A trip to the seaside

Now that My Eco Self has more free time, Food Neurotic Friend takes me on a travel assignment to a newly redeveloped seaside town. There are a row of pretty painted beach huts along the beach. “This might be the perfect life” I say, “sitting in your beach hut with a laptop, watching the elements, listening to Radio 4.”
“So what Radio 4 programme have you enjoyed recently?” he asks, raising an eyebrow in intellectual scepticism.
“I was listening to the Today programme just the other day – very topical.”
I tune him out while the interior design vision for my beach hut comes to me. I decide to consult the small spaces editions of Living Etc and Elle Decoration for further advice. I am thinking shabby chic, with pink-striped ticking and calico with dusty rose repeats, and walls painted in environmentally friendly duck-egg blue paint.
“Do you think environmentally friendly paint is resistant to salt and wind?” I ask Food Neurotic Friend.
I try to engage him in an eco debate, asking if it’s more environmentally friendly to have to repaint a beach hut each year in eco-friendly paint with reduced chemicals, or to paint every few years with a more polluting paint, but FNF does not look interested in my interior design dilemma.