Going Green by Nick Spalding

Author:Nick Spalding [Spalding, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

THE MANSPREADER COMETH

Oooh . . .

Just look at it.

Gaze upon its magnificence – and know in your heart that yes, the upholstery does smell absolutely fantastic.

It is, if you are interested – and you had better be, otherwise we might not see eye to eye from now on – a Mercedes-AMG C-Class, in Polar White. Just under three years old, and on less than 25,000 miles, it is a thing of such amazementology that I am fully prepared to invent new words just to impress upon you how much I love it.

It’s got more bells and whistles than Bell & Whistle Ltd, the world’s oldest bell and whistle factory. The nice man with the cocaine sniff at the Mercedes dealership assured me that the car will park itself. This is something I never intend to trust it to do, but it’s lovely to have it as some sort of option, if I ever feel daring enough, or just want to impress people.

Including you. You remain impressed, do you not?

Good.

We can proceed without further complication.

The list of features my new car has is extensive, but by far and away the best thing about it, and the main reason I bought the car, is that it is a hybrid. An environmentally friendly, gorgeous, Polar White hybrid, with climate control I can set remotely.

It does more than double the miles my stupid old car did. Its emissions are incredibly low. If I don’t drive it like a complete wally, I will reduce my carbon footprint exponentially.

And I can’t tell you how good that feels.

Because Aiden’s expression has stuck with me. As has Summer’s. And Jade’s. And Alex’s. And my brother Sean’s. And mine, when I looked in the mirror that evening.

For two days I walked around in an absolute slump. A melancholic guilt hung around my shoulders like an unwanted embrace. Not just because I’d spent the last few weeks and months of my life pursuing and undertaking a job I didn’t understand one little bit, thanks to my purely selfish desires – but also because my entire lifestyle up to this point hasn’t been environmentally friendly in the slightest.

I’ve now managed to get rid of the car, but I can barely look in my wardrobe. The amount of fast, cheap fashion stuck in there that I’ve never even worn makes me sick to think about. And don’t get me started on the pile of bags-for-life in the cupboard under the stairs, or the fact that I still don’t own a proper recycling bin.

Being the type of person who will wallow in self-recrimination if I get even one-millionth of a chance, I spent yesterday evening on the internet for three hours, really delving into the issue of the climate crisis for the first time. Can you believe that? I’ve been working for a green PR firm for a while now, and hadn’t even bothered to do much of my own research.

But when I did, I really wished I hadn’t.

It’s a bloody disaster zone.

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