“Daddy!” My son screeches, voice tremulous with excitement. He’s scratching at the dirt with a pointy stick.

“What is it?”

He rushes over, carrying the treasure in upturned hands, beaming. “I don’t know.”

“Ah.” It’s a piece of jagged, rusty old corrugated iron. “Wow. That’s… amazing,” I say.

We take it home and put it on the windowsill. I will wait for my chance, then throw it away.

School is largely to blame for the tatt filling our home. Every piece of class work, every piece of colouring in, every baffling scribble, is sent home for us to “enjoy”. I can’t help feeling this is slightly passive aggressive.

The teachers are saying “We have to smile and nod at this rubbish all flippin’ day long, and they’re not even our children! Now it’s your turn. See how you like it.”

It fills boxes, covers side boards, gathers in corners. The projects and crafts and rainy day crap. Sometimes it feels like the majority of the world’s cardboard, paper and plastic, once perfectly good recycling, is being irrevocably Sellotaped and coloured and painted into objects that are bound inevitably for landfill.

READ MORE: The real tragedy? It wasn't even worth it

The ideas and dreams of our children will last for millennia, flattened between a subterranean mountain of party bag nick-nacks and a poo-roclastic flow of disposable nappies.

Occasionally I snap and rage around the house hurling things into the bin, working as fast as I can before my irrational parenting emotions stop me.

I come across the jagged, dangerous piece of corrugated iron and hold it up triumphantly.

I tell it it’s going into the bin. I take it to the bin.

Then I remember the look on my son's face when he found it.

A titanic internal struggle takes place. Then I put it back on the windowsill.