My real focus group scorned climate change

If you ever want to get in touch with the real world, try pretending to be a second world war GI. This is what I did the other weekend and it was quite an eye-opener. I don’t mean the stuff I learned about the correct procedure for debussing and advancing to contact from an armoured half-track — fascinating, obviously, though that was. I mean what I discovered about my fellow Living History re-enactors in the pub, afterwards, when we got on to the subject of impending ecological disaster.

‘Oh that? No, it’s a load of old bollocks that is,’ said my neighbour, and I did a double take. It has become something of a speciality of mine — ideological Tourette’s, my wife calls it — winding up friends, colleagues, dinner-party neighbours, anyone who’ll listen with my appalling and deeply outrageous views as a card-carrying global warming denier.

This crowd, though, clearly would be a tougher nut to crack. ‘Yeah, and another thing,’ I went on. ‘You realise “global warming” hasn’t even happened this millennium? We’ve now got global cooling?’ They did know this. They also knew that solar variation is mainly to blame, that green is the new red, that wind farms are an ugly con, and eco-taxes a terrible scam. ‘Look, I’m sorry, mate, but if you’re after an argument you’ve come to the wrong place,’ said my neighbour. ‘We all think the same as you.’

Now I concede that ten drinkers round a table in a Worcestershire pub is not a large sample. And I suppose you could argue that any man (or woman — we had those there too, serving us tea in their sexy US Red Cross outfits) who chooses to spend his weekends impersonating C Company, 82nd Recon, 2nd Armored Division, is on a different planet anyway.