SOME things in life are really important. There may be war in Iraq, there may be famine in Africa, there may be virus in China, but the bin bags at home are building up.

There cannot be a street in the North-East that does not bear the scars of the Easter Bank Holidays. Even if the huge piles of bin bags have been lifted, there are still sticky trails left by stray yoghurt pots and orange peel as a reminder.

Indeed, some piles are so enormous they have become tourist attractions. Last Thursday in Duke Street, Darlington, there was a chap with a camera taking photographs of the head-high rubbish.

In this country, we no longer observe Christmas or Easter in the way we once did. No longer do we go to church and thank the Lord for all things wise and wonderful.

But we do observe Binbag Day with the utmost reverence. Just like on Christmas Eve when children place their stockings on the end of the bed, so religiously at dusk on Binbag Eve we carefully place our bags outside the back door (in Darlington there is a council-imposed orthodoxy whereby binbags have to be hauled to the kerb outside the front door, but most people live in more civilised places).

Then, in the dead of night, the bin-fairies come and tidy up, leaving only a line of sodden tissues to show the route by which they escaped.

Although Easter is an annual event, it catches us by surprise every year - just like snow in winter. We know there are going to be two Bank Holidays. We know that the bin-fairies are going to bring forward their collection day instead of following their usual Bank Holiday practice of putting it back.

But still it was an immense surprise when the Wednesday before Easter dawned with an unscheduled slamming of garden gates and a cacophonous clatter of cascading bin lids. It heralded the arrival of the bin-fairies 24 hours early.

Pandemonium broke out. People were charging around waving bulging binbags, their dressing gowns - untied in their haste - flapping at their waists to reveal pyjamas that really should be kept for the privacy of the bedroom.

One of the first rules of bringing up children is that you can only ever locate an ice-cream van in the street where it was 30 seconds previously. So it is with dustcarts. People were frantically following the trail of sodden tissues as if they were Sherlock Holmes. They kept stumbling upon fresh clues - "hey, it's last night's chicken carcass, we must be close now" - but to no avail. The dustcart had disappeared, due to return unannounced sometime after the Bank Holiday.

It is this uncertainty that does the most psychological damage. You have no idea when the rotting, stinking pile of garbage at the gate is going to be lifted.

And every cat in the neighbourhood has a smug grin on its face as it hides in the bushes beside the binbags. It affects innocence, but you know that the minute your back is turned, it'll be slashing the bags with its claws, spewing takeaway dishes all over the street.

This mess and worry explains why the Government allows us the fewest number of Bank Holidays in Europe. It is for the good of our health.

We have only eight days off each year; the Germans have nine, the Belgians ten, the Italians 11, the Greeks 12, the French 13 and the Finns a massive 16. These countries must be sky-high in rubbish - or do they have a more efficient way of collecting it?