“If you pass me the bin bags,” says my husband leaning in at the back door, “I’ll do your bins for you.”

I take a deep breath. Keep calm and don’t over-react, says that little voice in my head.

Despite the fact that I am standing at the stove, stirring a casserole, I’m not, in all fairness, chained to it. In fact, I’m not even in charge of it.

I’m just poking about at a stew that he himself made earlier – about three months earlier – and stuck in the freezer.

Together with several other very good dishes. My job here is simply to get the icy bits as small as I can to speed up the heating process. Then I can sit down with the paper.

So I can’t argue that I’m completely downtrodden. No need for inflammatory gestures with Swan Vestas and a couple of 36DDs quite yet.

But still. I’d say that over the course of the 1,755 weeks that we’ve been married – yes, of course I count, doesn’t everyone? – I’ve put the bins out at least 1,700 of those. And I sort out the recycling on a Sunday.

Yet however much I dispose of waste, that does not mean that they are my bins. It’s not a hobby.

I don’t sit around regretting squandering my time on TV and chocolate ice cream when I could have been amassing a novel collection of refuse sacks. I don’t hanker for a career at the civic amenity. I have no bins. And I want no bins. I think technically they probably belong to the council, anyway. I just do domestic chores.

Because I have to. Because if I don’t do them, they won’t get done.

The trouble with things like bins, is they’re pretty invisible.

I don’t mean that they’re so difficult to spot that you’re likely to fall over one coming up the path.

Or that they’re so well camouflaged that bin-men have to stride up and down pavements trying to distinguish them from the red brick garden walls.

No, I mean that nobody notices that you’ve done the bins. So nobody appreciates it.

One minute there are piles of half-eaten food and bits of polythene cascading over the kitchen floor every time you open the cupboard under the sink, and then ta-raah.

The pile of rotting refuse has been replaced by a neat white bag and there’s just the sound of a grumpy woman outside the back door, mumbling to herself as she does something that involves the rustle of plastic and then a dull clunk at the end of it. Magic.

Whereas with other tasks, you get a visible impact.

Cut the hedge, and you can suddenly all see that your garden is actually a lot wider than you remember, and maybe there’s no need to move house after all. Iron the shirts, and you can hang them up neatly and marvel quietly at the deft handiwork that produced cuffs so sharp, collars so straight.

Okay, so you have to guard them to make sure that the men of the house don’t spot them and want to put them on and destroy the fruits of your labour, but it’s almost worth it.

And despite Quentin Crisp’s assertion that if you can hold out long enough without doing housework the dirt doesn’t get any worse, there’s a certain occasional masochistic satisfaction to be had from a sparkling bath or a newly made bed, too.

But bins are different. The only ones who care whether you put the bins out are rats. If you didn’t rigorously reintroduce your bins to the bin men on the designated day, you would soon need to apply for a licence to keep wild animals. And that’s probably even more tedious than seeing to recycling.

“Thanks for that,” I say to my husband, as he carries the bulging bags passed the stove.

“My casserole should be ready for you in ten minutes.”

“Great,” he says, without a trace of irony.

Bless him. He doesn’t even blink.

When it comes to resentment, he’s rubbish.