There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline. Pete May
steel-rimmed glasses and in his Guardian column regularly attacks corporate eco-vandalism and climate change doubters.
He isn’t exactly a football fan though. He says he went to an England game at Wembley once and it epitomised everything he disliked about xenophobia and nationalism. At one post-Frisbee picnic we discuss TV. George says there’s so much he can do without watching TV. He could write a column every day, there are so many issues to research. He claims that TV is like a boxed fire in the living room. Humans used to tell stories around the campfire but now that oral tradition has been lost.
One of George’s best mates is Oliver. He comes from a strong environmental background – his dad advised Mrs Thatcher on the environment. Oliver is an endearing eco-warrior, a friendly, large-framed man with wild red hair and permanent stubble on his chin. He’s a lovely geezer, Nicola really likes him, but like most Greens he’s completely unaware how eco-eccentric his lifestyle can appear to a mere civilian.
He’s the only man I’ve ever met who wears a pouch around his waist, in which he keeps his cash. He lives in a house by the river and just as in Nicola’s flat, the walls are covered in masks from indigenous peoples he’s visited around the world. His front room is one giant office, covered in tottering towers of eco-faxes.
Oliver’s toilet has pieces of newspaper instead of loo roll, something I haven’t seen since watching Steptoe and Son. I admire his commitment, but surely this is taking paper saving to an unacceptable extreme. As we might put it at Loaded, it’s a bunch of (sore) arse.
Some of Nicola’s Green friends take their ‘back to nature’ beliefs to unusual extremes. Even she laughs about the time one of them answered the door wearing shorts and holding a sprig of comfrey, his legs smeared in goose fat. He’d bruised his leg hedge-laying, he explained matter-of-factly. Goose fat and comfrey was apparently the traditional method of healing bruises. He then wrapped the comfrey leaves around his goose fat-covered leg and secured it with a red bandanna. Normal behaviour to a Green.
Another of her eco-pals, George Marshall, wears a battered trilby and long overcoat, speaks in clipped received pronunciation, and is trying to turn his former council house into a carbon-neutral home. He’s another fine eco-eccentric and a delightfully non-PC Green, a man always prepared to talk about his search for a suitable eco-babe (eventually ended after meeting his wife while working for the Rainforest Foundation in New York) as well as the imminent disaster awaiting Bangladesh when the sea levels rise.
He is typical of the people in Nicola’s world. Everyone is either writing about GM foods or making programmes for Costing The Earth on Radio 4. Nicola’s mate Matthew Wenban-Smith works for the FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council. He’s a nice guy, although after a few drinks I keep thinking of him as Whambam Smith. Matthew says he can trace the Wenban-Smiths back to medieval times. Nicola says she can trace her family back to 1066. I can trace my family back to 1966.
Nicola met Debs and Thomas through her writing group. Thomas edits a subversive video news series called Undercurrents and is George Monbiot’s cousin. Undercurrents contains numerous reports from eco-protestors around the world, including one memorable piece on Carmageddon, where a group of crusties take a fleet of old cars to Scotland and bury them vertically to form a modern version of Stonehenge. Thomas’s wife Debs is American, full of energy and novel ideas, and is the only person I know who keeps a writer’s journal, although, astonishingly, she does have to ask who Eric Cantona is during one discussion.
At least Nicola has a sense of humour about Greens like the media-friendly Jonathon Porritt, head of Forum for the Future, coming from toff backgrounds. ‘Of course they can cope with turning the heating off and wearing an extra jumper, they’re used to it in their stately homes,’ she jokes.
I discover just how different the Oxford Greens are to my usual acquaintances at a dinner party one night. I play Essex Man to their Ethics Men. Everyone speaks of PNG (Papua New Guinea to the uninitiated) as if it’s a suburb of Oxford. The après lentil-bake conversation moves on to private schools and bizarre initiation rituals. One of our party mentions something involving a cardboard box and a banana. When my turn for an anecdote comes I have to confess that actually my school didn’t have an initiation ritual. George Monbiot is fiercely anti-public school and decries them for producing ‘emotionally stunted’ members of the ruling class.
‘That’s not true,’ says Nicola. ‘Pete’s emotionally stunted and he went to a comprehensive.’
‘I’m not emotionally stunted!’ I complain. ‘I’d probably cry if West Ham won the league.’
‘See what I mean?’ she smirks.
The revelations about my state school education cause some interest. Suddenly I’m studied with as much interest as if I was an indigenous person from some obscure tribe; which in a way I suppose I am.
Back in London I sit with my mate John, drinking pints of real ale in Borough High Street. He’s the Terry Collier to my Bob Ferris. We discuss my fears that maybe the Greens are just too scared to be Tories. Was it easier to be a Green and not really upset anyone? What if Nicola demands that I wear a Barbour jacket? Or grow dreadlocks? But maybe that’s too harsh. The Oxford Greens seem sincere enough, even if their parents are loaded. But still, their lifestyle seems extreme. John and I think that electing a radical Labour government will end all our problems, especially after our third pint. Surely we can’t go back to a pre-industrial world? And global warming hasn’t yet been proved beyond all doubt.
Green puritans are new to me. They grow organic vegetables on allotments, refuse to shop in supermarkets, and visit white people with dreadlocks at places called Tinker’s Bubble. They advocate urinating on garden plants to encourage growth. They dress in waistcoats. They are different from you and me.
Recently I’d read a piece by Matthew Parris claiming that Greens were simply part of the natural human tendency to always prophecy that the ‘end of the world is nigh’. Maybe he’s right. Would the Green movement go the way of CND in the eighties? We were all terrified of global annihilation, we went on marches to Trafalgar Square in our thousands, but the Cold War ended and it never happened. But what if they’re right? What if my loo paper is responsible for killing the planet? But I have other things to worry about. It’s time to meet Nicola’s parents.
They live in Hertfordshire, in the country, and I find the whole thought of visiting them terrifying. We’re from such different worlds. Nicola boarded at a girls’ school where they even had lessons in table manners. She explained you had to talk to the person on your left first, over the starters and then the person on the right during the main course. Or was it the other way round? My school merely insisted you didn’t throw food at your peers.
Maybe that’s why our ambitions differ. Us comprehensive types are content to be earning enough to buy the odd CD by a new band called Oasis who want to live forever; Nicola is constantly traumatised that she hasn’t become the head of the United Nations. Her personality is a strange mix of confidence and insecurity; she wakes early in the morning, when I’m half asleep, wondering if her novel will be good enough, can she make it as an environmentalist, should she go back to the Solomons to stop the logging companies, and how can she halt global warming?
But when I do finally visit her parents there’s no horsewhipping from her old-Etonian dad, despite my being a property-less, car-less man who thinks that ‘In the City’ is a single by the Jam rather than a description of a job. Their house has five bedrooms and a swimming pool, but it’s not the stately home I feared, even if there are numerous portraits pointing to a grander past. Some of Nicola’s ancestors did own large chunks of Bath, but in true Loaded style, they managed to lose most of the dosh through high living, drinking, gambling and death duties.
Her dad Angus is having chemotherapy for cancer, and in the circumstances he’s friendlier than I ever imagined he’d be to a football fan frolicking with his daughter. I’m beginning to see where she gets some of her quirkiness. Angus owns a waxworks in York and used to own a Dracula Museum in Whitby. He shows me his coppicing in the family wood and the horses in the top paddock. The only land I held in stewardship is the window box Nicola had installed