that doesn't involve taxation or winning votes. In the UK, every level of government, from parish to parliament, wants to make us eco-aware and feel guilty.

In my town we have been equipped with wheelie bins and the move is designed to make us feel responsible, or guilty. I know that most of the paper I put into the appropriate bin goes to an incinerator. Look around, how many products made from recycled paper do you see? By now, recycled paper should lead the market, but it does not because most of the paper we carefully set aside goes to an incinerator.

The EU has decided that we must use low-energy light bulbs, and the US government has followed suit. The current tungsten bulb, proposed by Joseph Swan in an academic paper two years before Thomas Edison was born, is easy to dispose of while the low-energy bulbs contain mercury. We will have to buy them but nobody has worked out how to dispose of them.

In my bid to save the planet, I am stocking tungsten bulbs.

Now motor racing has to clean up its act. The sport, in all of its expressions, appears to be spendthrift consumer of energy. Of course it is. Motor sport has always been related to conspicuous consumption. It has always been the playground of the wealthy. Even the cheapest grassroots forms of the sport require a level of disposable income not available to most of the world's population. Motor racing is not for the poor, and it never has been.

It can, however, help everyone, unlike football or golf. Every car now made is a lot more efficient than cars were a few years ago. The cheapest import from South Korea is made to a standard which only Rolls-Royce achieved thirty years ago. Engine management systems which began in F1, have permeated down. What Bosch once made for McLaren's exclusive use is now common currency.