There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline. Pete May
asthma-inducing soup of smog seemed more enticing. Nicola will surely dump me soon; my lack of commitment, and trousers, must be showing.
The evening continues. We cook rice and stir-fry. That’s the other thing about Greens. They don’t eat enough junk food. The house is stocked with enough pulses and grains to feed a small nation. A return to the composting loo looms and this time I may have to use it.
After dinner we chill, in every sense, over glasses of red wine. Someone asks about my work in London. Chris looks genuinely surprised that someone can earn a living from reviewing Doctor Who videos and writing about football, when there’s global warming and deforestation to be fought. The fact that I’ve also just completed co-writing The Lad Done Bad, a book on footballers behaving badly, doesn’t make my case any more convincing. He’s creating certified sustainable energy sources, while I’m watching TV and reading the Sun.
‘I know it’s not saving the planet, or saving trees or Nigerians from exploitation by multinational oil companies, but there’s a talent in writing about cult TV in a humorous fashion,’ I plead, warmed a little by several glasses of wine, ‘Life is made up of pointless but brilliant memories of trivia. That’s what makes it great, and I get free videos!’
‘He is amusing sometimes,’ admits Nicola as if she’s discussing an aberrant pony she’s about to sell. I still feel a little like a pornographer at an Andrea Dworkin lecture.
Finally, after twenty-four hours of bowel restraint, I have to use the compost loo. Resistance is useless. I feel like Joe Simpson’s companion cutting the rope in Touching the Void. Relief… The lavatorial deed is done. Nothing leaps out of the loo to attack me. I try to scatter the sawdust without looking down. If nothing else, my turds are now mingling with those of some of the finest minds in the environmental movement.
There’s no chance of watching Match of the Day, because Chris and Jane’s TV can only get one wobbly channel and in any case they only use the TV for videos. When the TV detector van man called they proudly told him that they’re among the few people in Britain who don’t have to pay for a TV licence, because they genuinely don’t use it except for watching videos.
And so it’s a big night in watching the fire. Eventually we retreat upstairs to the bedroom. Nicola is unimpressed with my lack of eco-ardour and tells me so. I admit it. I’m not sure that this relationship is, as they say, sustainable, and nor is she. There’s only one place to go.
The fairy lights sparkle in our tree-bed. We snuggle together for warmth beneath the blankets and duvets, still wearing our thermal underwear. Wind whistles through a broken windowpane. A spider crawls across the wall. The tarpaulin over the rafters flutters in the wind.
Turning towards Nicola, I mumble, ‘I guess we’ll always have Powys.’
There’s trouble when we return to London.
‘You were pathetic, a bit of cold never did anyone any harm.’
‘I’m sorry, Nicola. I was exhausted, I’ve been trying to write a book to a deadline. They are good people. But it was the three pairs of trousers… I guess I’m just the urban spaceman, baby. I can’t cope with somewhere where it’s 27 miles to get a newspaper.’
‘And we don’t go away enough.’
‘What?’
‘We don’t go away enough!’
‘Are you joking? You’re always arranging things. Oh no, we haven’t been anywhere this year apart from Oxford, London, Wales, Dinan, Penzance, Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, King’s Lynn, the Lake District, Edinburgh, York, Glasgow and about fifty other places!’
‘But it’s me who has to do the organising…’
‘I would, it’s just that you organise everything first!’
I write for Loaded. So it’s natural to be a loafer. But maybe she’s right. Her life might be driven, mine is PR-driven. When I sit at home PRs ring up at short notice and within hours or days I’m at the theatre, a launch or on a press trip to Pisa. Things just happen.
‘And you organise your life around football!’
That’s it. She’s gone too far, I can feel my rage building.
‘Do you know how difficult it is to organise your life around football matches?’ I holler dramatically. ‘Do you know how difficult it is when Sky keeps altering the dates and kick-off times? Do you know how hard it is to add extra Coca-Cola Cup ties to the existing home fixtures, and how the FA Cup draw isn’t made until January and how you have to make allowances for replays and possible away trips and the fact you might enjoy a bit of groundhopping and pencil in the FA Cup Final and the Coca-Cola Cup Final just in case and allow for postponements because of inclement weather… careful, Nicola you’re smiling.’
‘Have you ever thought about how much carbon you use travelling to football?’
‘I use the tube, mainly. Well, unless we get into Europe and then there might have to be some flights. Still, we can do a deal. If you agree to tolerate football I’ll try to be Greener.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. And I’ve organised a special trip for you tonight, all the way up the stairs to the bedroom. I’m afraid there are no fairy lights on the bed yet. But it is relatively warm… and we do have a roof.’
And so we carry on our relationship between London and Oxford through 1995. Nicola phones at unearthly hours like seven in the morning to say that the fritillaries in the meadows are looking beautiful in the mist. She busies herself working with the Forest Management Foundation, sending endless faxes to the Solomons and Papua New Guinea, going to meetings, freelancing and entering a series of essay-writing competitions. She tries to persuade me to enter a few, but the odds are so slim it hardly seems worthwhile. And now I’m taking part in a radical Green counter-offensive. We’re on St George’s Hill being buzzed by a low-flying police helicopter. Nicola wanted me to be Greener, so now I’m on the front line, dodging golf balls and choppers. It’s partly the fault of Billy Bragg. He wrote a song called ‘World Turned Upside Down’ in which he told us that in 1649 on St George’s Hill the Diggers attempted to cultivate unfilled land before the army came to cut them down, or something like that. And if Billy wrote a song about it then it must have some rock ‘n’roll credibility and so I’m there with an elite force of Greens.
The Diggers were led by Gerrard Winstanley, a religious geezer who thought that Jesus Christ was the head Leveller and that the Church should adhere to all that ‘The meek shall inherit the Earth’ stuff. So now the Oxford environmentalists are returning to the site of the Diggers’ original action, attempting to plant organic vegetables on what is now an exclusive housing estate and private golf club in Surrey.
I’m becoming more familiar with changing eco-fashions. In the sixties and seventies it was all Cat Stevens’s ‘Where Do The Children Play’ and communes and squats and copies of Small is Beautiful, Gaia and Silent Spring. Back in the late 1980s everyone was worried about the hole in the ozone layer and CFCs in fridges. The nineties has seen attacks on road building and now it’s hip to do guerilla gardening. A group called Earth First is keen on digging up patches of motorways and putting plants on them. Now we’re all becoming modern-day Diggers. When I visited Australia, a root was a euphemism for sex, not something you stuck in the ground. Now I’m stuck in some sort of industrial evolution. We’re leaving the city to reclaim our jobs in the fields. Not that I’m worried about my ability to stick an onion into the ground; just the fact that I might soon be buying Farmers Weekly instead of Q.
A dozen or so Greens, armed with trowels and plants, manage to enter the golf club’s private road without too much difficulty. Nicola is wearing a huge scarf and Peruvian hat, with long dangly bits drawn down over her ears, and is carrying a small garden fork. I’m reminded of the Knights Who Say Ni! in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and their demands for a shrubbery. Equipped for horticultural mayhem, we’d be just the people to steal it for them.