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Pete May and his wife Nicola Baird and the chickens live happily at their Finsbury Park home |
Becoming a green man!
Pete May’s true story of chasing his green goddess is a witty portrait of how many of us struggle to keep pace with the environmental movement, writes Peter Gruner
There’s a Hippo in my Cistern: One man’s misadventures on the eco-frontline.
By Pete May. Collins £7.99. Order this book
IT’S the old, old story. Slob, into booze and footie, doesn’t give two global warming cow farts about the environment until he meets a green goddess on a bicycle.
Suddenly the lad is recycling (his old jokes) and anxious to make renewable energy – preferably with both of them in a horizontal position.Pete May’s true-life tale, There’s A Hippo in My Cistern, refreshingly satirises the often deadly serious and worthy world of the environmental movement. Rather than lecture, he gently pokes fun at himself and the girl on the bike, Nicola Baird, who eventually becomes his wife.
The first time he meets Nicola she wears an “exhaust-stained” Gore-Tex jacket, a peculiarly ethnic-brown waistcoat covered in reindeers and snowdrop patterns, black drainpipe trousers and scuffed Kickers.
She is also very, very earnest in her beliefs.
Poor old Pete. One minute he is having a laugh in the pub with his mates from Loaded magazine, the next he’s going shopping for refillable plastic containers of Ecover washing-up liquid at Planet Organic.
Instead of accepting plastic bags he’s got to take his own re-usable ones, buy only fair trade coffee, not drink bottled water, eat less meat, recycle everything, not accept too much packing – oh, and stop flying.
Nicola, we learn, is an avid reader of George Monbiot in the Guardian and has hundreds of worthy books that take thousands of words to say that global warming is really bad.One such book is called Mortgaging the Earth: the World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development.
Pete always thought that “development issues” were when photos don’t come back from Boots.
Despite their differences, the couple find a flat in Finsbury Park and move in together.
Pete discovers that Nicola likes to have baths in the dark surrounded by candles. He points out that in Upper Street there’s “enough candle shops to keep her going in perpetuity”.
Pete is used to central heating on all day and enjoys hot fetid air. Nicola, however, likes leaving the windows open even in deep winter. “You live longer if you have fresh air,” she declares, sounding like Flora from Cold Comfort Farm.
Heat is a big issue for the couple. Pete writes that Nicola soon has her reluctant green boyfriend placing silver foil behind the radiators. She tells him that it will reflect the heat back into the room. She also turns down the thermostat and suggests he wears another jumper if he’s cold .
Pete writes: “Occasionally Nicola goes out for the day and I furtively turn on the heating for an hour. My new life reminds me of the opening scenes of the film Withnail and I.
“Each morning I get up, stumble down the stairs in my thick dressing gown, and secretly turn on the rings on the cooker in a desperate attempt to get warm. If Nicola arrives in the kitchen I can always say I’m about to heat up the organic porridge.”
Then there’s Nicola’s friend Oliver, as “eco-centric” as they come, whose dad advised former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on all things green.
“He’s the only man I’ve ever met who wears a pouch around his waist in which he keeps his cash,” writes Pete. “What’s more, all his walls are covered in masks from indigenous peoples he’s visited around the world.”
Oliver uses newspaper instead of toilet paper, which Pete says he hasn’t seen since watching Steptoe and Son.
Pete’s new friends grow organic vegetables on allotments, refuse to shop in supermarkets, and visit white people with dreadlocks at a place called Tinker’s Bubble. They advocate urinating on garden plants to encourage growth.
They also hang out at whole-food stores where the men proudly sport beards and ponytails and the women floppy Flowerpot Men beanie hats while perusing aisles of remedies like comfrey gel, Aloe Vera juice and tea-tree toothpaste.
Nicola writes an essay on logging for the FT and wins an opportunity to study sustainable forestry in the Solomon Islands. And she wants Pete to go too. But what is sustainable forestry? It seems it’s where you tell the bloke with the chainsaw to chop down only selected trees. Pete goes with her to the Solomons but is back after just three weeks, tired with sleeping on plaited leaf mats and having to wash and go to the toilet in the sea.
Later, back in Finsbury Park, Nicola organises weekly talks about conservation at the flat.
She decides to give everyone in the street window boxes to green the neighbourhood, getting a grant from Arsenal’s Gunner fund to pay for the scheme, and filling the boxes with compost and red geraniums.
“She knocks on every door seeing who wants them and astonishingly the street is soon full of her flowers,” Pete writes.
Next, Nicola wants chickens. They are on sale at Freightliners Farm in Holloway. “Lots of people are doing it,” she says. “Look, it’s in the Guardian.”
The birds cost £12 each and Nicola is delighted. Pete writes: “The chickens are less pleased. For the first few hours they make terrible clucking sounds that can be heard down the street.”
It all turns out well. Pete and Nicola have two children and even decide to marry. Pete realises that his wife is right about many of the issues – a point brought home to him when his daughter develops asthma, with a suggestion that it could be triggered by pollution.
Overall it’s an enjoyable book, which is a lot of fun and manages to make some important and serious points along the way.
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Your comments:
Looks like I'm in trouble - I'm a coal shoveler at a big power plant! (Though I do support windmills to reduce the load on said power plant to save fuel).
Clivey
Bring on the windymillers I say! :-))
Clive, Didcot Power Station
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