How my family turned me from Queen of Mean to Queen of Clean
She admits she was the weakest eco-link – until her crusading daughter and grandchildren helped change her ways...
PLEASE picture the scene. A spectacular white villa designed by an awarding-winning French architect, and lying in the heart of Provencal countryside. Within its grounds, amid fields of lavender, a blue infinity pool.
This is our family summer holiday treat, provided by an indulgent granny (me). The second we arrive, my small, shouty grandsons throw off their clothes to swim.
Their mother’s unbridled joy, however, is not fully visible until the next morning when she returns from a four-mile run.
‘I’m so excited,’ she announces, ‘I’ve found the local recycling bins.’
It’s not easy living with a greener than green daughter. Frankly, it’s exhausting.
My generation were Sixties rock and roll babes who loved The Beatles and hated the Vietnam war.
The knowledge that the planet, and our well-being, needed to be safeguarded came later. It’s been a stiff learning curve. For example, young women’s jaws drop when I say that in the early Seventies, when the above-mentioned environmentalist was but a bump in my stomach, the distinguished gynaecologist in charge of my welfare barely looked up from writing notes when I mentioned I smoked.
The catastrophic risks of inhaling nicotine, the damage from air pollution, the threat to rainforests, the effect of climate change and the peril of millions of tons of plastic being dumped in the ground or washed into rivers and oceans were yet to be aired.
Emma must have been about ten when she came home from school with her huge (and annoying) handpainted poster urging ‘ Love Your Lungs’. To her credit, her zeal for saving me and protecting the world has continued ever since.
My generation’s clever children, it turned out, often had only a minimal interest in the sort of politics and current affairs that had meant so much to us (I’m not entirely sure Emma, with a first- class honours degree, would recognise a photo of, say, Enoch Powell).
Instead, they and their children have focused their attention on limiting the damage to our world.
David Attenborough is their hero. His Blue Planet programmes have had the sort of impact that make our protest movements look pathetic. The Daily Mail’s support for the Great British Spring Clean is reminding us that tackling litter is important.
And why, this week I’ve mucked in with the rest of my family to smarten up our corner of London.
I’m astonished to be reminded that the Mail’s remarkable campaign to limit the use of plastic began a decade ago.
It resulted in a charge for plastic bags which has now seen billions fewer of them used every year. To begin with, shelling out a few extra pennies in the supermarket was simply an irritant.
But of all the environmental crusades, stopping the thoughtless use of plastic and the importance of recycling has triumphed above the rest. It has captured my failings.
Now I carry wicker baskets in my car for shopping. If I dash into our village store, I exit with an armful of groceries rather than be heard asking for a bag. My meat and bacon come from the butcher; my vegetables whenever possible are loose.
I run most mornings. My water bottle is a small plastic Evian one that I try to remember to refill. When Emma and the children arrive at my house in the country, I stay obediently silent as she completes her first inspection of my kitchen bins. Much sighing takes place. Some plastic containers are taken out of the bin, noisily rinsed and placed in the recycling.
My fridge is scrutinised for tell-tale purchases of bottled mineral water.
She concedes to using the dishwasher, but I’m very aware that in her house the dishwasher is only employed to store recycling.
The wrapping paper from Christmases past in my home and her own is saved by her for future use. (We don’t dare ask when exactly.)
The only chance I have to take the moral high ground is when I remind her and my grandsons to turn off more lights when they stay.
The rest of the time I exist in a fairly constant state of environmental shame.
MYprinters, and I can’t begin to explain how this drives me nuts, she’s changed to print both sides of the paper. I don’t know how to reset them. And at home, she endlessly reuses paper that’s already been printed on one side.
My eldest grandson, Hudson, ten, is a music lover – a cello player – and adores art, so it’s no surprise he was unembarrassed to be taking into school a permission form to attend orchestra camp written on the back of a script for a L’Oréal commercial. One for which his mother has done the voice-over.
But to find Parker, nearly nine, whose passion is swords, daggers or any other weapons of mass destruction, cycling around picking up litter illustrates an impressive parental job. I don’t know whether to laugh or applaud when I hear the children’s mission to collect can lids for one of their art projects resulted in them rounding up enough to supply the whole class.
Last week, Emma’s neighbours,
with a new baby, went on holiday leaving six bags of rubbish outside. The foxes couldn’t believe their luck. But never mind.
In the morning, she and Hudson put on thick rubber gloves and rebagged four lots of recycling from the scattered debris. No wonder Emma has been made a Westminster Recycling Champion. Of course she has!
I cannot compete. But honestly, I am doing my best.
Even though my daughter almost certainly believes my best is not nearly good enough.
DAUGHTER EMMA SAYS:
SHE’S right. My mother. Those words don’t come easily to this daughter. But I am slightly batty when it comes to recycling and the war on plastic and litter.
I wouldn’t dream of stepping out without two reusable shopping sacks stashed in my pocket.
Alas, my mother hasn’t been the speediest to jump on our recycling bandwagon. Instead, she loves to complain to people that I go through her rubbish. Of course I do. It’s horrific. She thinks sorting your waste is some New Age fad to be avoided. Despite having three recycling bins, a regular trash can and a compost bin in her kitchen, there is still a danger she will hurl stuff blindly in together.
Plastic wrappers (which cannot be recycled), cling film and food debris are tossed in a disgusting mess to be dealt with later. Though not by her. Obviously.
I, on the other hand, have raised two eco-warriors. My youngest, Parker, has the senior rank. He’s what’s known at his school as a Green Unicorn. In his first year in office, his team transformed school policy. They stopped the use of 16,000 plastic bottles a year. Instead, children now bring their own reuseable ones.
At our house, meanwhile, reusing stuff is a badge of honour. As my mother never tires of telling people (cue much eye-rolling), we store our ‘clean’ recycling, ready for the next school project, in the dishwasher (our home is small, and this kind of storage space is a luxury). Cardboard from loo rolls is a hot commodity.
Very little goes straight to the rubbish without a family debate: ‘Should we save this for something? Is it reusable? How could it be useful?’
LAST
weekend, I couldn’t bring myself to throw out our car’s colossal rubber alternator belt that was past its best. The children want to play with it. I wonder what else we could do with it?
The boys love my new earrings. They’re made from crushed Nespresso coffee pods. No, I didn’t design them myself. I wish.
But I have squirrelled away every plastic bag our daily newspaper is delivered in. I reckon I have more than 200. And I refuse to chuck away the elastic bands from freshcut flowers. I have about 200 of those, too. What for? Any suggestions appreciated. Without prompting, my son, Hudson, goes through the recycling bin in his classroom and brings me back reusable paper for the printer.
A true David Attenborough foot soldier, Hudson made a poster last year which said, ‘Eight million tons of plastic dumped in the sea every year.’
On a Sunday morning, in the snow, we ran round London’s Hyde Park putting his posters on notice boards. ‘ Please Recycle! There will be more Plastic than Fish in the Sea by 2050.’
Naturally, we pick up litter around the park daily, trotting back and forth on the school run.
Parker can stalk a crisp packet with ninja precision. A fun challenge is to count how many water bottles need to be moved from general waste bins to recycling.
Are any of our efforts enough? This week, a whale died from swallowing 88lb of plastic that had clogged its stomach. Plastic bags resemble squid. It’s heartbreaking – and the reason why the Mailbacked Great British Spring Clean is more important than ever. It’s about life or death.
So yes, pick up litter whenever you can, and recycle whatever you can. I’ve become a Westminster Recycling Champion, and my boys are the first to spot those small, impossible-to-find triangles that signpost an item’s recyclability.
My mother? Not so much. We worry she wouldn’t recognise a green triangle if it offered her a Chanel handbag.
The fact is we all need educating. And increasingly, it starts with the younger generation – the Eco-Warriors and Green Unicorns. Hudson and Parker are quietly Saving the World – one plastic bag at a time. And hopefully they are encouraging my mother to join them.