There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline
The hilarious true-life tale of one man's journey from self-confessed planet-killing lad to eco-friendly, green-crusader Dad set against the backdrop of Cool Britannia, Blair's Britain and the rise of the green movement.Back in the nineties, Loaded journalist, Pete May was your normal twenty-something male: a football mad, beer guzzling, Dr Who watching lad's lad, quite happy surrounding himself with countless pizza boxes, beer cans and other environmentally unfriendly consumer items. Recycling to Pete was a debate about whether he should turn his socks inside out and reuse them.Then one day, out of nowhere, along came eco bunny Nicola – a greener than green environmental activist. Could two people so different really fall for each other? Would Pete ever change his ways and sign up to the green lifestyle of composting loos, freezing cold houses, multiple jumper wearing, chicken rearing, recycling, cycling, energy saving and general self-sufficiency?This is the charming and funny true-life tale of one man's struggle to grapple with the good life, go green and get the girl.
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Published in 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Text copyright © Pete May 2008
Pete May asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Extract on page from Loaded reprinted with permission of IPC Media Limited. Copyright © Martin Deeson/ Loaded/ IPC+ Syndication 1996.
Extract on page from ‘Scandal of National Lotto-Tree’ reprinted with permission of NI Syndication. Copyright © The Sun 27.05.1997.
Extract on page from ‘Apocalypse Now’ reprinted with permission of George Monbiot. Copyright © George Monbiot 1999.
Extract on page from ‘Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?’ from David King, SCIENCE 303:176-177 (2004)’ reprinted with permission of AAAS.
Extract on page from Ken Livingstone 07/07 speech reprinted with kind permission of the Mayor’s office.
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Source ISBN 9780007264315
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007282104
Version: 2015-01-08
For NLB – who changed my climate
A Hippo is an inflatable plastic bag that is placed inside a toilet’s cistern to conserve water.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Don’t Ever Date an Eco-Bunny
Chapter 2 I Guess We’ll Always Have Powys
Chapter 5 That’s Yer Allotment
Chapter 9 Lord of the Fruit Flies
Chapter 12 Reclutter Your Life
Chapter 14 It’s a Nice Day for a Green Wedding
The 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.
