The Green Weekend has come and gone. It’s been a great success, by all accounts. Shop-keepers and café proprietors appreciate the extra business (even those who’d happily vote for nuclear power and badger baiting) at a time of year when there’s bugger-all else going on. There was quite a run on bobble hats. Giant Rizlas couldn’t be had for love nor money. And a bloke with a pedal-powered rickshaw was doing good business by ferrying people from one end of Sir Bernard’s Square to the other. I got him to take two fat friends and a week’s shopping up to Dodnaze; that wiped the smile off his face.

Local pressure groups had stalls in the square. Why pay exhorbitant heating bills, the crowds were asked, when they could harness the power of the sun? Yes, I can see that solar power makes sense in a place like Milltown, with its sunny winters and Meditteranean-type climate. But not everyone agrees. Sir Bernard Ingham, for example, is paid by the nuclear industry to think deeply about the future of the planet. If a man of his long experience has reservations about solar power, the rest of us ought to listen. We’ve got to face up to the truth, no matter how unpalatable it may be: solar power is just not as sustainable as the tree-huggers like to suggest. I happened to leave my solar powered torch on charge by mistake, and the next day the weather was cloudy and dull. Don’t tell me that’s just coincidence.

And if you listen to some of those cock-eyed optometrists we hear so much about, wave power is being touted as the Next Big thing. Poppycock... once you start sucking energy out of the waves, the seven oceans of the world will soon be as flat as millponds. That’ll give Surfers Against Sewage something to think about, instead of moaning about the odd turd floating about in their face masks.

We were told that the Men of the Trees would make an appearance over the weekend. But they had to cancel (a bad experience with a blackthorn, apparently) and their place was taken by the Men of the Shrubs, a shadowy organisation with paramilitary links to the Men of the Hardy Perennials. A short address by arboreal activist, Theresa Green, asked us all to think twice about felling trees. "Would we cut trees down so blithely if we could hear them screaming?", she asked. Well, we might, if they screamed all the fucking time and kept us awake at night.

Another raving harpy was laying into the fur trade, with some misguided guff about donkey jackets. "Think of the poor donkeys", she bleated. But no-one mistreats donkeys any more. Even the Spanish - a people not noted for their animal welfare - have stopped throwing donkeys out of belltowers during their fetes and ferias. The donkey-thowing business has - quite literally - gone underground. Now the locals throw donkeys down lifts and mine-shafts, which allows even the most sensitive holdaymakers to work on their tans.

Of course, once you advertise a green weekend, you tend to attract the lunatic fringe too. A ‘Honk if You Love Peace and Quiet’ campaign had a mixed reception. And the ‘Put The Landfill Site Where The Poor People Live’ petition is yet to reap rewards. But give it time.

Let’s be straight about this. "Looking after the planet for future generations" makes a useful, if meaningless, slogan. It’s done the nuclear industry no harm. But I’d be more concerned about saving the planet if these self-appointed ‘greens’ could answer just one simple question: what on earth have those future generations ever done for me? Hmmmm?