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,