I wasn’t very good with girls when I was at school. Attracting them wasn’t the problem; most schoolgirls, in my experience, would happily lock lips with any boy in possession of a driving license and a fake ID. The problem was, once I had them, I never really knew what to do with them.

When you spend your days almost exclusively with other boys, playing sports, Playstation, and sports on the Playstation, interspersed with the odd bit of illicit drinking in Regent’s Park, the prospect of being expected single-handedly to entertain an attractive female, possibly for whole hours at a time, is a faintly terrifying one.

Most of the time, I failed miserably. My first ever date was lunch at Pizza Hut (‘all you can eat lunchtime buffet, only £5.99!’) followed by ninety minutes in the back row of an otherwise entirely empty cinema, watching people being killed by a giant tidal wave.

The relationship didn’t last. Nor had I improved much a couple of years later, when I took a very pretty girl to a very expensive lunch at a very sophisticated Japanese restaurant, only to discover that we were the only patrons.

We spent the next two hours listening to our awkward small talk (‘sunny, today, isn’t it?’) echoing around the enormous room while a bored-looking waitress hovered twelve inches away, interrupting every two minutes to ask whether we wanted the bill yet. I’m not sure I ever saw that girl again, either.

I struck gold in my first year of sixth form. After spending six hours wandering around Oxford on an open day, I invited an acquaintance who lived nearby to have dinner with me at Chiang Mai Kitchen on the High Street. It was possibly the most romantic evening of my life: a beautiful medieval building; a quiet corner of a small, wood-panelled room filled with beautiful couples gazing devotedly into each other’s eyes; light, witty conversation over an exquisite prawn curry and a bottle of Riesling, followed by a night of passionate fumbling atop New College Mound.

I was in love – not with the girl, who soon faded away into ‘let’s still be friends’- but with the restaurant.

I was so enraptured by the memory of that happy evening that for almost three years afterwards I never went back, because it could never be quite as good as I remembered.

But this week I did. Chiang Mai is a Thai place hidden down an alleyway off the High Street opposite Nero’s, and you could easily go through your entire time in Oxford not even realising it existed. It’s in a rickety wooden building that used to be a Private Hall, with a wonderful giant wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been changed in five hundred years.

We went on a Monday lunch. This is generally the quietest time of the week for restaurants, but there were three other tables occupied, one by a large and rowdy group of tutors discussing the merits of nuclear energy versus renewables. Not quite the same atmosphere as last time, then.

The food was still good though. Steamed pork dumplings came wrapped in a wrinkly batter that made them look like testicles afflicted by a particularly nasty venereal disease, but they tasted great, as did vegetable spring rolls dipped in some kind of sugary sauce. Minced chicken with basil, chilis and an oyster sauce was fiery enough to justify the two chillis warning symbol on the menu.

The only slightly duff note was a dish of stir-fried squid with garlic and pepper: a steaming mound of white tentacles which wobbled on the plate, and had a disconcertingly slimy texture. This, I feel, is the wrong way to serve it; squid is just one of those foods that should always be deep-fried in batter, like Scottish Mars Bars.

There’s a cheap lunch menu, but the best time to go is undoubtedly dinner, when you can gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes and dream happily of the night to come.

7.30 am. The army trucks rolled up into the square. Troops of fully-armoured riot police offloaded and took station. As I looked on, I could feel the uncomfortable dampness of my sweaty t-shirt against my back – but maybe that was more a result of the 30 degree heat that never relented.

I’d arrived in Honduras during the military coup of President Zelaya, so the country’s second city and financial capital, San Pedro Sula, was on high alert. The previous night had borne a 6pm curfew to stem potential gang violence. In any case, I was sure that I’d read that San Pedro had the second highest murder rate in the world. So, if anything, the presence of the riot police made me feel more secure.

Not that first impressions backed my preconceptions, mind you. Despite the armed guards outside every bank and the 8ft jail bars around every home, the overwhelming feel of the city was not of danger, simply ‘American’; but a laid-back, Caribbean kind of American. In fact, the whole country seemed to delight in megahighways and fast food joints, and every town and corner shop was ‘sponsored’ by both Coca Cola and Pepsi!

Yet that’s part of the reason I was there: to enjoy and explore the ‘differentness’ Honduras had to offer. To me, stretching outside your comfort zone to embrace and relish contrast makes for the real thrill of travel.

Indeed, taking an impulsive bus ride to a town I’d never heard of, missing the ‘stop’ and ending up in a Grand-Theft-Auto-esque run-down beachside city in the shadow of night is something I’d dread at home, but enjoy (with hindsight) when abroad!

Equally, local food is something to indulge in. I still miss balaeadas – the Honduran flour tortilla, refried bean and scrambled egg snack that made a cheap and tasty meal, and the crimson-coloured banana soft drinks that suggested Latin American food-colouring regulations are nowhere near as strict as ours.

Such variety of life was no more evident than in the Mesoamerican cloud forest in which I was on a biodiversity research expedition – the main focus of my trip. Here, stick insects the length of your arm, transparent frogs and finger-length crickets that made a finger-lickin’ treat were among the natural highlights. And I shall always remember the night hikes on which every step yielded a novel invertebrate or amphibian that looked stolen from a sci-fi movie! In contrast, collecting and measuring over 1200 leaves and rolling balls of horse excrement constituted the mundane, but necessary reality of biological research.

Accessing data in the remote field is a physical challenge in itself. We climbed up near vertical canyons, scrambled along river beds like kids in the Wacky Warehouse, and got drenched by tropical ‘power shower’ downpour. All on a diet of cabbage soup, rice and kidney beans that hungered us to the extent of naming the best-looking quartet of mangy feral chickens around camp the ‘edible four’. Perhaps local food isn’t something to indulge in after all!

But as I swung in my hammock in the remote forest camp, enjoying nature’s music accompanied by a babbling, thriving stream, I realised that the planet we all share is so valuable and so fascinating. Whether that be the contrasting anthropogenic infrastructure and culture that can add so much to our travels, or the natural splendour we too often take for granted, we should admire the variety of life rather than fight over it.

Life is (to steal, and slightly modify, a line from Kanye West) becoming faster, cheaper, quicker, shoddier… and as disposable as the carton your McDonald’s fries come in.

Shopping is no longer about what we need, but what we decide we want: over Christmas, Tesco launched the VX1i ‘Party Phone’, which comes SIM-free as an alternative second phone, so that you don’t risk losing your more expensive one during enthusiastic dancing – it’s the ultimate throwaway phone for night-time partying.

The most shocking story of our disposable nature, of this new decade, comes from the NY Times, alleging that bin bags full of clothes that had not been sold by an H & M in America had been found slashed with razors and disposed of outside, so that they would be rendered unwearable.

That’s a pretty extreme example, but when it comes to clothes, we seem to be environmentally and ethically at our worst, without even realizing it. Fashion magazines used to revolve around fashion seasons – winter and summer – and we’d dress and buy accordingly. Now, we’re offered new, affordable apparel every few weeks – we can buy a ‘capsule’ wardrobe for our two week holiday, and not mind if we leave behind a few items, whilst the celebrities that litter the fashion magazines are never

seen in the same outfit twice (and if they do, the photos are printed side by side with damning red rings, citing their reusing crime). We are becoming a society obese on the clothing equivalent of fast food.

A new action plan was launched at the beginning of last London Fashion Week to make fashion more sustainable and less environmentally damaging, by Defra Minister Lord Hunt. Environmentally, clothing and textiles have an extremely high impact, exacerbated by the high volumes of clothes we consume in the UK. The Defra ‘Sustainable Clothing Roadmap’ has brought together over three hundred organisations, from high street retailers, to designers and textile manufacturers to battle the environmental impacts of ‘throwaway fashion’. Companies and some of the biggest names in the industry have signed up to take action to make a significant difference to the environmental footprint and social inequalities, which blight some of the production and retail processes of consumer fashion.

We buy, we wear (maybe once, maybe not at all) and we replace, on an epic scale. In the UK alone about 2 million tonnes of clothing, with the enormous value of £23 billion, is purchased every year, with the discount fashion sector (characterised by low-cost, short-lifetime garments) making up one-fifth of the UK market. This is an area of the shopping sector that has grown, beyond belief, and beyond most people’s expectations. What’s worse is that, according to DEFRA, 74% of the 2 million tonnes ends up in landfill every year, when it could be recycled or reused. Instead, it sits, attempting to biodegrade in a mass of synthetic fabrics and cheap material.

Obviously, a lot of the blame has fallen upon the ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em quick’ retailers, and whilst, obviously, the more expensive end of the market may be just as guilty, you’re far more likely to hold onto a t-shirt that you had to scrimp and save for. In the past five years, with the rise of ‘value retailers’ such as Primark, H&M and TK Maxx, not to mention supermarket fashion ranges which you can buy on your weekly shop, the price of clothing in the UK has plummeted by up to 25 per cent. For this reason, textiles are fast becoming the biggest waste product in the UK.

TRAID is a textile recycling charity, aiming to divert clothing from landfill sites and back out into the public. Leigh McAlea, TRAID’s Communication Manager, said that TRAID ‘has noticed a rise in cheaper quality and poorly made clothing over the past two years. The majority of this clothing comes from high street fast fashion retailers such as Primark. It is very common to get clothing on the belt from low cost retailers which has never been worn and the labels still attached.’ The fact that it is cheap doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t reuse it, what is true however is that the reuse value is negligible as such cheaply made clothing wears so quickly. This of course impacts on the amount of textile going to landfill as more people buy more clothing that simply isn’t made to last.

According to Leigh, ‘It also marks a trend that TRAID is sorting more quantity for less quality’, which it appears, we are doing as consumers as well. The poor quality of our cheap fashion fixes has caused the bottom to drop out of the recycled textile industry and the value of recycled material has fallen by 71 per cent over the past fifteen years.

Low prices encourage waste – who hasn’t blown £15 in Primark for that one-off bop outfit that, more often than not, is in the end used as a sponge for those hastily prepared JCR ‘cocktails’ and thrown away at the end of the night. Not so far removed from that, were the dresses that melt in the wash that were last year’s environmentally friendly innovation to hit the world of fashion. They were the fruit of the Wonderland project, a unique collaboration between a pioneering British designer and scientists at the country’s leading universities, which sought a solution to the ‘Primark effect’. The team created plastic dresses – made out of a similar material to washing capsules – that disappear on contact with water, with the aim of drawing attention to the problem of waste plastic.

This is all very good and well, but we all like new clothes – and there’s still not anything very sexy about being dressed in clothes you’ve had for years, seldom washed because you want to preserve them for as long as possible. There is no green language that is socially acceptable and fun. Who wants to be an ‘environmentalist’, dressing in hemp and telling everyone that if you don’t wash your hair for a month, it actually starts to self-clean?

Sexing up recycling is always going to be a tall order, but things are being done to change environmentalism’s image. Clothes-swapping has been re-branded as ‘swishing’ and it’s all the rage. There’s an official website and the International Day of Swishing has just passed. Having less of better stuff is a more tasteful, healthy and moral option. The alternative is ‘fast fashion’, which is tempting, briefly appetizing, but ultimately not very satisfying. 

Born and raised in Uganda under the rule of Idi Amin, Margaret Sentamu came to England in 1974 with her husband, John, who was taking up a place at Cambridge University. Since then she has worked in diversity and recruitment and supports numerous charities, including the Mothers Union and Traidcraft plc. In 2005, John was appointed as the 97th Archbishop of York, but even though they now live in a 13th century palace, Margaret certainly has not lost touch with what’s going on in the world. Taking time out of her jam-packed schedule, she told me about her eventful life and her current interests.

Most readers will know of the dictator Idi Amin through the critically-acclaimed film, The Last King of Scotland. However, if you thought its atrocities had been embellished for the sake of the box office, you would be sadly mistaken, as when I asked Margaret what she thought of it, she replied, “I thought it was quite true, quite close to the script as it were.” Forrest Whitaker’s frightening portrayal of him was remarkably real; “when you were with him, he was a very charming man, but obviously the minute you left the room, you could be targeted. He was absolutely ruthless.” Just as Mugabe’s presidency began positively, before going “perilously sour”; so Amin was initially elected by popular vote; by people who “wanted change, but hadn’t bargained for the kind of person they were letting in.” Both dictators had the rest of the world, particularly Britain, fully supporting their rise to power. Only later, Ugandan people and the rest of the world realised they had “unleashed a monster”. The country became a dictatorship after Amin seized full control in a military coup in January 1971, following the same pattern as several past dictators. “History repeats itself again and again…people think, the next leader is bound to be better than the one we have at the moment, so they put the new one in, without having done their homework.”

“You can’t just sit there waiting for bad things to happen”

Obviously, his rule affected Margaret’s day-to-day life; how could it not when “he could just wake up one morning and say, ‘I’m going to ban women from wearing short skirts.'” Almost every single family had experienced his brutality, or knew someone who had “disappeared”. Husbands would be abducted on their way to work; families would be lucky if the body was ever found. Despite this constant uncertainty, Margaret says she did not live in a permanent state of fear. In these situations, the human spirit finds a “survival mechanism” which enables people to carry on as ‘normal’. As she admits, “you can’t just sit there waiting for bad things to happen.”

However, just three weeks after her marriage to John, Margaret was to experience the arbitrary cruelty of Amin’s rule for herself, when her new husband was abducted and imprisoned after being accused of helping a colleague to flee the country. During this time, having no one to trust or talk to apart from her close family, Margaret says that her Christian faith “really kicked in”.

Indeed, the Anglican Church, established a hundred years before, was a constant source of resistance to Idi Amin’s rule and helped many Ugandans to survive the atrocities, due to its emphasis on gathering together, whether in prayer or in support of one another. Margaret believes that it is currently doing the same thing in Zimbabwe, providing comfort as well as quiet resistance. This has not been missed by President Mugabe, who ordered police to lock up churches over Christmas so that members could not congregate within them. This is not the only difficulty that the Church faces, as it has become split between those members who side with the regime and those who oppose it. I asked Margaret if she thought that the succession of corrupt African leaders may be due to the vacuum left by the colonial powers, but she heartily disagrees. “The colonial past is just that, a past, and it ought to be treated as a past.” She cites Ghana as an example of a country that has only had independence for forty odd years, yet is thriving. So, what is the answer? “Africa needs to take responsibility for its own governance.” Despite some notable exceptions, the taste of power seems just too tempting, and without strong democratic safeguards in place, the general rule is: once a president, always a president.

“I don’t think we’re very discerning about who we put on a pedestal”

“Education in developing countries is very important because it opens up opportunities.” Luckily for Margaret, her father, a civil servant, believed in the importance of education for girls, so after school she went on to study Literature in English at Makerere University, Kampala, where she met John. As part of her course, she read a great range of authors, and this was to have interesting results when she came to England. Literature had given her all these ideas, yet though she may have read Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, she had never actually seen daffodils. Similarly, she sang hymns such as “In the Bleak Midwinter” in Uganda, yet had no notion of snow. “So suddenly I was in a country where all these things came to life…it was very exciting.”

Apart from being able to put objects to the names, on her arrival Margaret was struck by several other aspects of English life. Particularly shocking was the sight of people sleeping rough; “I don’t want to idealise Uganda, but in the Uganda I left then, the family structure was strong enough to ensure that this did not happen.” Of course, this may not be true now, as the AIDS crisis has left behind a huge number of orphans, who often end up on the streets. She was also so surprised by the number of people living by themselves in England, particularly those spending Christmas in isolation. African communities are with you from birth until death; “Your life is not your own. You’re who you are because of others and the community in which you are raised.” The same could be said of the Church, which was instrumental in helping the Sentamus settle quickly in England. “There is a given that you all belong to the same Christian faith and therefore you are all members of a wider Church family.”

Margaret is very involved with charities and takes a big interest in world affairs. Her main area of passion is women, her great desire is to “help women and children to achieve their potential.” As an equality and diversity consultant, she encourages companies to consider job applicants that they might be tempted to dismiss, whether they be female, disabled or of an ethnic minority. She is also a patron of Five Talents, a micro-finance initiative which gives small loans to women in developing countries to start businesses, 99.9% of which are quickly paid back. Margaret insists, “It is about giving women the opportunity to stand on their own feet.”

When it came to thinking of female role models, Margaret was hard-pressed to think of any current ones, although history seems to be full of them, like “Indira Ghandi, the first female prime minister of India; although she came from the Ghandi dynasty, there was some passion within her, wanting to make change.” Another would be Rosa Parks, an African-American in 1960s USA, whose actions inspired civil rights campaigners when she refused to move seats on a bus for a white person. Margaret admits that she could not have done the same; “I’m a real coward, I would have given in easily!” After this, no one else is forthcoming. As Margaret says, “we roll out people like Mother Teresa, but I’m not holy enough to lead a life of poverty, chastity and obedience!” However, she’d rather people admired Mother Teresa than the latest X-Factor winner, “I don’t think we’re being very discerning about who we put on the pedestal. I do wonder what some people have done apart from appear on ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!’ Britain’s celebrity culture seems to be more about changing one’s image than helping to make the world a better place.”

“your life is not your own”

The majority of women in the headlines these days seem to be one half of a “power couple”; think of the Sarkozys, the Obamas, the Clintons, the Sentamus? But Margaret sees this relatively new phenomenon as something worth applauding, “Of course you can succeed as a solo player, but increasingly, if you work as a team, you bring something more to the equation. I’m sure Barack Obama would tell you that he wouldn’t be where he is if it wasn’t for Michelle, and she’d say the same of him.” Team work is important in every kind of relationship, but in marriage particularly, “which is about protecting each other’s identity, but also encouraging each other to be able to flourish. You don’t want to be clones of each other!” Margaret wants to open women’s eyes up to how they can be perceived as people in their own right and not simply as someone’s wife. Somehow, I think Margaret may have upset quite a few of these assumptions in her time! But in so doing, she has only increased my conviction in the truth of the phrase, “Behind every great man, is a great woman.”