“Good summer?” “Fantastic, actually. We had a wonderful walking holiday in the garden, then inverted the roof to collect the rain run-off and hooked it up to one of those super three-mega-watt home turbines from greenerthanthou.com at £5,999 minus packaging, and it’s been tremendous fun selling our surplus back to the Grid knowing that every unit it buys means unthawed pack ice for another thousand penguins.”

“Wow! Really? It’s just that I was driving past your place this morning and...”

“You were driving?”

“Well, pedalling, but your roof seemed to be exactly as it was before you flew off to Barbados.”

“Oh, that! Incredible. We offset the whole trip before we even walked to the airport. Then we spent a week monitoring methane sequestration at the main Bridgetown landfill and flew home with a month’s bananas at no extra carbon cost per banana. I did look into going by train and the Trans-Siberian’s per-passenger-kilometer climate impact is amazingly low. But the only way across the Bering Strait is by raft and it takes longer for a tree to grow to maturity up there on the tundra than it does for a plastic bag to biodeg. . .”

“Could I interrupt and ask if you think you’re one of the nine out of ten Brits who admit telling green lies to make out that you’re more environmentally conscious than you really are?”

“No idea what you’re talking about, but I bet that research was printed on paper. Yuk. Paper is inherently compromised, which is why I’m using word of mouth to recycle my low-energy cleaning lady. Want to give her a try?”