Читать книгу There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline - Pete May - Страница 7
ОглавлениеThe 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 and you’ll always find me out to launch. The invites come from flirtatious PRs and I’m happy to trek to various revamped warehouses and bars all over London in search of a story. CDs, videos, books, T-shirts, computers and numerous over-packaged consumer durables are relentlessly promoted over free beer, Chardonnay and nibbly things served by waitresses in black and white uniforms. My flat is full of freebies. And through Time Out I get to review every new Doctor Who video. My collection of fifty Whovian titles is filed chronologically in a new video stand I’ve just purchased from the Virgin Megastore.
James Brown and Tim Southwell are plotting a new men’s magazine to be called Loaded and I’m called in for consultation meetings and subbing shifts. With my pals Denis and Andrew I’m attempting to sell to publishers a book idea called The Lad Done Bad, detailing sex, sleaze and scandal in football. We think it perfectly captures the Zeitgeist, to use the current buzz word so beloved by media-prats wearing trendy narrow glasses.
There’s regular work writing the London Spy column in Midweek magazine, numerous features to be written about fat balding blokes playing for Sunday league football clubs in FC, a magazine that specialises in Sunday league football, and my column in the West Ham fanzine On A Mission From God – all enough to keep me in Dr Martens shoes, Gap chinos and a navy-blue bomber jacket with orange lining. Another factor enhancing my writing prospects is that everyone in the media is now affecting an Essex accent; only I don’t have to, because I’m the real thing.
Much of the 1980s and early 1990s were spent in a peripatetic tour of London, among dodgy gaffs and even dodgier landlords at Turnpike Lane, West Kensington, Hammersmith, Parsons Green, Fulham Broadway, Camberwell, Neasden, Westbourne Park, Victoria and now Elephant and Castle. I’ve reached my thirties without owning a home or getting coupled up and my parents are probably convinced that in London I lead a secret life of the Julian Clary kind. They’re probably already saying to their neighbours, ‘It’s funny how he never married’.
They’re retired and living up in Norfolk now. When I ask my dad, a former tenant farmer who received a nice little earner when the M25 sliced through his farm, why he’s still worried about the price of a pint he replies, ‘But I’m a cattle dealer!’. My own finances, based mainly on passing large sums of cash to satellite dish, CD and VHS video manufacturers plus brewers and curry houses, must be a deep disappointment to him.
Still, there’s been a good run of form with women recently, even if they do tend to wash and go with the regularity of West Ham signing journeymen strikers. To my great joy, women in their thirties are suddenly much less choosy who they go out with. My back pages from the nineties contain a probation officer with two children, a teacher, a charity worker, and a literary bird with a daughter. Nothing that’s got beyond mid-table mediocrity or flirting around the edges of Europe, but there’s always another pub and party, another can of overpriced Stella Artois, or another freelance sub to pursue.
As Billy Joel might have put it, I’m living in a white bread world. A downtown guy waiting for an uptown girl, who then usually goes off with some poncy TV person with their own car. But then, my flat isn’t exactly a GQ or Arena-style pulling pad; it’s more Men Behaving Badly.
My life is not all work and socialising in London. I’ve been on the road with Jack Kerouac twice in recent years. Travel is the right of my generation. I retreated to Australia and New Zealand for lengthy periods in 1989 and 1992. Flying is exciting and helps create the illusion that I’m the last of Morrissey’s famous international playboys. Internal flights, flights over Ayers Rock, flights to the top of Mount Cook, the more the better. The backpacker generation wanted to booze their way around the world; I’d travelled twelve thousand miles to discover that Kings Cross was in Sydney and full of English people. But it didn’t matter; I’d fallen into spinifex at Ayers Rock with a woman from Camden and snogged a Surrey girl on Sydney Harbour Bridge. Beer, CDs, videos, women, freebies, flights, football – the world is truly my lobster.
But then something happens which might just mark the end of my carefree, live-for-today-for-tomorrow-may-never-come existence. I meet a girl. Another of my jobs sees me sub-editing two days a week at the New Statesman. It’s a boozy sort of place, with long pub meetings preceding the days before it becomes the Blairite house journal. Editor Steve Platt is a mate of mine from Midweek days and a big Port Vale fan.
Prime Minister John Major is suing the Statesman because the mag has written about rumours he’s had an affair with a cook. Major claims the magazine was not correct about this matter. Years later we’d discover that he had, in fact, been rogering Edwina Currie, an image that still makes most people of a certain age feel queasy. The girl I meet is fund-raising to help our case. Nicola organises lunches among Lefty types to raise money and stop the magazine being bankrupted by this pernicious prosecution.
Nicola isn’t my usual sort of babe. She cycles to work and wears an exhaust-stained Gore-Tex jacket, a peculiarly ethnic brown waistcoat covered in reindeers and snowdrop patterns, black drainpipe trousers and scuffed Kickers. It’s hard to tell her form, if any, under the packaging. She has Ben Elton-style big brown glasses and twiddles her dark hair as she speaks. Linda the chief sub says that Nicola likes me.
Our eyes meet over my red pen and a page proof of a Ken Livingstone article. Her accent is BBC toned down to lefty Estuary football-speak for my benefit. We chat by the juddering old filter coffee machine in the utility room. For the previous two years Nicola has been working as a VSO volunteer in the Solomon Islands. She’s come home skint and says she wants to be an environmental writer and is taking an MSc in Environmental Management. Despite having no idea what this is, I try to sound impressed. A carbon footprint is something my old manual typewriter used to leave, and the closest I’ve come to recycling is trying to go out with someone else’s girlfriend.
But Nicola does have something. Will she be interested in the Elephant man, though? It’s worth a try. Having at times dated Red Wedgers, social workers, Labour supporters, Socialist Workers and women in black polo-neck jumpers, an environmentalist will surely be easy to cope with.
Several months after that first meeting we go on our first sort-of-date. Well it might be a date, or it could just be a friend asking another friend to watch a football match. That’s my reasoning, just in case she has no interest in penetrating my ozone layer and it all becomes embarrassing. Nicola has read Nick Hornby’s best-seller Fever Pitch and is now interested in football, she keeps telling me in the Statesman’s utility room. She’s even seen Arsenal play; she lives in Highbury, close to the ground. The new middle-class interest in football is all a little bemusing to me, having spent years trying not to mention the sport in intelligent circles or in front of women, because they treated football fans like some sort of rabid, racist sub-species. Still, why not use this new-found love of When Saturday Comes and soccerati writers…
My photographer mate Dave Kampfner has invited a group of mates over to watch the Holland v England World Cup qualifying match. Dave accuses me, probably quite accurately, of ‘always sniffing around Lefty women’, usually with various degrees of distress. But as Dave and myself know, concerned, caring women are often extremely attractive and up for a raunch-fest with downwardly mobile writers too. And in 1993 you don’t get too many babes at Young Conservative meetings.
‘Is Wrighty going to play? You can see at Arsenal that he’s so much quicker than the other players,’ says Nicola as we open pre-match cans of designer lager.
‘I think Taylor should play him. But as long as Carlton Palmer doesn’t play I’ll be happy,’ I reply, ruminating upon Taylor’s turnips, as the Sun has dubbed his side. Football coverage was becoming much more fanzine-like in its blokey humour. When England had lost to Sweden, the Sun came up with the unforgettable headline of ‘Swedes 2 Turnips 1’.
It all goes wrong. England hits the post, then Ronald Koeman brings down David Platt but the referee doesn’t send him off. Graham Taylor is haranguing the referee in the style of a very irate grocery shop owner. ‘Taylor’s lost it,’ says Nicola. Correctly ascertaining that Taylor ‘had lost it’ impresses me. However, she does insist on referring to the England players’ kits as ‘uniforms’. Deflated by a familiar England defeat we take the Tube back and depart for our separate lines, still unsure if we’re friends or potential lovers.
When we next meet Nicola takes a Taylor-esque route one approach. She phones me up and suggests we meet in Pizza Express at the Angel. That morning Nicola had watched the New Statesman versus VSO match at Regent’s Park, a game she organised through her contacts at the volunteer service. Clearly she’s been impressed by the firm man-to-man marking job I performed on her mate Morgan, a Carlisle United fanatic who was in the Solomons with her.
I haven’t followed up the first date as yet. There’s also a charity worker in Brixton I’ve been dating, and it’s all too tiring doing Time Out shifts seeking stories to fill the diary page and there are just so many football matches to fit in. But having just been dumped by Brixton woman (probably for watching Match of the Day during a romantic mini-break in Shropshire) Nicola’s call is a boost.
Over dinner Nicola tells me about her plans to move north, to stay with friends in Yorkshire for a couple of months, so that she can finally get down to writing a novel based on her volunteer work in the Solomons. I volunteer the story that after a number of failed liaisons, I’m not looking to go out with anyone at the moment. I’m thinking of taking time off from women and devoting more waking hours to football. All in a faltering, commitment-phobic fashion. This doesn’t seem to bother her, which is promising.
After a nervous pizza date we end up taking a taxi to her flat in Highbury. Result. Up the tattered carpet on the stairs towards the top floor. Only inside her flat, there appears to be no heating. Maybe her boiler has broken down. There’s a bike on the landing surrounded by helmets and luminous sashes. The kitchen has a copy of Gaia by James Lovelock on the chopping board. A huge edifice constructed from plastic bags full of wine bottles and old Guardians is dumped on the floor. It resembles my flat, with its empty bottles, piles of crumbling newsprint and crumpled beer cans. But hers haven’t just been tossed aside. They’re apparently going to be taken to the recycling bins. The walls on the stairs are covered in hunting prints and a display of ethnic masks from various obscure parts of the globe.
It’s a little disturbing to spot several ring binders bulging with stuff on European environmental law by her bed. But after a bottle of Chardonnay my main area of reflection is based on the fact that here is an attractive woman who wants to sleep with embryonic Loaded man. Do I not like that.
The next morning we kiss goodbye with affection as I try to memorise her instructions on how to get to Drayton Park station. I’m due at the Loaded office to work on a dummy issue. And for some reason Nicola has a flower behind her ear.
‘Pete, you remind me of my horse,’ she says at her door.
‘What, a stallion?’ I ask hopefully.
‘No, my old horse Cass, she had a face like yours. And she was calm, with big teeth, creaking joints, a floppy lower lip…’
‘Is this a compliment?’
‘Of course it is. I’ve had horses all my life. And I used to work for Horse & Hound.’
‘Is that how you know so much about IPC?’
‘Yeah, I was in that tower block for years, long before Loaded. Then I went to the Solomons and everything changed.’
On board the train I indulge in that self-satisfied, knowing sensation that I’ve bedded a new woman in a new part of town while everyone else is reading their morning papers. I’m feeling groovier than Paul Simon. But as the stations pass I remember that she’s going away and though last night might be a beginning it’s looking more likely to be the end. It’s never going to work with her writing her saving-the-planet novel on a mist-shrouded moor in Yorkshire and me down here in London living the Loaded life, now is it? And surely I’ve given up on girlfriends, haven’t I? Haven’t I?
Two days later there’s one further furtive assignation over lunch at the Statesman and a snog in Hoxton Square, which we hope that Linda the chief sub and Nyta the features writer who suspects something won’t see. Two days later Nicola decamps to Yorkshire, just like a latter-day Sally Bowles.
Surprisingly, I find myself thinking of her at unguarded moments, such as the ads break when the Sky game is on. But she writes to me. A good sign, from someone I’m not involved with. Long stream-of-consciousness letters that make me laugh. ‘Oh my God, you’re not going to believe this, I went to use a duster and I discovered it’s a fox’s brush!’ she writes in a quick scrawl that seems to sum up the speed of her thoughts.
Details emerges about the family she’s staying with. Fleur is the granddaughter of a legendary Conservative Cabinet minister and her husband is master of hounds in the local hunt. All non-PC enough to get us both excommunicated from the New Statesman.
After a fortnight she returns to London for a long weekend because she’s attending a party in Kemble, which I’d always thought was a planet on Doctor Who. And she wants me to come too. I’m imagining cans of lager and a party tape.
As the train shuffles through the Gloucestershire countryside the market towns become leafier and more prosperous. We take a minicab from Kemble station for several miles down country lanes and emerge at a large detached house with stables.
Nicola then tells me that her mate Diana is in fact a Lady. Not the Lady Diana, but still a genuine Lady. She seems friendly in an earthy, county-ish way and at least doesn’t send me round to the tradesman’s entrance. Nicola tells me she used to go to school with her.
We are shown to our room and later emerge for dinner in the Aga-fired kitchen. Some of the other guests have arrived. Women in Puffa jackets and chaps called Johno.
‘Nicola I’ve got nothing in common with these people,’ I blurt as we have a moment’s respite in our bedroom full of crisp white linen.
‘Nonsense, they’re too polite to be rude to you. Just be yourself and tell them you’re a writer.’
Maybe she’s right. The kitchen is homely, there’s a dish called kedgeree that’s good, although I furtively have to observe the other guests to make sure which knife and fork you use, as there’s enough cutlery on the table to feed the Third World. Everyone tries to be friendly. But conversations tend to end once Nicola refers to me as a football journalist. There are several men here, all apparently in the Army and they’re all, of course, fans of rugger. And I’m the man who arrived wearing a navy-blue bomber jacket with an orange lining.
I’m not the only one struggling though. One of the guests has brought a dog with her and it’s yapping away by the table.
‘What an annoying dog, why don’t you have it shot!’ says Nicola politely to its owner. ‘Oh sorry, sometimes I speak without thinking,’ she giggles, as there’s a bemused silence. Is she rude, mad or just drunk on champagne? I realise I find her fascinating. Strange, different and horribly fascinating. But what am I doing here with these people, with her? Dinner over, we collapse into the fine linen and it all feels very Brideshead Revisited. Surely our relationship will end soon. We come from different classes. I’m not posh enough for her. She’s living all over the country. And I appear to be playing the Mellors to her Lady Chatterley. Where can this possibly be going, and do I want to be on this journey anyway?
The next day we get a lift with Lady Diana’s husband Tim, a man of typically English diffidence, who drives us to the station in a horsebox. It’s the first time I’ve ever used such a mode of transport. It feels like being Harvey Smith. I find myself rather enjoying it all. Horses, dogs, posh girls. And then it’s back on the train to London covered in straw.
Once I’m back on the city streets I realise I’m not getting that usual ‘back home’ feeling. Something has changed. I know things are different, because although I’m back in my world, I find myself thinking about Nicola’s.
After several weeks at the Yorkshire farmhouse, Nicola returns to London and announces that she’s renting out her flat in Highbury and moving to Oxford. Why? Because it’s the epicentre of the Green movement. Her plans change more often than Graham Taylor’s formations.
We watch Four Weddings and a Funeral, a British film that’s becoming a huge hit. Hugh Grant is brilliant as the diffident, very English, Charles. I tell Nicola that I once met Hugh, when I was interviewing his girlfriend, actress Elizabeth Hurley round at their Earl’s Court flat. In fact Loaded has just found some very tasty shots of Liz in lingerie for the first issue, but best not mention that.
When Hugh’s rushing to beat the alarm clock in the first scene it reminds me of life with Nicola, always dashing to make a train or appointment in the mornings. She cries at the end of the film, and indeed during it when W H Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’ poem is read out at Gareth’s funeral. She’s a strange mixture of earnest Green and utterly sentimental romantic. And where does she feature in my life? Is she Andie MacDowell’s Carrie, Vomiting Veronica or Duckface? Will we one day agree not to get married? I realise, with a mounting sense of terror, that I’m thinking about getting married. Or at least, about the possibility that we might not get married. Why am I even thinking this?
Nicola is no rock chick. I try to play her some of my CDs but her interest in music appears to have ended when she left York University in the early eighties, when she did at least like ‘Soul Mining’ by The The. She likes reggae and Lucky Dube in particular, because he was played all the time in the Solomon Islands. But she covers her ears when I play early Clash and Buzzcocks to her. She says she can see why Joy Division’s Ian Curtis killed himself because they were so bloody awful to listen to. She hates the mournful dirge of REM and thinks Radiohead’s Thom Yorke should just cheer up, stop whining and get a girlfriend.
I am slightly surprised, but pleased, to discover that I have got myself a girlfriend. Loaded lad has fallen for posh eco-bunny. By the spring of 1994 I’m helping my peripatetic girlfriend move her possessions via the Oxford Tube, the hourly coach service that runs between Oxford and London. As we leave her flat she turns out the pockets of her exhaust-stained Gore-Tex jacket, looking for her tube pass. Inside are crumpled receipts, bank statements, bus tickets, an apple core, some conkers and a hastily-scrawled address. We race across London and she insists we call at the home of Gareth, a freelance writer for the New Statesman. She emerges from his doorway with a black bucket full of water. I glimpse inside the bucket and take a step back.
‘What the hell is that!’ I exclaim.
‘It’s Terra.’
‘It’s a bloody great big monster!’
‘No it isn’t. He’s lovely. Gareth’s going to work for the Daily Star in Lebanon [no, not the sleazy British paper] so Terra’s going to come and live with me.’
Inside the bucket a terrapin is splashing around, trying to scale the shiny plastic walls. Perhaps it is all virtual reality. No, it’s still there.
‘We’re taking that to Oxford? Nicola, you’re wearing green Wellington boots and carrying a bucket with a terrapin in it. Oh, and your pockets are full of conkers. Have you ever thought you might be eccentric?’
We board the coach with the bucket veiled by her coat. Is what we are doing legal? Somehow we survive the two-and-a-half hour coach journey with a bucket at our feet containing an irate terrapin. If he’d escaped and savaged the driver it might have caused one of the M4’s worst-ever disasters.
She carries the bucket down a side street while I follow with her bags like a faithful retainer. Her new home is in her friend’s mum’s house, situated by the River Cherwell. She’s renting a small room with a damp shower area, plus a living room with French windows, several ancient armchairs and a pleasing air of Oxford donnishness. Terra the terrapin is housed in a borrowed fish tank, although I’m all for putting him in the Cherwell and never mind the ecology.
As spring passes into summer, we spend long weekends here by the river. We go to see the film Shadowlands, the film about C S Lewis and his doomed lover Joy Gresham, which is set in Oxford. There’s not much sex in it though. And Forrest Gump, where Nicola cries five times, and it’s really embarrassing. Blokes don’t cry unless their team wins the League or gets relegated. Why are women so susceptible to the fact that life is like a box of chocolates?
We visit tea rooms, saunter around the ancient colleges, and gaze at artefacts from the South Pacific in the Pitt Rivers museum. We spend a dreamy summer picnicking by the River Isis watching punters wobble their way along the water and stopping for real ale in bucolic pubs. If you travel far enough you can even catch Sky in some of the less cerebral boozers. ‘Love Is All Around’ by Wet Wet Wet, the theme song from Four Weddings and a Funeral, is on all the juke boxes. And maybe it is in the air for us too. The man who wrote the original hit for The Troggs, Reg Presley, now spends his time looking for evidence of aliens making crop circles. I’m quite surprised he isn’t a mate of Nicola’s.
It’s not very laddish at all out in misty, academic old Oxford. When Loaded has its annual day out at Brighton races followed by karaoke, I find myself turning down the offer of some cocaine in the loos on the pier, pleading that I have to work the next day when actually I’m catching the Oxford Tube and really I think that real ale is better than drugs anyway.
Nicola joins an Oxford writers’ circle and soon establishes links with the Oxford Greens. In fact the entire Green movement, all twelve of them, seem to be in Oxford. They can be found playing Ultimate Frisbee in the parks and resolutely not talking about football.
Soon Nicola is making eco-waves. She’s running a tree-saving charity called the Forest Management Foundation (FMF), via a phone/fax machine she’s bought. That’s the important thing about being a Green. Through her tree-hugging work on the FMF I discover that there’s only one thing Greens value more than saving hardwood in Papua New Guinea, and that’s having an acronym.
Back in London I’m spending my week days in Colindale newspaper library searching through old copies of the Sun for our book on soccer sleaze. It doesn’t feel like I’m plugging the hole in the ozone layer, but it’s fun.
Amazingly, Loaded is suddenly the publishing sensation of the year. Most people thought it would last for only a few issues. It’s selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Now the staff are stars and there are regular subbing shifts, my contributions to write for the Greatest Living Englishmen column (Brian Clough, Steve Jones, Patrick McGoohan, Tom Baker, the Brigadier off Doctor Who and Robin Askwith all prove popular) and interviews with footie icons Julian Dicks and Karren Brady.
Inadvertently, through dating Nicola, it seems I’ve cracked a Loaded fantasy. Editor James Brown often asks, in his strong Yorkshire accent, ‘Eh, are you still going out with that posh bird?’ and offers me more shifts.
Despite Loaded attracting much ire from Guardian and Independent commentators, Nicola seems pleased that I’m part of something successful and exciting. The lads in the office aren’t exactly environmentally aware though. One afternoon at the IPC offices, where Loaded is based, the building is besieged by placard-waving protestors. They’re campaigning against the cruelty of angling. It turns out that IPC also produces fishing mags. The Loaded staffers respond by making paper darts from pieces of A4 printer paper. They write messages on them reading ‘Cod and two chips please’ and ‘There’s a plaice for us’ and then fly them at the irate demonstrators. Juvenile, but very funny after lunch in the Stamford Arms.
It’s strange commuting between London and Oxford. Soon I’ll have to make a choice. Can I keep laughing as I throw paper out of a window while Nicola fights to save trees? Oasis and Blur are battling for Britpop supremacy in the charts. Loaded has Noel Gallagher on its cover. ‘You Gotta Roll With It’ wouldn’t inspire the Oxford Greens to holler an Oasis anthem into the night. They’d ask if the roll was organic.
In my new Oxford circles the guru of the Greens is George Monbiot. Everyone speaks about him in awed tones and refers to him as simply ‘George’. He’s a Fellow (is that the academic version of being a lad?) at the university and writes columns for the Guardian. Nicola already has his books on Kenyan nomads, persecuted tribes in Irian Jaya, and displaced indigenous peoples in the Amazon. According to the publisher’s blurb he’s been caught by hired gunmen, beaten up, shot at by military police and shipwrecked. The most dangerous thing I’ve ever managed is an away trip to Millwall.
George is one of the Frisbee players Nicola hangs out with. He’s the most intellectual man I’ve ever met. His parents are rumoured to be keen Conservatives, but then so are mine. George is a radical with a great grasp of figures and an incisive mind, dedicated to fighting planetary pollution. He wears 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 in my Elephant and Castle short-life pit.
Nicola’s mum Fiona has the same energy as her daughter; always working in the garden, putting the cover on the swimming pool, preparing meals and running the house. As we load the dishwasher she tells me that she was Green long before it was fashionable, because she and Angus had to make do and mend as they put their children through private school. Fiona is always smart and keeps her house tidy; Nicola is all flyaway hair, ethnic waistcoat and untidy bedrooms.
Her brother Drew is staying too and he’s a big fan of Loaded. He’s carrying a CD. Angus picks it up and asks ‘‘Sorted for Es and Whizz’? What’s all that about then?’ It might be OK here. I drink whisky, which Angus seems to approve of, even if my coppicing is, as yet, uninspired.
So in turn I take her to visit my parents, who now live in King’s Lynn. She’s a little bemused that my mum does all the work and that we eat at six o’clock and no-one speaks during meals. Her family are normally arguing, telling stories, swearing or laughing throughout dinner, which is at eight. ‘I’m not a performing monkey,’ I tell her, ‘we don’t do raconteurs in my family.’ She’s no doubt spotted that we call the living room the lounge and the loo the toilet.
My dad is baffled at meeting an assertive woman. Nicola quite enjoys challenging his opinions. He has no sympathy with the Greens. A retired farmer and lifelong Tory he tells us over a pint of home brew, ‘There’s no such thing as global warming, it’s invented by people who make a living out of it. They’ve all got college jobs, they rely on it to sell their books. And if the ocean level rises a foot what effect will that have on us?’ He then produces an article from Farmers Weekly that proves that organic food is a waste of time and that nitrates are really good for the land.
She must be committed to this relationship to be listening to this here in Norfolk with me. She copes with my dad’s views with hitherto unknown levels of diplomacy.
‘Thank you for putting up with this. My dad enjoys telling people they’re wrong.’
‘I’ve heard it all before from my relatives. And I was enjoying counting how many ways he could insert “Well, if Pete had gone into farming” into a conversation.’
‘Can you imagine me as a farmer?’
‘I can’t imagine anyone worse. You’re completely cack-handed at anything practical!’
There’s a small blip when she tells him to slow down in his car – no one in my family has dared criticise my dad’s driving – as he drives past a pheasant, but no disasters. She puts up with lots of things that irritate her, such as watching television and always having to drive to pub lunches. No-one does that simply out of politeness. She’s doing it for me. I want to believe she’s doing it for me.
Meanwhile my Oxford commutes continue. My true inauguration into the Green set comes with an invitation to George Monbiot’s party. No one drives to this venue. In the front garden of George’s two-storey house is a huge mountain of mating bikes. Racing bikes, granny bikes, mountain bikes. Piled on top of each other like a bizarre cyclical sculpture. The sort of thing the EU should do something about.
Inside it’s squeezing room only. In one corner of the living room stand a group of bearded Newbury veterans and members of the Donga Tribe, jamming on bongos, violins and harmonicas singing in pseudo-folkie voices and occasionally blowing tin whistles.
Many guests appear to have been issued with ethnic trousers with drawstrings. A man in a rainbow jumper is slumped on the stairs. Fashion has clearly never penetrated Oxford. Collarless shirts, tweed jackets and endlessly patched trousers are everywhere. This party would never feature on a glossy magazine’s lifestyle pages. Not a high heel, short skirt or a glass of champagne in sight. We’re soon introduced to a local novelist, a woman doing a project on bananas and a man who was working for Sting’s Rainforest Foundation. George is unfailingly friendly, performing introductions as if he’s on Question Time.
‘Ah, yes, this is Nicola who’s an environmental journalist and director of the FMF, and this is Pete who’s a journalist doing some very interesting work with, erm, football, and this is Tim Pears who’s just written a fantastic novel and this is Piers who’s back from PNG where’s he’s campaigning on logging issues.’
The guests appear impressed by a commissioned book, but there’s a silence when I mention it’s on something called football. At times it feels less a party and more like a convention of anthropologists. No wonder we have global warming; it’s because the Oxford Greens are doing so much flying around the world studying deforestation, indigenous tribes and Fairtrade fruit.
It does make me wonder if my split existence can really continue. It’s football and TV versus Frisbees and story telling, showbiz parties in London versus tin-whistle affairs in Oxford. Is love worth a future of drawstring trousers? The only solution is to try and not think too hard about it and to gratefully sup several bottles of organically-brewed beer.
A couple of weeks later we’re on another big night out and as we’re on the wrong side of Oxford we end up sleeping at Oliver’s house, dossing down on the floor of his office. We’re awoken at the unbelievable time of 6.30 am by the sound of something mechanical swishing. Light cascades into the previously dark room as an organic hangover batters my cranium.
‘Oliver has automatic curtains. He likes to get up with the sun,’ explains a strangely awake Nicola. She thinks the automatic curtains are a brilliant invention.
Ten minutes later Oliver emerges munching a bowl of muesli and wearing headphones. Where’s the coffee? Sodding 6.30 am. Who wants Gaia and a perfect sense of elemental nature at this time? It’s neither day or night.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ booms Oliver. ‘I was just listening to yesterday’s Archers on my personal stereo.’
‘Do you know what is the biggest problem about saving the planet?’ I ask Nicola.
‘No.’
‘The hours.’
