The word means 'gambol, caper, frisk,' (OED) or, aeons age, a TV kangaroo. Neither of the aforesaid resembles a clunking metal container.
Onwards. Occupation of the same house for more than three decades brings a disgraceful amount of clutter and junk, most of it useless.

Yet each item is thrown out with a sense of anguish.

Might I not just, at some future date, need that broken CD rack, that stool with missing leg, that raggedy piece of carpet?

Agreed, that 25-year-old tin of gloss paint is as dry as the Gobi desert, but could there not be, beneath that crust, just a vestige of liquid? OK, that torch has no batteries and is rustier than the Angel of the North, but maybe at some future date......?

I adopt an unsentimental approach. Out they go, into the skip.

Here's a small sample from the cupboard under the stairs.... two flymos with missing parts, a pasting table, a wicker basket, three plant pots, a roll of underlay, a walking boot, a plastic sheet, a sandwich board, a bucket and spade, mouldy paperbacks, coconut matting, a half bag of compost, old vinyl, a broken table lamp, a sandwich board, stiff brushes, rusty nails, solidified Polyfilla, a rawlplug, a video player, a ripped T-shirt, a bobble hat, plugless wire, wireless plugs, a thousand plastic bags.

Eventually the cupboard is clear. Two days later it is already beginning to attract new items of junk – more plastic buckets and spades, a biscuit tin, three tupperware containers – the process is unstoppable.

Some items are too noble to suffer the skip. In the loft I discover two wood-panelled speakers, still working, yet unfashionably bulky. I stick a post-it note with the words 'Working OK' on each speaker and put them out by the back gate.

Two hours later, they are gone, and I am reconnected with that strange deity, The God of the Back Lane.

I say 'God' though the deity could be a Goddess, but let's keep it simple. The God is appeased by the regular offering up of sacrifices.

These it claims swiftly silently, and invisibly. He is an unsung God because his habitat is deeply unfashionable.

Back lanes are the neglected, unlovely, unnoticed part of urban life.

Back lanes never feature in tourist brochures, architects spend little time thinking of their design, painters rarely set up their easels in them (Charlie Rogers, the Gateshead painter is an exception).

Terrace householders, who keep their house fronts bright with fresh paint, often neglect the back.

The yard gate, which is usually numberless, is often flaky and tired looking.

Back lanes are like the back of a stage set – not expected to be seen by the public at large. They are defined by two rows of house rear ends mooning across at one another.

In pre-wheelie bin days you would occasionally hear a clatter of dustbins, or ragamuffins would kick a half-deflated football around the evenings long. You can still hear lonely late-night warbling of a swaying drunk on his uncertain return home.

I once lay down, unnoticed, in a back lane in similar state for a good 40 minutes at 2am.

Back lanes are very northern. Visitors to Virginia Water would have no expectation of seeing one.

It was once a convention that cars were not parked in back lanes, (which is how washing could be strung out across them) though, as the total overall length of cars now exceeds the overall length of pavement parking available, the convention is being abused.

Visitors now are the flashing wheelie bin lorries. These give the bins their weekly tea dance treat, the bin men waltzing them up and down, depositing them far from their own gate.

Meantime, in the front street, the skip is attracting visitors, and beginning to empty of its own accord. I chat with the rummagers, all unconsciously good and worthy recyclers.

Such activities are part of a twilight culture that rarely shows up on official GNP figures. Here, one person's rubbish is another person's must-have, a curiosity I realise, that elsewhere propels the entire momentum of car boot sales.

PETER MORTIMER