are too difficult, and I don’t want to seek wilderness or be like indigenous people. My girlfriend wants to save the rainforests and that’s good, but I need my urban space, my consumer durables and an open pub.
Looking at my ruined camera, it seems that my flirtation with the Greener side of life may be at an end. It seems my sodden relationship may be over too.
Back in London my work life shifts into place. Columns to catch up with, launches to attend, commissions to be written, subbing shifts to be done.
Nicola and I communicate mainly by fax. Occasionally I manage to ring her in PNG and her voice has changed; it’s suddenly all relaxed instead of full of energy. Her boss Max keeps a wallaby and an emu as pets, as you do. She’s way out in the bush, her lodge has leaf roofs and open walls instead of windows. Every night she says there’s the noise of insects and animals all around her. ‘It’s like sleeping in a rainforest,’ she tells me. At least her scope for meeting other men is limited. She’s isolated and a long way from Port Moresby, where it’s too dangerous for a woman to walk out alone at night.
Perhaps I should visit her in PNG if I can find the cash. Or maybe I should make an effort to appear Greener. Perhaps my videos of Men Behaving Badly might help. There’s one episode where Tony hears that Deborah likes people who want to help others. He’s so desperate to impress Debs that he pretends to develop an altruistic streak, working for charity, helping out in old people’s homes. No, that will never work. Nicola would never believe it if I suddenly joined Earth First.
But after two months she suddenly announces that she’s returning home. And she plans to come and live in her London flat with me. She gave up her room in Oxford before leaving for the Pacific and has now decided to move back to London. More than that, she has decided that she thinks we do have what it takes to make a serious relationship. No more Frisbee playing with the Oxford Greens. We are an official couple. I feel a wave of relief, followed quickly by several smaller waves, all tinged with something pretty close to panic. Isn’t commitment something I expect to see on the football field?
I meet her at the airport. She’s looking brown and slimmer and for once she’s not wearing her exhaust-stained red Gore-Tex.
‘So you were missing me?’ I ask hopefully as we hug at arrivals.
‘No, Pete, my visa ran out.’
‘Oh.’
‘And I don’t love PNG, I love the Solomons.’
Show me a man who can contemplate cohabitation without fear and I will show you a liar. What if she wants a flowery duvet cover? No, she won’t, not Nicola. Or fills the bathroom with make-up? She won’t do that either.
But I do know she likes to have baths in the dark surrounded by candles. In Upper Street there’s enough candle shops to keep her going in perpetuity, which is worrying. What is it about women and candles? And why don’t they want to see their bodies when they’re in the bath? How do they cut their toenails, eh? If I then use her water (she likes this as it’s a good use of resources, although I’m not so sure) she gets cross if I blow her candles out and turn on the light. It’s all very illogical.
Before she has time to fully unpack, we’re away for Christmas at her mum’s and then we spend New Year’s Eve in Wiltshire. The parents of Thomas, the maker of Undercurrents videos, have a place there. We’re accompanied by 15 Oxford Green types, people with names like Hux. We play charades and eat communal meals of vegetarian chilli and baked potatoes.
On New Year’s Day 1996 we’re awakened by the loud mooing of cattle outside. That morning we travel to Avebury to look at the standing stones. They’re fantastic today, shrouded in mist, mysterious and, well, all stoney. Like all proper men, I love standing stones. But not in the manner of the Greens, who caress them lovingly and feel electro-magnetic forces and vibes from beneath the earth.
Were the stone circles for religious ceremonies or just big raves? Or more likely something that could encourage a huge collective effort, like sport? After all, there is an avenue of stones that leaves Avebury and leads to the man-made Silbury Hill. In fact the flat top of Silbury Hill, Britain’s version of the Pyramids, looks an ideal spot for a presentation to be made to the winner of the Avebury and District versus Beaker People Challenge Cup.
We retreat into the village pub and listen to ‘Zombie’ by the Cranberries on the jukebox. After a couple of pints I begin to wonder if in Neolithic times they had stones protestors chanting ‘No more stones!’ and claiming that we had quite enough stone circles already and in fact Avebury was a site of special scientific interest. Maybe inside Silbury Hill was a gigantic network of tunnels where the protestors hid to prevent the extension of the avenue to meet up with the Ridgeway bypass?
My first night’s sleep of 1996 is disturbed by the sound of an American anthropologist and shamen speaking loudly on the landing. He’s telling an eco-hippy that he can’t sleep because of the dead bodies he’s sensed are buried beneath this house. I contemplate adding his body to the collection of dead souls apparently beneath our feet.
It’s back to London and serious coupledom. Compromises have to be made. But mainly, it seems, by me.
The bedroom is the first area of dispute. Nicola has spotted my radio alarm clock, with digital figures showing the time.
‘You can’t have that by the bed!’ she announces.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s full of electro-magnetic radiation. It will give you cancer if it’s so close to your head.’
‘Is that something from the Ecologist or Resurgence? You’ve been reading too many eco-scare stories. Anyway, I’ve had it since I was at university…’
‘I don’t care, it’s going!’
‘Oh no it isn’t! It’s my oldest friend… and it never asks me to light candles in the bedroom!’
Eventually we compromise and I place the radio alarm on the floor, a metre away from the bed with the numbers turned away from us – thus rendering it 90 per cent useless in terms of being able to wake up and see the time with my contact lens-free eyes.
Nicola insists on leaving the bedroom window partially open all night, even in winter. ‘You live longer if you have fresh air!’ she beams, sounding more than ever like Flora from Cold Comfort Farm organising Seth and co.
One inadvertent side effect of this fresh air policy is an alarming plague of moths in our wardrobe on the landing and in our bedroom drawers. These winged asylum seekers take grateful advantage of the lack of all border controls. There’s little chance of being a woolly-jumpered intellectual here, as the contents of our drawers soon disintegrate.
‘It’s not wild moths that lay eggs in the drawers,’ chides Nicola.
‘Well, someone bloody has. Can’t we just blitz them with pesticide?’
‘No, we’ll just have to use cedar wood moth balls…’
Heat, starring Robert de Niro and Al Pacino, is a big hit at the movies. But heat is certainly not a major player in our flat. Nicola soon has her reluctant Green boyfriend placing silver foil behind the radiators. ‘It’ll reflect the heat back into the room,’ she tells me. This is of course dependent on the central heating actually being turned on – and it rarely is. Nicola gleefully turns the thermostat down to zero, or stands over me while I set the timer, ensuring we only have a minimum period of heat in the early mornings and evenings.
‘Just wear another jumper if you’re cold!’ she demands.
‘I can’t, they’re full of moths!’
‘Oh for goodness sake! We have to cut our carbon emissions and