Читать книгу There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline - Pete May - Страница 8

CHAPTER 2

I Guess We’ll Always Have Powys

In the outside world Radiohead have the Bends, Paul Weller is the Changingman and Oasis say the sink is full of fishes. Eric Cantona’s away with the seagulls and trawlers after being suspended for kung-fu kicking Crystal Palace fan Matthew Simmons. John Smith is ushering in a New-ish Labour and Jarvis Cocker wants to do what Common People do. Meanwhile I’m marooned inside a roofless cottage, desperately trying to restrict my bowel movements through fear of using the compost loo.

Gazing at the hole in a piece of wood intended for my backside and the accompanying bucket of sawdust, it seems that Green life is perhaps beyond me. Or more accurately, beneath me.

An updraught of cold air chills my buttocks. Cobwebs cover the bare stone walls of the bathroom. Outside, half a metre away from the condensation-drenched bathroom window, is a slab of bare and decidedly damp rock.

The house has been dug into the hillside in an attempt to keep out the winds that sweep down the valley. Ernest Shackleton must have felt a little like this when he was immobile on the Endurance, sitting in darkness for months, not having a proper loo either and waiting for the pack ice to close in and crush the life from his vessel.

Nicola has invited me to a meeting of like-minded eco-warriors in Powys, Wales. We’re staying in the house of a man called Chris. He looks a prototype Green. He’s got a light beard and the thin wiry frame of the perpetual cyclist. No sign of a paunch, just a six-pack stomach from a diet of vegetable stir-fries and much mountain biking. From the evidence of the ropes and karabiners in his garage Chris knows a lot about climbing and abseiling. There’s a canoe too. Chris works in some capacity at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth, known affectionately as ‘CAT’ to CAT people.

We visit CAT after finally leaving the train that spent several eons perambulating gently through the wintry hills under grey skies. Set in an old slate mine, CAT has a hydro-powered cliff railway, lots of solar panels, a community wind turbine, geodesic domes (whatever they are), a straw-bale theatre, an eco-playground and recycled glass tableware.

It’s all good, worthy planet-saving stuff. As an eminently unpractical man I could never design anything propelled by water, not even a paper boat. So maybe I’m a cynic for knocking environmentally-aware people simply trying to promote a sustainable non-polluting lifestyle. Yes, everyone at CAT is doing a fantastic job. It’s just Chris’s alternative loo technology that presents a bit of a problem.

Chris lives with his partner Jane in an old farmhouse that they’ve bought for the price of a London garage. This sounds a good deal on paper, until you discover that it’s, as the estate agents say, in need of some refurbishment. The cottage itself is reached by driving in Chris’s Land Rover across a river, up an improbably steep and winding road for three miles and then down a long muddy track. It’s perched at the bottom of the valley and at times it does look inviting, when there’s a rare burst of sunlight. Chris and Jane are busy turning it into an eco-home. Which means that it doesn’t have any tiles on part of the roof. Just a tarpaulin slung over the rafters.

‘At least the Oxford Greens have roofs,’ I mumble to Nicola.

‘Oh shut up, it’s lovely. And the insulation will be going in soon and when the roof is finished they’re going to have solar panels and a wind turbine.’

It’s the coldest weekend of my life. We’re staying inside a work in progress. Several of the windowpanes have holes in them. They will be replaced with double glazing one day we’re told, but at the moment it’s make do and don’t mend. Chris is clearly a very hardy (and Hardy-esque) environmentalist – a model of low-impact living.

I’m reminded of an old classic black-and-white TV series, The Survivors, which can be dimly remembered from my youth. Nearly all the population had been destroyed by a plague and the few survivors are trying to cannibalise what technology they can still find and construct a new society while growing vegetables and avoiding outlaws. There are no papers here, no TVs, no means of finding out the football results. Civilisation could easily have collapsed in the outside world.

We go for a long walk across muddy hills in a squall and then return to huddle before the log burner in the living room. Several old armchairs lie before a partially collapsed inglenook fireplace. Large pieces of ancient insulating material are hanging precariously above the burner.

We eat toast, hoping the bread will remain warm long enough to thaw fingers now devoid of all tactile sensation. It’s all reminiscent of the arrival of Withnail and I at Uncle Monty’s cottage in the Lake District.

But my major problem here is not the cold, it’s the sanitary arrangements. Green life is starting to seem like a major cistern error. Especially when I discover that the only loo is of the composting variety. Using the compost loo involves defecating into the abyss, and then sprinkling sawdust upon your deposits.

The whole contraption is more than a metre off the ground, meaning you have to climb on top of it and then rest your feet on a piece of wood. It’s like some kind of fiendish interrogation device. Less waterboarding, more faeces skimming.

You can’t urinate while standing up because the whole structure is so precarious. In some kind of act of feminist revenge, all men have to sit down to pee or retreat into the fields outside. And however much you try not to look down into the pit of doom, some irresistible perverted wish means that you can’t help but glance down into the depths – viewing sawdust, horrible bits of scrumpled paper and biodegrading turds.

Small flies retreat into darker quarters of the odorous wooden box. This sewage sludge also contains numerous tiger worms, silently composting our faeces. Chris stands by the compost loo looking down into the depths and admiring his worm’s work.

‘Greedy buggers, aren’t they?’ he says cheerily.

They are diminutive tiger worms, admittedly. But they could get bigger. Remember the giant maggots made from condoms that menaced Jon Pertwee in Doctor Who? My subconscious registers some forgotten primeval fear of white buttocks being clamped by all sorts of creatures emerging from the dirt.

But at least it’s helping me appreciate some of the innovations of modern life. Thomas Crapper was a genius. Defecating into a box of malodorous turds and sawdust was never going to be preferable to the glorious clear water of Crapper’s fabulous flushing closet. Perhaps I’m a bad person for not being able to tackle a compost loo. They save countless litres of water, provide fertiliser (although I’m still not sure I’d want to eat crops grown with ‘humanure’) and are essential in places without sewage systems. Maybe it’s because I’m an anally retentive, pathetic wuss, as the Australians might put it. It’s just that I’ve never worked in the Third World or remote islands, or disaster zones and refugee camps, unlike all of Nicola’s friends. My whole life has been spent using conventional lavatories. And I never realised just what a luxury they are.

I’m trying to get into this, honestly. Chris and Jane are friendly people and attentive hosts. It’s just that they seem oblivious to cold. They even give up their bed for us. And it’s the perfect bed for an ‘eco-bunny’, as Nicola calls her Green friends. Jane has attached four silver birch trunks to each corner of the bed and created a rustic four-poster bed. She’s entwined fairy lights among the twigs, creating a sort of Lord of the Rings meets The Woodlanders ambience.

I’m not sure my mates at football would be that impressed. But as long as I make a big effort to unleash my inner Hobbit then the fairy bed is fine, really. If only Jane and Chris had given the same amount of attention to the window, which looks as if one push would remove the whole crumbling frame from the wall.

The next morning we eat muesli, feet chilling on the stone floor of the kitchen. In order to shower we have to boil the kettle several times and then stand in the bath beneath a bucket with holes in its bottom. In the living room there’s a sort of stable door, which leads directly out to the fields and a vista across the hills. As soon as she’s up, Nicola opens the top section of this door, ensuring the glorious chill of March frost permeates the room.

She’s loving it, and is irritated by my shivering. I suggest a walk among the sheep, hoping it might be warmer outside and on the move.

When we return two of our old Oxford Green chums have colonised the living room. Oliver is lying in a hammock, all booming voice, sure opinions, wild hair and bristly chin. He’s wearing a red-check, padded lumberjack shirt and his pouch. He is also the only man I had ever seen lying in a hammock, if we exclude the odd viewing of South Pacific.

Sitting in an ancient armchair is bespectacled, woolly-jumpered George Monbiot. I realise that George and Oliver’s conversation is as indecipherable to me as my discussions about football must be to Nicola. They mention acronyms in every sentence. Their talk is all of Carmageddon, Undercurrents, the Diggers, park-and-ride schemes, food miles and things George said to John Gummer. They’re bemoaning the tragedy of the commons and then they mention Enclosure.

‘Yes, I’ve seen the movie, Demi Moore was great,’ I declare enthusiastically. They both look a little puzzled.

The morning passes with more Lapsang tea and eco-jargon. I shuffle closer to the wood burner, still wearing my Polartec fleecy jacket, jumper, shirt, T-shirt and thermal vest.

Then it’s a group walk, admiring the sensuous curves of the hills (at least that’s how Nicola describes them, her inner poet inspired by this arctic expedition). We walk to a waterfall and then admire a set of sustainable wind turbines upon a distant hill. The windmills remind me a little of the effigy the islanders create in The Wicker Man. I start to wonder if the Greens sacrifice non-virgin men who write for lad mags, like football and have problems with compost loos in giant wicker turbines.

That evening Chris puts Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits on the cassette and ‘Blowing in the Wind’ has rarely sounded more appropriate. Then he takes off his trousers. Underneath them is another pair.

‘Just how many pairs of trousers are you wearing?’ I ask.

‘Only two and a pair of thermals,’ he answers, as if multi-trousering is a completely normal dress code.

If my host is wearing three pairs of trousers then I’ll always struggle to be a proper Green. I refuse to live anywhere, however scenic, that requires three pairs of trousers. Never has a return to London’s carbon-dinosaur-generated 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.

‘Make sure you hold the flower pots upright,’ Nicola whispers.

St George’s Hill is a horrible place. Gated houses surrounded by a course for the world’s most boring sport. It’s where Terry and June would go if they won the Pools.

But now the horticultural revolution is imminent. We’re stalking our way past tees and fairways and bunkers. ‘If any one asks us questions, we’re looking for golf balls,’ commands Oliver, in the fashion of a Green Andy McNab. He looks purposeful, no doubt ready to defend himself with a rolled-up copy of the Independent should he be apprehended by security guards.

We drift through woods and past pairs of golfers. A golfer eventually challenges us and Oliver replies ‘We’re looking for golf balls!’ Luckily his received pronunciation appears to win us some time. Did the Dam Busters feel like this? We’re deep in enemy territory now – the heartland of Daily Mail readers.

We carry on skulking in the undergrowth looking for our fellow 20th-century Diggers. But then there’s the drone of a helicopter engine. It appears overhead, hovering. It feels like we’re in the Vietnam War. We run for the safety of the woods, wondering if we’re soon to be strafed by machine-gun fire as Wagner plays over the soundtrack. Maybe we could throw golf balls at it. We embark upon a strategic retreat, trowels and plants in hand.

At the gatehouse to the golf club a uniformed security man is surprisingly friendly. ‘We had reports there were stalkers outside Cliff Richard’s house,’ he explains in a mystified tone.

‘Nicola, you’re just a Devil Woman,’ I tell her.

The ignominy. Being mistaken for a Green Digger was tolerable – but a Cliff Richard fan? Gerrard Winstanley would have scarpered immediately if it had happened to him.

It’s not been as dramatic as a Greenpeace action. But it was my first outing as an activist, and I realise I felt kind of proud to have carried a plant pot into action. We were there, and we were prepared to dig, and it took a police helicopter before we threw in the trowel.

But was this real commitment? And if so, to what? To the Green cause, or to my Green girlfriend?