Emma, 11th November 2009
I can’t stand this situation any longer. I’ve decided to leave him. He’s getting suspicious, asking where I go with Katy on my trips up to town. I can hardly tell him I’m seeing Biff as he doesn’t even know that I know her so well, though we’ve seen each other from time to time across group meetings and exchanged a few rolls of the eyes as the others get more carried away than normal. It would be good timing because Biff has broken off her relationship with Milo, saying that was getting too intense. I know how she feels. He acts as though we’re his, all part of some great crusade to achieve the perfect lifestyle. It’s like he’s Noah and we’re Noah’s wife and daughter shut up in the ark with him. God, if I ever see another wood burner again it will be too soon. I’m longing for a fillet steak, nice clothes, killer heels on expensive shoes, pavements instead of fricking bark chippings, disposable nappies and central heating, not necessarily in that order. This little cottage in the woods is no rural idyll but neither is it the centre of the revolution, as he would like me to believe.
‘We change the world one step at a time,’ he told me last week when I called him on it.
Yeah, but it’s not him scraping baby poo off cloth nappies and washing them in the tub by the back door. I feel like I’ve travelled back in time to the Victorian era. When he gets home from his work for the Forestry Commission, he makes a great show of saying, ‘Hey, Ali, let me do that. You can make a start on dinner.’ He takes the basket and hangs the washed cloths around the fireguard as if that’s the hard part. No, you idiot, that’s the easy bit. You missed all the backbreaking, disgusting work while you were out tree-hugging. And does he care that the nappies give Katy a rash and I can never get them dry quick enough at this time of year? No, Mr Save-the-world-but-not-his-own-family is unmoved by any of that.
I’ve done all I can here and, more to the point, we’re never going to see eye to eye on Katy’s upbringing. He wants all this back-to-nature stuff with which I’ve rapidly fallen out of love since Katy: no inoculations, no records, no health visitors, no contamination with the modern world. Forget that. Back to nature meant half of under-fives dying of what are now preventable diseases. My daughter is getting the best that the NHS can offer. I’m not playing Russian roulette with measles and mumps. Plus inoculation only works if a high enough proportion of the population participates; it’s a parent’s social duty to see their children get their vaccinations. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, mate. It’ll do you a great deal more good than the weed you grow.
OK, decision made. I’m out of here. I don’t need much. I left most of my stuff in London in the flat. Fortunately, he has no idea about that. I’ll just grab Katy’s things and then I’ll be on the train to civilisation. She’s too young to miss him and he has never taken that much interest in her, as he is on fire for the world, not one little citizen of the planet. He’ll probably be relieved to see the back of us once he gets used to the idea. We will significantly reduce his carbon footprint by leaving. I’ll get a decent childminder and report back to the office. There’s a training conference in a few weeks’ time that my line manager wants me to attend, so that can be my new start. I’ll put in for a post near home, rather than out in the field. Sanity will be restored to my life.