by Mike Gayle
‘Well, you still can.’ Claire reached across to type ‘Genealogy DNA testing’ into Google. ‘I saw an article in The Times a while back about various companies who have set up businesses to analyse people’s DNA and work out their genetic heritage. It’s not as good as a big sheet of paper with a bunch of names on it but it has to be better than nothing. What do you think? Shall we order you a test?’
I thought for a moment. Did I really want to have my DNA tested to determine my genetic heritage? Of course I did! It was so wonderfully CSI that it was all I could do to stop myself swabbing the inside of my mouth with a couple of cotton buds that very moment. We decided on a DNA testing company and ordered its ‘Gold Heritage package’ for £299 which would be delivered in five to ten working days and would tell me loads more about my genetic make-up than the £199 silver package and the £150 bronze package which, as far as I could gather, would only determine whether or not you were human.
‘How do you feel now?’ asked Claire as I closed down the computer.
‘Pretty good, actually. Okay, so after all this work I’ve put in I still haven’t ended up with a full tick but do you know what? That’s okay. The important thing is to keep going no matter what.’
Excerpt from Mike’s To-Do-List Diary (Part 5)
Monday 21 May
3.44 p.m. I am on the internet looking at a report which states that since the introduction of decimal currency in 1971 over 6 billion one-penny coins (that’s a staggering £60,000,000) have been lost, never to be seen again. I’m guessing some of them are currently in my house annoying my wife which is why Item 857: ‘Collect together all the loose change in the house and do something useful with it’ made it on to the List. On this particular task I have to hold my hands up and admit that the only person who leaves loose change around the house is me. I lose money all the time. I get sick of change loading down my pockets so I take it out and put it somewhere handy, like the mantelpiece. Then Claire comes along and says, ‘That doesn’t live there,’ and puts it somewhere else and before you know it money is everywhere.
3.51 p.m. I have just checked the sofa and found £3.63 and two cashew nuts.
4.03 p.m. I have just checked the kitchen drawer by the back door and found £5.22.
4.20 p.m. I have just checked under our bed and found £1.89, a missing library book, three hairgrips and a year-old copy of Mother and Baby Monthly.
4.37 p.m. I have just checked both cars and found £8.44, a mouldy tangerine, sixteen sweet wrappers and Lydia’s toy baby’s knitted underpants.
4.48 p.m. I have just emptied the two pint glasses of change that have been sitting on the shelf in my office, the mug of change from our bedroom and the jug of change from the counter by the sink in the bathroom into a very large plastic carrier bag.
5.01 p.m. I’m at Sainsbury’s and with Lydia’s help am pouring all the money that I’ve found into the change-sorting machine that stands in the lobby. It’s actually quite exciting. The loose change makes a terrific sound and I feel as though I’ve just won big on a Las Vegas slot machine only in reverse. As the machine sorts out the cascade of coins the numbers on the front of the machine quickly rack up: £1.21 . . . £3.44 . . . £6.21 . . . £8.95 . . . £12.31 . . . £16.87 . . . £19.51 . . . £23.40 . . . and then finally, following a series of deep clanks and screeches that make me worry that I have broken the machine (and after spitting out €3.30, a one-peseta coin, sixteen Greek drachmas, five German Deutschmarks, two parking tokens and eleven screws) it stops at a staggering £31.02. ‘What shall we do with all that money, Daddy?’ asks Lydia. I deliberate, my finger hovering above the ‘cash now’ button, and then having pictured all of the useless tat I might buy with £31.02, I press the ‘donate to charity’ button and head home.
Tuesday 22 May
2.22 p.m. So that I can tick off Item 413: ‘Wear hats more because you look good in them’ I am on my way into town in search of headgear whilst sporting a light-brown Kangol hat that, along with my olive-green army hat and grey Nike baseball cap, was already part of my small but perfectly formed, admittedly vanilla hat collection. Today I am looking for a hat that is a little more off the hat beaten track – something with a bit of attitude that says to anyone who looks at it: ‘Yeah, that’s right, I’m a hat, what of it?’ I want the kind of hat most men would think twice about even trying on let alone walking out of the shop with, which I’m sure will be pretty easy because most men I know wouldn’t be seen dead in a hat, vanilla or otherwise.
2.44 p.m. I enter Selfridges in search of man hats.
2.54 p.m. Man hats appear to be thin on the ground. I think about asking one of the trendy assistants if they have a hat department but fear coming across like a slightly overweight confused thirtysomething trying to claw back what little cool he once possessed.
3.03 p.m. Success! Apparently Top Man is the place to go for man hats. I pick up a black pork pie hat but am overcome by self-consciousness. Is there any act more embarrassing than trying on a hat in public? What if it looks rubbish? What if I think it looks great but other people think it looks rubbish? What if it actually looks great but I’m just too self-conscious to realise this? I try it on. It looks rubbish. I try to work out if it really looks rubbish or just a bit unusual. In the mirror I spot two girls looking at me. Their expressions say: ‘Look! A man trying on a hat! How silly!’ I wish I was a pensioner. No one mocks old people in hats! Too embarrassed to continue I put the man hat down and leave the shop but vow that once I’ve recovered my composure (possibly in a month or so) I will be back and a man hat will be mine!
Saturday 26 May
9.38 a.m. I am on my way into town with Claire and the kids and we are talking about mental blocks. Ten years ago Claire’s ‘auntie’ Margaret gave us two £5 Debenhams gift vouchers as a wedding present, which was very kind of her, and we really did appreciate them. Unfortunately for the last decade – that’s right, a whole decade – we haven’t managed to spend them. For the first year they used to go with us everywhere as they lived in Claire’s purse. Following the great purse purge of ’98 they were moved to a drawer in the hallway for a couple of years until we moved house when they seemingly disappeared until, while clearing out the drawer of my office desk, they miraculously emerged sandwiched between an ancient Nectar points card and Lydia’s birth certificate. It was like accidentally coming across the treasure of the Sierra Madre. I was unsure what to spend them on, so they had sat in my drawer long enough to merit inclusion on the List (Item 967). And today we are going to spend them.
10.05 a.m. Claire and I are having an argument.
Claire: I don’t understand why I’ve got to ask if these things are still valid. It’s not even my list!
Me: Because it was your auntie.
Claire: Auntie Margaret wasn’t even my real auntie.
Me: But she loved you just like any real auntie would.
Claire: You only want me to do this because you’re scared of asking someone yourself.
Me: And?
Claire: Fine, I’ll do it! But next time one of us has to do something embarrassing in public it’ll be your job!
10.08 a.m. Claire has just got the green light from a Debenhams lady of advanced years that the vouchers are legal tender! ‘Great,’ says Claire, ‘we have ten pounds to spend which probably would’ve bought us a lot more ten years ago.’
10.27 a.m. After much toing and froing we have finally settled on what we are going to spend our vouchers on: a pair of swimming costumes for the kids. Cheers, Auntie Margaret, you’re a star!
Chapter 18: ‘Go green because it’s not just about plastic bags.’
It was just after ten o’clock in the morning of the first Sunday in June and I was standing on the muddy verge of a small ‘A’ road located on the edge of an East Midlands village.
‘So what exactly am I looking at?’ I asked my friend Dave.
‘A mound,’ replied Dave.
I blinked hard. Dave was right. The thing in front of us
was indeed a mound. Not big enough to be a hill and too small to be a gentle rise in the landscape. It could only be described as a mound. A very large mound.
‘I’m lost. Are you telling me that you drove me all the way out here from Birmingham when I could be doing To-Do-List stuff just to show me a mound? I don’t want to be rude, mate, but I’ve got proper hills a lot closer to me and, to be frank, a lot more impressive than this. I thought you were going to show me some kind of environmental horror that was going to shock me into becoming a plastic bag-hating, 4×4-baiting, organic mung bean-munching eco-warrior.’
‘I just did,’ said Dave. ‘You see, mate, roughly twenty-five years ago this hill was a clay mine that was sold off to the local council as a landfill site. The council then filled it full of rubbish, chucked a load of dirt over it and left it to grass over. They probably would have forgotten all about it had methane from a landfill site in Loscoe in Derbyshire not exploded in March 1986 destroying a bungalow and rendering two other houses unfit for habitation. Ever since then it’s been the job of people like me to keep an eye on sites like this.’
‘How long for?’ I asked. ‘Ten years, twenty years, forever?’
‘Put it this way,’ said Dave dolefully, ‘the likes of you, me and probably our children will be long gone before we can stop having to deal with the consequences of this particular pile of rubbish. Now multiply this one mound from twenty-five years ago by the number of councils there are nationally and multiply that number by the millions of tonnes of rubbish we’ve been burying in landfill sites every subsequent year in the UK alone and you can see that we’ve got a big problem. So how’s that for a horror story then? Good enough for you?’
‘It really is time I went green then, isn’t it?’
‘Probably.’
‘Right then.’ I pulled the List from my bag and flicked through to the appropriate page. ‘You can now consider Item 166 on the To-Do List: “Go green because you know you really ought to”, officially kick-started.’
Going green had been on my unwritten To-Do List for so long it had ceased to be funny. Like most people my age I’d paid lip service to the idea of being greener but apart from newspaper, bottle and plastic recycling that had pretty much been it. It probably would’ve stayed that way too had it not been for the imminent arrival of Lydia. That made me consider what the world might be like as she grew up. Once she’d been born, I had no time for anything that wasn’t going to happen in the next ten minutes; and the idea of being more green got pushed to the back of the queue somewhere behind ‘clear leaves out of gutter’ and ‘remember to put preservative on the shed’. It was only when we knew Maisie was on her way that I suddenly recalled in an ‘Oh, yeah, I was going to do that wasn’t I?’ kind of way my mission to save the planet. I needed inspiration and that was when I put the call in to my friend Dave, an environmental officer, hoping that he might show me something that would inspire me to earn my Go Green tick.
Returning home from Dave’s mound I searched out Claire and sat her down.
She eyed me suspiciously. ‘You’ve got that look in your eye.’
‘Which look?’
‘That “I’m going to change the world” look. The last time I saw it was when you started this list of yours, the time before that was when we got that huge electricity bill and you turned the heating off and insisted that we walk round with our coats on all the time. The time before that was when you read that article about that couple who didn’t have TV and you took the plug off ours and made us play Scrabble day in day out. And then the time before that . . .’
‘Yes . . . yes,’ I replied dismissively, ‘I get it, “Mike’s a bit faddy and gets a bee in his bonnet about stuff sometimes”, but this is different.’
‘Aha! So you admit this is another one of your mad fads then?’
‘No . . . yes . . . maybe. Look, I’ve just seen something that has convinced me that we can’t carry on the way we’re going.’
‘We who?’
‘You, me, and the rest of the human race.’
Claire offered me her best eyes-closed-this-will-all-end-in-tears shaky head. ‘So what is it now?’
I said, ‘We’re going green, babe,’ and then explained how Dave had opened my eyes to the ways of green.
‘Okay,’ she said slowly. ‘That all sounds reasonable enough. So where’s the catch?’
‘There is no catch. We’re just going green.’
‘How green is green? Are we talking lime green, pea green or an emerald green?’
I thought for a moment. The purchasing of a wind turbine, the banning of all chemicals from the house, the recycling of our own waste, the purchasing of only organic produce, the boycotting of multinational companies, the bringing to an end of all non-domestic holidays, the disposal of both cars and the end of all new clothes purchases . . . and the changing of my name to something a touch more eco-warrior. Exactly what shade of green would all that be?
‘How does Militant Green sound?’
Claire put on her very best ‘this had better be a joke’ face. ‘Look, Mike,’ she began, ‘I was up with Maisie and her colic at 2.30 a.m. for twenty minutes, then 2.55 a.m. for half an hour and then finally 4.20 a.m. for the best part of forty minutes and I’m in no mood to be trifled with . . . so whatever big ideas you’ve got . . .’ she squinted as though trying to read my mind, ‘. . . for wind turbines, the boycotting of multinationals and getting rid of both the cars, you can think again.’
‘Fine,’ I replied reeling at her stupendous psychic abilities. ‘Let’s aim for pea green and then see how we feel when we get there, okay?’
‘Fine.’ I could tell from her face that she was already regretting her decision.
So as not to alienate Claire too much during the initial stages of the greening of the Gayle household I started off quite gently, using the internet to search for ideas and order one or two purchases along the way to help our greenification. Some three and half hours later those one or two purchases had swollen to just under two dozen. I ordered a water butt that fits straight onto the guttering downpipe; an electronic gizmo that can tell you how much energy you’re using in each individual room; a water purifier so that we could finally renounce all those evil food miles involved in importing Evian from the French Alps; and a weekly delivery of locally grown organic vegetables. It felt good to have bought all of these things. It was as though each time I whipped out my credit card and tapped in my details I was chipping a little bit of Dave’s mound away and simultaneously saving planet earth for my children. But of all the purchases that I made that day it wasn’t the supply of natural cleaning products, the solar-powered iPod charger or the Standby Buster (that will mean I’ll never have to feel bad about turning a TV on with a remote control again) that made me happiest. It was a simple black plastic box, a tray arrangement and a bag of worms that really did the trick.
My eco-wormery arrived late in the afternoon on day six of my greenification effort and by then the novelty of being the greenest people on our street was already beginning to wear thin. The cleaning products were okay but not great, Claire was getting sick of me telling her how much money we were wasting having the lights on while watching TV and, despite forking out the best part of £150 on them, the reusable nappies had been an unmitigated failure. It wasn’t that they didn’t work (they actually did the job very well indeed), more that neither Claire nor I could face the job of scraping Maisie’s poo off the inside bit of the nappy on a regular basis. Maisie made things extra difficult by offering us a delivery of such combined liquidity and stench that all we wanted to do was burn the nappies in the hope of destroying the smell. The wormery was a different kettle of fish altogether. On the website it had looked revolutionary and exciting; surely it wouldn’t disappoint?
The idea was this: in exchange for forking out the best part of fifty quid for a worm house plus worms I would get a completely organic food and paper waste-crunching machine that could allegedly consume up to 4 kilog
rams of food per week and churn out in return ‘a full tray of worm castings’ aka ‘Black Gold’ compost. The fact that I still had two bags of ordinary Homebase compost left over from an all too brief gardening spurt last summer didn’t dampen my enthusiasm one iota. Having grown up in a family that had never had an animal of any kind in the house (nearly everyone in the Gayle household had an allergy to something or other) after thirty-six years I was finally getting not just one, but several hundred pets of my own.
Claire, Lydia and I sorted through all of the bits that made up the wormery to get to the exciting bit, the worms. All day we’d been imagining how a company might go about sending 2,000 worms through the post. Lydia, being four, imagined that they would probably come wrapped in cotton wool. Claire, somewhat older, guessed they’d be in some kind of pot with holes in. As for me, I secretly hoped they would be dried out in temporary suspended animation and would re-animate the moment I added water. We were all wrong. There were only thirty or forty worms at most, and rather disappointingly they were stuffed in a plastic bag with a bit of compost and appeared not to be moving.
‘They’re dead, Daddy,’ said Lydia gravely.
Claire and I exchanged worried glances. Hers said: ‘They are, aren’t they?’ while mine said, ‘How long is our daughter’s obsession with death going to last?’
‘No they’re not,’ I declared eventually. ‘They’re just resting.’ I flicked through the wormery booklet and was relieved to see that the worms’ immobility appeared to be a natural reaction to the stress of the journey.
‘See,’ I said, pointing out the relevant section to Lydia even though she couldn’t read, ‘the worms are just suffering from jet lag like we do when we take a plane to go on holiday.’
Lydia nodded thoughtfully. ‘But that’s not two thousand worms is it, Daddy?’
I shook my head. ‘No, sweetie, I don’t think so.’ I checked the instruction manual and the receipt that came with it. There in the small print was the reason why we only had thirty worms: we have ordered the wormery starter pack. For an extra £24.99 we can order another kilogram of tiger worms or we can wait for two years for the worms to get their breeding up to full speed. I was loath to spend any more money on worm recruits so made the decision to set up the wormery, give the worms we’d got some leftover food and hope that with a bit of luck and the occasional blast of Barry White every now and again, they’ll somehow get their numbers up.