» Up in smoke
This month Katie’s love of paper brings her to the limit of her eco-consciousness
The more eco stuff I do, the easier it seems. It turns out that – contrary to my original ecoexpectations – hippies don’t have the monopoly on green living.
Buying old cashmere in charity shops, mincing around the market buying home-grown, jumping on the Tube and chucking my wine bottles into that green thing in the kitchen, really ain’t no big deal. I have taken to eco living with gusto. But there are limits.
“The truth is I’m having a love affair with paper. I like the way it folds, and feels, smells and tastes… well OK, obviously I haven’t actually eaten it, but you get the picture”
For there is one major blip in my eco-manifesto that so far I’ve managed to ignore – until now. And that, my friends, is paper. I am to paper what Dale Winton is to fake tan – an utterly addicted and ruthless consumer.
As a journalist (a writer on a good day), paper is one of the tools of my trade. I read it, I scrawl on it, I screw it up in balls and throw it at the wall as an expression of my creativity. Even this here fair mag is printed on it.
If clothes are in a mountain and milk is in a lake, then my paper wastage must be forming some huge origami snowball somewhere on the South Coast. I feel bad thinking about it – so usually I don’t.
It’s hardest to give up the things you love and the truth is I’m having a love affair with paper. I like the way it folds, and feels, smells and tastes… well OK, obviously I haven’t actually eaten it, but you get the picture.
I like the feel of it crushed in my hand, a rustling ball of ideas, a bundle of achievement. I like flipping the bold pages of the broadsheets and wetting my finger for a speedy flick through the tabloids.
If I’m writing then there’s nothing as cathartic as scribbling out that line of prose you hate and chucking the paper mercilessly to the bin. Pressing delete on my laptop just doesn’t do it for me in the same way.
I like paper’s old-skool charm, its retro cool; the way it turns yellow in the sunlight and flutters in the wind. I love the things paper has brought me, the ideas it’s shared and the way it has changed my life, page by page.
Paper was my mate. And giving it up to go green was going to be like putting my favourite grandmother into a care home because Swampy suspected she’d be a bad influence on my unborn children. But I was going to give it a bash.
I regret to inform you that that bash lasted little over 24 hours. OK, it didn’t even last one.
Obviously I couldn’t start on Sunday – who could forego the joy of a morning in bed with The Mail on Sunday, The Independent on Sunday, The Observer, News Of The World and a big pot of coffee?
Not inviting them over would have been like ditching a group of old friends. And let’s be honest here, I’d written for a fair share of them and wallowing in my own collected cuttings is one of the high points of my week.
It couldn’t start on Monday either – it’s Media jobs day in The Guardian. Nor Tuesday – I still had a page left to fill in my Moleskine notebook. Nor Wednesday – when my copy of Vile Bodies finally arrived from Amazon.
So Thursday it was. I gritted my teeth as I passed the newsagent, and dutifully carried my laptop to the nearest wireless café to scan the papers and write my pieces.
And it was while I was begrudgingly conducting this online trawl of the news that I stumbled across an article headlined, “What are the options for green smokers?” Well, it was all the excuse I needed.
Indignantly, I slammed shut my laptop screen.
The green brigade have taken my water, cut down my carbon – they were denying me the luxury of those glossy sheets I loved so much and now those bloody greens had set their sights on my ciggies. That was it. I could take no more.
There were sacrifices and there were sacrifices, and if the greenies had their way then my life would be left a pitiful descent into boredom or madness.
I lit up a Marlboro Light and marched to the nearest newsagent, generously clearing their shelves of any paper matter in a 0.5 mile radius. I took it home – my bundle of joy. And, dear reader, I’m pleased to report that I read the lot.
Photo by Daniel R. Blume
