A mini celebrity in the greasy spoon

Location Greasy spoon cafe in Old St | Mood Black humour | Date 11 January 2006
Filed in:
Author (full name): 
Franny Armstrong
Location: 
Greasy spoon cafe in Old St
Mood: 
Black humour
Soundtrack: 
eggbaconbubbletoastwhiteteatwosugars
Ailments: 
Back still painful unless sitting bolt upright, which the slacker in me rebels against
Date: 
11 January 2006

Osteopath Simon - together with painkillers Nurofen - worked a small miracle on my back, to the extent that I can now do everything except play the piano. Apparently I had twisted a rib which was poking into a lung and causing me to squeal every time I breathed in. The camera equipment and French Alps have owned up.

(Though was alarmed to hear Simon, who seems like an enlightened kind of guy, happily describe how he commutes between Geneva and London on Easyjet. When I asked whether he considers his carbon emissions he replied, and I kid you not: "I've been recycling for more than ten years".)

Met with Tony Juniper from Friends of the Earth today. He's a mini-celebrity in his local greasy spoon, which is oddly cheering. While I was waiting for him, two people sitting next to me were talking about the gas price rise (1000 quid a year!) and whether they could go solar at home. And yesterday in a cafe in the city waiting for another meeting, the two city types at the next table were discussing green electricity tariffs. Is the whole world waking up?

Tony is struggling with the same problem as me: how to present the scale of the problem in our film/ campaign, without making people give up hope.  We agreed, over rhubarb crumble and custard, on something like: it is an almost insurmountable problem, the size of which we don't really fully understand. What we do know is that if everyone doesn't start acting individually immediately - and campaigning to make national governments’ legislate, and then international - the world will be mainly uninhabitable within one or two generations.