When I was younger Glastonbury was about music. If you’re of a certain age it was also one of the few times there was lots of music on TV, that’s ordinary TV, pre-streaming TV, pre-quick internet TV. But now it’s about the after event photo, the one of abandoned tents, camping gear, plastic bottles and tonnes of rubbish. The bizarre juxtaposition of direr warnings of eco disaster and the picture of what one looks like!

It’s the abandoned tents that get me! I camp, several times a year. We put the tent up, we take the tent down, I fix any damage, and put the tent away. The ecological impact of using a tent once many times and one tent once doesn’t need to be explained. Tents aren’t cheap, so when a tent that has cost one, or two, or three or perhaps even more hundred pounds becomes a consumable item, having just cheered on the said warnings of eco disaster, there is a problem. In outdoors pursuits there’s a concept called: ‘leave no trace.’ I’ll just leave it there, but I wish they wouldn’t leave it there.

Then there’s the rock n’ roll stars, politicians, and A Listers flying around in private jets, telling us not to do what they’re doing. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and when you have, you’ll never take them seriously again!

Then there’s the ad for a washing powder that’s saving the environment one low temperature wash at a time. This gets me twice over! Firstly a long wash (3 hours) that has clothes soaking in cool soapy water no matter the brand of cool soapy water works! But secondly, I always fume why aren’t washing machines plumbed for hot water, the hot water that could come from my solar panels, solar panels that would allow me to have a ‘green’ 60c wash, while drawing nothing from the national grid! But ho hum what would I know!

Oh let’s not leave the washing yet, so what happens when the low temp wash is finished? Where do the clothes go? Pound to a penny it’s a couple of hours in a tumble-drier. My grannies clothes used to go through the mangle then onto the clothes horse. I loved playing with it, never caught my fingers once! Ours gets an extra spin then onto the remarkably similar looking clothes horse. We don’t do this because of some valiant moral values, we just don’t see the point in wasting electric, and we have a process. Just like my granny, though she had a top loader, I don’t think she really trusted a door on the side of a washing machine.

Then I think of plastic bottles, and wistfully recall the good old days. Anyone old enough to recall the glass bottles you got 10p back on? Oh the joy of searching for them, of finding 3 or 4 of them, of getting a 1/4 of sweets for them, a veritable nation of little Wombles! As a child milk came in the morning, and in glass bottles! Did you know Blue Tits have forgotten what to do with them? Back to the plastic bottles, hey big brand drinks companies start refill vending machines! If Spurs can fill beer glasses from the bottom up, then someone can work out how to fill a bottle with carbonated, sugary, flavoured water without it frothing everywhere or tasting like a soda stream!

Plastic bags! When my grandmother went shopping (to any shop) she had a wee trolley bag thingy she put everything into. Or I recall us (that really means me standing watching) putting our shopping in cardboard boxes that the shops left out, then using them in the same way we use plastic storage boxes now, without needing any more plastic.

At my grannies I remember frost on the inside of the window, a pig (porcelain hot water bottle) in the bed, and wearing a vest or jumper inside. I remember my granda using a red hot poker to put tread on the soles of his good shoes so they’d last longer. The best I’ve done is stick the sole back onto my hiking boots – which worked! I got an extra year out of them. And though he died in the late 80s I still use his hand tools and consult his books on gardening.

Then at home we had storage heaters that used ‘economy 7’, that’s electric that had to be produced during the night but no one really needed, so to make use of it the electric was sold at a lower tariff. Okay, this one could be way off, but surely the electric from wind power produced during the night could do the same? Surely with advances in technology and insulation (keeping the heat in till the evening) storage heaters would work even better now!

Lectures don’t work. Lectures obviously don’t work. If lectures worked people would take their expensive or even cheap stuff home with them, stuff like: tents, rucksacks, sleeping bags, fleeces, wellie boots and all the rest of it. Then once they were home they would clean them. Scrub the wellie boots. Wipe the tents. Put the clothes, sleeping bags and so on into the long slow soapy wash, whilst using a washing powder of your own choosing, then not into the tumble dryer, except the things that need to go through the tumble dryer so they actually work. Then once this hands on work is finished, you could sell it on the internet, give it to someone or give it to an appropriate charity, or even just use it again – imagine that.

In reality someone who isn’t wasteful, reuses things and appreciates the world around them, but never thinks of themselves as an environmentalist, is much better for the environment than someone who is wasteful, decadent, and in practice shows scant regard for the world around them, but thinks of themselves as an environmentalist.