OK, so life’s not short enough. Not content to hover over my children and pounce if the tap stays on a nanosecond longer than is necessary to moisten their toothbrushes, or to sweep an organic field from the kitchen floor after unpacking my weekly vegetable box, I turn my attention to our cars.
I want to be absolutely pea green, really I do. I want some far-off day to watch my grandchildren gambol in the park unencumbered by oxygen tanks. I want to be gleaming clean inside and out, from the organic moisturiser on my face to the uncontaminated state of my internal organs. I love the idea of polishing my woodwork with a mixture of beeswax and good old calorie-burning elbow grease. Love the idea. I wash our clothes in slightly greying eco- laundry liquid and I absolutely never iron.
But the big car is my guilty secret — or would be if it weren’t parked so conspicuously outside the front door — a tatty gas-guzzling camper which, in its defence, doubles as our holiday home. The little car is a VW Lupo, the tiniest I could find to compensate for the van. It does a gadzillion miles to the gallon. Of petrol. And there’s the rub. I do know that the cleanest way to travel in London is by public transport, but most of my journeys would take treble the time. It’s not possible to dash out by bus to collect one child from a piano lesson and drop another at swimming while cooking supper with my third hand. In fact, it’s not possible to dash by bus full stop. But I feel guilty and dirty, and not in an interesting way.
So I test-drive a G-Wiz, the entirely electric car you plug into a three-pin socket like a lamp. It charges over six hours to give you a range of 40 miles, less if you turn on the radio, say, or the fan, let alone the heater or, God forbid, go up a hill. Its dial has a cheerfully optimistic top speed of 50mph. Free parking in Central London and exemption from the congestion charge mean that more than 800 G-Wizes have been sold in the capital alone, but they are still unusual enough for people to point and smile and sometimes, let’s face it, jeer at you as you scuttle around the streets like a bug on coke.
My test drive waits for me in the heart of the City, airily parked next to a meter. The car is terribly small and so ugly that it has the appeal of the runt of a litter. It looks like a once-normal car that has had its sides squeezed so hard that the top’s popped out. In fact, even though it’s actually 2.64m (8ft 8in) long and 1.3m wide, it looks like one of my son’s toy cars.
I turn the ignition key. Nothing. The car is absolutely silent. I press the accelerator and the car urges forward in an eerily soundless way. I’m spooked. But after a mile or so, this sinister first impression gives way to respect. It’s fun to drive. It isn’t comfortable, but it nips in and out of traffic in a thoroughly unapologetic way. I admire its nerve and so decide to save up for one of my own.
By the time I’ve found the necessary readies, the Government has withdrawn grants for electric cars so I have to find a further £1,500 to make up the full price of £6,999. I sell a small child and get on to the internet. The online ordering process is clear and simple. Unfortunately, it has many of the downsides of online ordering, too, as I enter that dreamlike virtual shopping zone that lures you into ordering trousers from the Toast catalogue even though you’re only 5ft 1in. The screen asks me what colour I’d like my new car. It takes a second to click “rainforest green”, some subliminal thing at play here. I wake in the night in a cold sweat. What have I done? I drive black cars. I live in Camberwell, not Camberwick Green. I get on to the company first thing but, alas, too late. The die is cast.
Months later, it arrives. The delivery man shows me how to charge it and top up the battery with water. I whiz him to the station and hurry home to inspect my new purchase in private. It’s sweet really. And I don’t much mind the colour. But what the delivery man hasn’t told me is that in the months between test drive and delivery the car has shrunk. In fact, it is alarmingly tiny. How on earth will I fit the kids in, I wonder. Or the weekly shop. And why on earth didn’t I wonder about this earlier.
My children are 8, 10 and 13. At first, Will, the eldest, appears to solve the problem by refusing to get into it at all. He stands, arms folded, and eyes the little green car with disdain. “You are never to pick me up from school in that,” he instructs me. “I’ll look a complete muppet.” He eventually agrees to accept the odd lift on condition that I don’t grin, which apparently compounds the whole nauseating uncoolness of the thing.
But the younger children are thrilled. They fit perfectly in the back seats, with plenty of room for a refusenik in the front. We spend a happy afternoon taking all the local kids for rides. I am high on smug self-satisfaction and lecture them all sternly on the perils of global warming as we scoot round the block. They discuss what to call it. “How about Froggy?” says one. “Or Buggy?” says another. “How about Bogey?” says Will.
Next morning I set off for the supermarket. I am nearly undone by my own bright-greenness as I have five chunky plastic boxes for my shopping to save on plastic bags. But the car is a triumph; if I put the back seats down, all five stack on top of each other so long as I don’t mind my croissants being crushed.
Later, I squash my anxious partner into the passenger seat for our first serious trip. He is 6ft 2in and not comfortable. We discover that if he moves the seat back a little his head only scrapes the roof, rather than being entirely compressed by it. “It’s not very cool, is it?” he says. I ignore this, and tell him to look hard so nobody laughs at us. We set off. It is pouring with rain and the little car steams up so rapidly that I start to panic and rub the windscreen with my spectacles cloth. If I turn on the fan, will we be able to get home? I ask my partner but he is too busy chuckling to notice. “Look hard,” I hiss at him. He chuckles harder.
However, the trip is a success. The car is so quiet you can hear people sniggering at you over the clear sound of the stereo. We enter the congestion zone and park just off Oxford Street, where I experience a quite shocking frisson as I walk away without dropping half my housekeeping into the meter — at 45 you take your thrills where you can. We pop into Selfridges, as if it’s our corner shop; just like that.
And later that day we have a further breakthrough: Will consents to be driven to the dentist. Two dudes lounging against the wall in Brixton call out as we drive past. I’m delighted. “Hear that?” I say to my son. “They think it’s a really cool car!” “No, Mum. That’s not what they said,” he replies grimly, and sinks low in the front seat.
So it’s not unadulterated joy. I must admit that as I sit chafing at exhaust level behind a smelly white van, or get tooted at yet again as I pull oh-so-slowly away from the lights, I wonder who exactly I’m doing this for. I’d prefer a Porsche, too, as it happens.
And I use the car for journeys I didn’t even know I had to make. To some extent having a green car is so easy on the conscience that you make less healthy decisions; the fact that I have changed to a green car to lessen the impact of my carbon footprint means I now leave no real footprints of any kind, as I drive everywhere and so I am not only smug but fat.
It’s also less comfortable than your average run-around, which is fine if you’re into a sort of hair-shirt brand of green. It’s slower than your average run-around, too, but that’s mainly because you have to stop a lot to answer questions about it. Boy-racers try to burn me up at traffic lights. They succeed. And if I use the heater, it reduces my range by ten miles, so I have to warm myself in the righteous glow of doing my bit for saving the planet instead. Small consolation for looking a complete muppet, I agree.
For more information or to buy a G-Wiz, visit www.goingreen.co.uk/store/content/gwiz
