There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline. Pete May
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Published in 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Text copyright © Pete May 2008
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Source ISBN 9780007264315
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007282104
Version: 2015-01-08
For NLB – who changed my climate
A Hippo is an inflatable plastic bag that is placed inside a toilet’s cistern to conserve water.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Don’t Ever Date an Eco-Bunny
Chapter 2 I Guess We’ll Always Have Powys
Chapter 5 That’s Yer Allotment
Chapter 9 Lord of the Fruit Flies
Chapter 12 Reclutter Your Life
Chapter 14 It’s a Nice Day for a Green Wedding
Postscript The Importance of Being Earnest
The last months of 1993 are for me a kind of male nirvana. My short-life flat in Elephant and Castle certainly smells like team spirit. Shin pads drying above the gas fire, footie shorts on the back of the kitchen chair. My ideal weekend starts with Friday night TV and the blokeish repartee of Have I Got News For You and Fantasy Football. Saturday it’s down the Hammers, Match of the Day in the evening and on Sunday, five-a-side beneath the Westway.
Division One has become the Premiership and Sky has begun to televise live matches on a Sunday, ideal for a post-game pint in the boozer. It is possible to spend an entire weekend watching and playing football. It feels a bit like being Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Arthur couldn’t believe that after post-war austerity he could now drink endless pints of beer and mugs of tea and knock off a married bird; here in Elephant I can’t believe there’s football almost every day on the telly.
By day I’m ‘Sidelines’, the gossip columnist for Time Out magazine