I got a really interesting email from Sheila Hayman who has just written an interesting book about how a “normal” person is dealing with the challenges of global warming. I asked her to write a bit more about herself and her book and here is what she sent me.

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What do you do if you find yourself, over the course of a decade, more and more convinced of the need to make principled changes, sacrifice your petty comforts, and crusade to make others do the same –

– but meanwhile discover you’re still married to the same person you always were, and he thinks everything is just fine the way it is?

You have two options; get divorced, or see the funny side. I knew many years ago that my husband and I were different; the choice was whether to decide this meant ‘fundamentally incompatible’, or ‘two halves of a perfect Platonic whole’ – and by the way, try lightening up. The second option sounded cheaper, and easier on the children.

My husband was horribly confused by it all. He expected to share his declining years with the woman who drove a 1968 Pontiac Firebird ragtop, and thought nothing of flying the Atlantic for a wedding. Suddenly he finds himself shackled to a gloomy Cassandra who mainlines ‘Permaculture Monthly’ and goes round shouting at the children to turn off the lights. But somehow he survived, and responded to it all with English pragmatism. I decided we had to compost; he built me a compost bin. I moaned every time he switched on the dryer; he put up a clothes line (and hung the clothes on it).

Meanwhile, I began writing it as a comic novel, a relatively harmless vent for my frustrations. It ended up taking years, as novels will, and meanwhile I’d acquired a mass of fascinating information (80% of the world’s buttons are made in one city in China; scientists have identified a cow that gives naturally low-fat milk, and called her Marge…) and a slew of bizarre enthusiasms and magazine subscriptions that I felt an inexplicable compulsion to share.

So the book needed a web site as well. And the book became Mrs Normal Saves the World, and the web site is called MrsNormal.com. It’s just that; stuff to add a few jokes along the path to virtue, sort out the confusions of ordinary people trying to tramp it, and catalyze them into doing something. Because we can all do something, even if it’s not something huge.

In the book, the marriage almost implodes, and her children are almost terminally alienated, but in the end, Mrs Normal is revealed to be heroic, albeit not in the way she expects (it’s a comedy, after all). And they all love her more than ever, and everything is as peachy as it can be.

Well, I wrote it. I had a right to make it end like that. History has yet to reveal what will happen to the real Mrs Normal. Log on and find out…

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It sounds like a really interesting read, and I might serve as a good guide for other “normal” people ready to make the switch to a more sustainable way of living. Check out her website here MrsNormal.com.