Green Moustache

I'll nail my colours to the mast right at the outset. I live as green a life as I can and I truly believe that more people should embrace the joys of home-grown and local produce. We should use cars less than we do. I'll even go so far to say that we should probably eat less meat than we do, although as a rampant omnivore this is more about the appalling quality of meat in most supermarkets than any moral qualms.

I am, however, pretty much ready to give my colours some company on the mast and would like to nominate Dick Strawbridge to be so honoured.

I am aware that many of the potential audience for this ramble are of non-UK origin and so for them I shall provide a smidgeon of background.

Some years ago Channel 4, one of our once great television channels, commissioned a series called "Scrapheap Challenge" (Americans will know it as "Junkyard Wars"). On this programme teams are given challenges to design and make different, usually destructive, gadgets each week and pit them against each other. One particularly successful team was the "Brothers in Arms", a strange set of brothers who all spent time in the army, hence the witty title.

Head of this little crew was the magnificently moustachioed Dick Strawbridge. He led his team to victory several times and then disappeared from our screens.

He re-appeared a couple of years later in an entertaining programme that showed his and his family's efforts to be as green as possible. He bought a run-down farmhouse and set up a watermill to provide electricity, got pigs and chickens and all was hunky-dory.

So far so jealous.

However...

Since then he has appeared on our screens again, this time telling various celebrities how wasteful and appalling their lifestyles are.

I, for one, am now getting more than a little exasperated with the seemingly constant pressure to eschew modern life. I know full well that should everyone live the way I do we would require more planets than we have currently available. I also know that there is little more I can practically do as an individual.

When I find work again I will need to travel to get there. Until such a time as we get a government capable of realising that the majority of people live outside the reach of London's underground network and therefore would require investment in public transport in order to facilitate leaving the car at home I shall need to drive.

Although we do a decent job of growing fruit and veg in the garden there's no way I can be self-sufficient with the amount of land I own. In fact, for everyone to be green and self-sufficient the way young Dick would like would require more planets than our current lifestyles would.

While individuals can, and should, do more, it is also up to governments to implement policies which make a difference. Our present incumbents seem to have washed their hands of this idea.