Mr Writer

My raised beds beginning to take shape

Rooting around in an old suitcase I have stashed at my parent's house, where I spent a few days last week to celebrate my mum's birthday, I discovered an old newspaper clipping. It was an article from the Guardian written by George Monbiot, undated but I believe from the 1990's, which expressed the fact that humanity is not living within its means. We are chewing up resources at a faster rate than they can replenish. Unless we make some pretty big changes this is not going to end prettily. This was the first time I had encountered this rather troubling problem and it made quite an impression on me, enough indeed to cause me to make the only newspaper cutting of my life.

I hadn't previously heard of George Monbiot, and didn't come across anything else he had written for some years hence. In fact it probably wasn't until the Guardian went online and I began reading it more often that I realised he was a regular columnist, a hard-hitting investigative journalist, a controversial environmental spokesperson and an author of several books. I liked how his (always strong) points of view were rigorously backed up with lots of references to authoritative sources, e.g. peer-reviewed scientific papers. I read his book on how Britain can massively reduce its carbon emissions to combat climate change (“Heat”, 2006) and another on how the UK government allows itself to be swayed by corporate rather than the public interest (“Captive State”, 2000). And in the last couple of years I've met environmentalists deeply angered by his switch to a pro-nuclear-energy stance (his reasoning being it's the least bad of a bunch of options for keeping the lights on – in his view renewables alone can't provide enough energy, and at least the nuclear industry doesn't emit much carbon.)

So when he walked into the kitchen yesterday as I was weighing vegetables and introduced himself, it was quite a moment for me.  Admittedly it was his kitchen so perhaps it was more a surprise that I was there rather than he. No, I haven't become a stalker of well-known Greens, breaking into their homes to effect a meeting. It just happens that he lets the local veg-box scheme grow some produce in his back garden and box it up in his kitchen, and yesterday I was volunteering some time to help them with their weekly harvest. All quite plausible really, m'lud.

Suffice to say he was very pleasant to us despite us getting in the way of his making dinner, admiring the bountiful veg on his table and making small talk. This was the second author in two years I had met by chance whose books had made a significant impression on me (the first being Tobias Jones last year.) Both their works have actually caused my direction in life to change. Having spent fourteen years in London where you can't move for writers and hacks, it  seems strange that I had to leave it to meet two of, at least for me, the most influential ones. I'd be predicting that next year I'll be bumping into Douglas Adams (my childhood, teenage and perhaps also adult favourite writer) in some out-of-the-way country pub were it not for the fact a heart attack took him 12 years ago whilst running on an exercise machine. Gyms are dangerous places.