After school I find Mum frying meaty quarter-pounders, like I’ve never told her it’s ozone-irresponsible to fill the world with methane-making cows.
Mum, I tell her again, going vegan is the single biggest thing we can each do about the climate crisis.
I explain how the methane and stuff is why we’re getting hotter and hotter and we’ll need plenty of Factor 50 for the summer.
She’ll understand when she watches my new YouTube channel, although I can’t decide whether to call it Diary of an Eco Warrior or Diary of an Eco Worrier, except I’m definitely doing my first video as a prose pantoum.
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Dad says he’ll talk to Mum about the vegan thing, about it being the single biggest thing we can do to stop frying the planet.
When she agrees to try it until Easter, starting on Ash Wednesday, I give her a big hug and shout Yay, Lentils for Lent, Mum!
I decide I’m more Worrier than Warrior and tell Mum we don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children.
She stops chopping her onions and goes Children, Catriona? and I say No No No Mum don’t worry, I’m only seventeen, and she gets all teary, but it’s probably the onions.
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Dad has seconds of Mum’s Ash Wednesday lentil lasagne and says we’re giving Malaga a miss this year and going camping near Abernethy instead.
Mum laughs, says we’ll be alright for water, what with the rain, and Millets have a sale so she’ll get a twenty-litre jerrycan, and I say it’ll have to be metal.
Then I announce I’m applying to do environmental science at Utrecht, not English at Edinburgh, and Mum gets teary again and this time it isn’t the onions.
And I say Oh Mum I’ll come home to see you, on the train of course, which will cost a fortune but not cost the earth, but we all have to be responsible ’cos if I have kids one day, I want them to see real polar bears and tigers, not just in old David Attenborough programmes.
~
Mum says she’s doing her bit, what with finding a metal jerrycan on Amazon because Millets didn’t have any.
I tell her we’d better stock up on Factor 50 because, forget the rain, they reckon this summer will be the hottest since records began, even in Abernethy.
I sit her down and explain how her grandchildren will need more than old wildlife programmes and soft-toy tigers: they’ll need polar bears who don’t have to swim hundreds of miles because they’re hungry, glaciers that stay icy, jungles jumping with tree frogs and tamarin monkeys, rivers fizzing with kingfishers, not chemicals.
When, finally, she watches my Pantoum for the Planet on my YouTube channel Mum promises no more meaty quarter pounders, no more meat at all, and I give her an extra big hug and this time both of us are crying.
Cover photo credit: Polly Pullar
Chris Cottom
Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield and once wrote insurance words. His winning entry in the Off the Rails 3 Minute Story Competition was read aloud to passengers on the Esk Valley Railway between Middlesbrough and Whitby. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.