Chris Hines MBE

(Image: Steve Tanner)

Surfing has been used to sell everything from music and movies to beer and aftershave, but Chris Hines used it to sell clean seas when he co-founded Surfers Against Sewage. The Independent called it ‘Britain’s coolest pressure group’, while the BBC described it as ‘Some of the government’s most sophisticated environmental critics. In its first ten years, SAS helped deliver a £5.5 billion spend on clean up of the UK coast. In 2008 he was awarded an MBE for his efforts, which he reckons probably stands for Moaning Bloody Environmentalist.

He spent five years as Sustainability Director of the Eden Project, and now Chris inspires, catalyses and drives positive change through public speaking, broadcasting, writing, consulting and coaching. He also sits on the BBC’s Sustainability Advisory Group. Just before Christmas, we met for breakfast at the Blue Bar, a favourite with surfers on Cornwall’s north coast.

Martin: We were both at Eden, though not at the same time. Tim Smit once wrote to me that he believed marketing is the Devil’s art, but you’ve used marketing to improve the world. How did you do that at Surfers Against Sewage?

Chris: Surfers Against Sewage was formed in May 1990 and at that point surfing wasn’t mainstream, it was nothing like the level of an industry with the global reach that it has now. It was a small sport. But it’s like an adman’s dream – it’s used to sell everything from washing powder to cars; we even ‘surf’ the internet. What we did is that we blatantly used the image of surfing to sell the campaign for cleaner seas. We knew that they were never going to clean it up just for the surfers, but we realised that that imagery would allow us to get far greater coverage than we were due according to our slice of society. So within about three months of forming we had a whole page in the Daily Mirror because they could use the image of a surfer with a gasmask on. We just put our twang, the gasmasks and things, on top of the normal surfing imagery. That helped us get a Channel 4 documentary team following us for six months, and again, that was within a year of forming.

We wanted to lobby Ofwat, the financial regulator of the water industry, and the Director General Ian Byatt said ‘This isn’t really anything to do with me, you need to talk to the Environment Agency’ and we said ‘Well, no, because you control how the money is spent, and we’ve always said that we want to see it spent as efficiently as possible, and think the water companies aren’t doing that.’ And he replied ‘Well, I don’t really want to see you’ but we said ‘Well, we’re coming’.  So off we went to Birmingham, about ten of us in a minibus, and we had our 10-foot inflatable poo, our surfboards, our wetsuits, our gasmasks, and we walked through the streets of Birmingham to Ofwat’s city centre tower, and that was probably the only time that BBC Pebble Mill and Central TV could use the Beach Boys and imagery of surfing - and they did, blatantly: “You won’t believe what’s happened on the streets of Birmingham today – there’s surfers here.” So we suddenly went to millions of people using the surfing hook as the way of ramping up the issue which we wanted to talk about. If we’d just been beach-users or swimmers, we wouldn’t have got that coverage.

And at that time there was the Marine Conservation Society, and we got on very well with them, but they were ‘safe’. They were based in Ross-on-Wye, which is about as far away from the coast as you can get and, whilst academically they were saying ‘This is a terrible thing that’s happening to our seas’, and they were founded on the principle of someone having got ill, they weren’t in it – we were surfing in this stuff! We were surfing in a slick of human excrement. You look out here - this is Porthtowan Beach. I’ve got a House of Commons Select Committee report at home, which I gave written evidence to - and I was called to give oral evidence to the Select Committee - and in there it says ‘Mr. Hines raised the issue of their local beach Porthtowan, known by the locals as Porthtampon.’ And in the nineties, although it is still viewed as quite a radical sport, we were fringe, absolutely fringe, possibly regarded as drug-crazed hippies on the outer edges of society. But we were litmus paper, as one of us said ‘You know, if the surfers are going in and getting ill, then we can tell you other people are getting ill’.

I grew up with punk and early reggae coming through and that was quite influential on the way that I felt about stuff. I mean we were blissfully naive as well. We had no training in any of this, and we just did it through passion, through what we felt in our hearts and our minds. And I’d like to think we did it quite intelligently but absolutely, we used the image and music of surfing to put us on a playing league than was way bigger than the size of the population we represented.

Martin: John Grant was saying you almost need a bit of ‘Devil’s art’ to get these ethical brands in front of people that really need to see them. You need to make them sexy or interesting, and then people may dig into the issues. That’s apparent when you compare your approach to more traditional campaigning organisations. It’s not glamour so much as coolness - increased relevance to ordinary people. The story of surfers on the streets of Birmingham gives you a platform.

Chris: Yes, to talk about clean water. And also, importantly, that’s where all of those tourists that come to Cornwall live – that’s our tourist base. There was another moment where one of our members rang up and said ‘Look I write the scripts for the BBC’s Casualty. I’m a script-writer.  That’s what I do. And I’m a member of Surfers Against Sewage. Why don’t we work on a script together?’ Which we did, and we got 50 minutes on a Saturday night when 14 million people used to watch Casualty. They weren’t allowed to say Surfers Against Sewage, but the wardrobe department spent £2,500 to £3,000 buying our t-shirts and stickers and everything.  But it was absolutely our story. It was kind of a media piracy we were doing. And there was no way we could have afforded that coverage. Again, someone from EastEnders rang up and said ‘I work on the script, I’m an SAS member’ and an SAS watch was used on screen for ten seconds and that was our image. And we kept using that approach - some would come our way, some wouldn’t.

Also, we did a banned advert at one point. We had an ad production company come to us – Springhall Fanthorpe, they were called. They both used the water, one was a surfer and one was a sailor, and they said ‘Let’s try and do something for you. The best thing is that any advert you put out, you will be banned’, which is great because there’s no way SAS could ever afford to book and pay for a television advert. So they made this advert for us, £48,000-worth, but they just called in favours with the cameraman, the editing suite, and then we had this one minute advert. Under law, because we were mainly of a political nature, we weren’t allowed to pay for advertising, so we were banned. So we waited until the Tory party conference was on in Bournemouth and then we booked it into the cinema. And then we were able to say ‘SAS Show Banned Advert During Tory Party Conference’. And then because it was a news item, the news teams could show the whole advert. So our advert was then shown at no cost, on both channels, and then we went around every TV area, and we placed that ad in cinemas in every one.

I used to have a map of Britain on the wall, and I knew where all the different water companies were and another of the TV areas. So every time we set off around the country to do a little tour and demos, I would always do one in each TV area, because I knew there was no point in going to Bournemouth one day and Brighton the next, because they’re in the same region and they’ve already done the story. So you have to learnt how to work the media.

Martin: That was incredibly insightful. If you don’t mind me saying, you’re a born marketer!

Chris: Yes, but I don’t have a problem with that. So is marketing the Devil’s art? No it’s not! It’s an art. If the Devil uses it, then stuff the devil - we can do better. And if you’ve got a good story and you’re using the art of marketing, you’ll win. And we just need to all wake up to the fact. Because it’s brilliant - there’s amazing things out there. There are solutions to every environmental and social issue – there is an answer, there’s a way of doing things better. And everyone should be doing that. We should use the tools better. And guess what, we’ll win, because we’ve got the better story.

Martin: And what you were doing there with product placement, which would normally costs thousands of pounds – instead, you were using your network of people who believed in what you were doing, to achieve the same thing. That wasn’t transactional, there’s something much deeper going on, based on your purpose. But much of what you’re doing is PR, guerrilla marketing, theatre – when you put a giant inflatable turd on your back, and try to say hello to Tony Blair, you’re creating content. We’re always hearing that content is king these days.

Chris: And knowing your soundbite. So when I leapt over the fence at Carn Brea Leisure Centre, the media knew what we were going to do. So they would say ‘Tony Blair is going to be here’, and you’d say ‘OK where?’ And then they’d all be on their radios to each other saying ‘He’s not coming in the front entrance, we think he’s coming from the running track’, and then it’s ‘Come on, come on!’ Because they know that’s their story. So then you jump over the fence with the gasmask on your head, in your wetsuit, someone else lobs the inflatable poo over and you get within a yard. And then a hand comes on your chest from MI5 or whoever it is and they say ‘That’s close enough’. And then you say ‘Mr. Blair, whilst you’re in Cornwall, if you do a shit, it’s going straight in the sea. You do know that don’t you?’ And that’s all you need to say. If you do a poo - and guess what, all of us poo every day, if we’re healthy - it’s going in the sea. That’s it: soundbite. You don’t need to say any more, you don’t need to quote legislation, it’s that one sentence. That’s what it all comes down to. And there isn’t a sentence from the Devil’s team that is better than that. It’s that basic, really.

Chris campaigning in Westminster.

Martin: We talk about fishing where the fish are in marketing, and you’re doing that when you work out where the media are going to be.

Chris: But the media would contact us. I had one when John Gummer was Secretary of State. The media said ‘If we told you John Gummer was going to be at Bedruthan Steps tomorrow, what would you do?’ And I said ‘Well, we’d be there, wouldn’t we?’ And they’d say, ‘Well guess what? At 8.30 tomorrow morning, John Gummer’s going to be at Bedruthan Steps!’ So I found out about this at 3.30 in the afternoon, and I waited until 5.15 and then I faxed the Department of the Environment’s press office and say ‘We understand that John Gummer is going to be at Bedruthan Steps tomorrow. We, along with the media, we’ll be there and we’d like to talk to Mr. Gummer, and if he doesn’t meet with us, we and the media will be left to draw our own conclusions as to his real care for the environment’. And when we turned up in the morning, their Press Officer was absolutely seething. And we said ‘It’s nothing personal, but we’re going to use everything we can. And he came up, and we had to disappear into a little gift shop and have a private chat, but they all filmed us going in, and that’s what they wanted. So having that good relationship with people is important. We never had a single arrest.

Martin: It’s in line with Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, which inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among many others. You always come across as a very nice and personable guy; you’ve got very clear convictions, but you put them across in such an amiable way that I imagine it’s very hard for anyone to get angry with you, because your intentions are good, and you’re communicating your position in a civilized manner. 

Chris: There was a civil servant in the Department of the Environment that we had to influence the most. I was in Whitehall going to a meeting, and I bumped into him in Pret a Manger. He said he was sneaking off to watch Scotland play Brazil in the World Cup, and they lost only 1-0. Surfers put wax on their surfboards, and there’s a brand called Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax – ‘the best for your stick’! So I sent him a pack with a card saying ‘Really sorry about the match – thought I’d send you this.’ A couple of months later I went for a meeting with him, and his paperweight on his desk was the Mr. Zog’s. So every day while he operated and did his job, we were within two feet of him, we were in his eyeline the whole day. And everyone coming into his office would have said ‘What’s that?’ And obviously he did have a sympathy for us, otherwise he’d have just hurled it in the bin.  Again, people might say ‘The Department for the Environment, civil servants, they’re the devils…’ No they’re not. They’re just people like the rest of us. And actually if you can present the campaign and the story and the positive solution, then why wouldn’t you go there? Though for sure there’s vested interests.

Martin: I read Civil Disobedience again once Trump won, and there were immediate protests in New York and across America, and there was a line that reads ‘It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience’. It really is all about individuals, isn’t it? And at Eden, the view was that it’s not that companies are inherently bad, you have to work with companies to effect change.

Chris: Yes, who’s got the best distribution? Coca-Cola. They have. If you can get into the right brain parts with them, though it’s a difficult one to do.

Martin:  What about marketers inside corporations. If they’re like your scriptwriters on Casualty and EastEnders who want to try to use their position and skills to try to improve things, what sort of things could they do?

Chris: If you look at what happened with Brexit and Trump, on each of those, one side was doing really good guerrilla-level communications. They better understood who their market was, and they used imagery. You know, that £350 million to the NHS was a complete lie. That is slightly worrying now that we live in a time when you can say whatever you want, and then you just print a tiny little disclaimer, or you even immediately walk away from it. This whole post-fact world – if you go to hospital and you’ve got a serious illness, you kind of want facts, you don’t really want someone going ‘I don’t care about facts, but try this tablet’ - you will want experts when you really need experts. 

I think marketers should help people articulate and get those messages out, into the mainstream, and challenge some of the communications that exist. I think we will see a time when the model of mass-consumption is shifting. Someone was on the radio the other day – it was the head of an electrical retailer – and he was saying that in the future their business model is going to be providing a service, rental of your whole home IT system. From the moment the cable comes in, everything will all be done by them, and you won’t own any of that, you’ll pay a service contract. That’s Radio Rentals! So it’s taken us 20 or 30 years to come back to Radio Rentals! None of us used to own a television, but we’ve been conned into the fact that we have to buy televisions.

Martin: And that’s down to the need to grow, I guess. I saw a great quote by the environmentalist Edward Abbey: ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.’

Chris: He was a writer who wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang. Aw, yeah! The best!

Martin: It’s a brilliant summary of the absurdity of the notion of growth for growth’s sake. Growth with an end in mind, OK, but when I was talking to Rowan Williams we were talking about how companies start with a purpose but they then forget that and their objective changes simply to ‘growth’. So what’s your environmentalist take on growth?

Chris: Well, we’ve only got one planet so growth on the model we currently have isn’t sustainable, it can’t carry on.  If all 7 billion of us wanted to live like Americans we would need five planets, or like Europeans, it’s three planets. We’ve got one. And we can’t say to people ‘You can’t have what we’ve got’, so we have to work out how we live within the carrying capacity of one planet. And if we don’t, then stuff will go wrong. And we’re already seeing some stuff go wrong. We’ve not done a clever job on the environment, and I think the general public know that. And I think the general public will, given good leadership, react well. I think the reasons need to be put forward.

I think people generally know that [the Western way of living] isn’t making you happy. We’ve lost our communities, people are more isolated, and they’re less happy. We’ve got more products and things, but none of that actually makes us very happy. Tim Lang who is a professor of Sustainable Development and sat on the Sustainable Development Commission with Jonathon Porrit, believes there is a shift from value for money to values for money so that we know people aren’t being exploited.

We just had a very nice breakfast. Now, it wasn’t actually that huge, mine was just two eggs, some pine nuts and some spinach. It could quite easily have been bigger, but we paid a reasonable price for it and it’s good quality food. And I know that the eggs will have come from around here, the pine nuts probably won’t have, but it’s been cooked here and the Blue Bar where we’re sat now, it’s at its capacity. There was a moment when they tried to grow, they tried to replicate, and they had a Blue Bar in Falmouth and a Blue Bar in St. Ives, and what they actually said was ‘Those don’t work really, we can’t replicate what we’ve got here. So this is it’. And guess what – ‘this is it’ is just fine. They employ a whole load of staff, they make good money, they provide good service. In the summer you might have to wait for a table because everybody wants the food. And what’s wrong with that? That’s its capacity. 

I think there is a whole thing around spirituality, and I don’t mean religious, I mean connecting with and remembering that we are of this planet. We’re not, as a species, anything very different from other ones, we’ve just been quite a clever one. Though some of our species haven’t been that clever! But we are connected, we’re animals and the health of the planet dictates the health of us.  So back to carrying capacity: we have to live within it. And can we? For sure we can!

Martin: Is growth always going to be with us, but how businesses grow might change, such as along rental lines, as you say? So growth is OK, as long as it isn’t messing up the planet?

Chris: Yeah, and in that example, growth will come from the company that does rentals the best. And those that go with the Radio Rentals model, they need to grow that as the option that pushes [out] the others who are trying to sell you single use items that fail. Built in obsolescence is ridiculous. How’ve we allowed that one to happen?

But there’s growth in making something and having a really good repair and maintenance, and then the ability to decommission it, take it back into its constituent parts – Ellen McArthur has been doing loads of work (and lots of other people have as well) around the circular economy and things like that – that’s how you grow. So there are all these jobs that are available, and some of them are probably more skilled. If you want a skilled, well paid economy, you have people who can repair your television, you don’t just have people whose job it is to sell you one, and then put it in the bin. 

Martin: So it’s not growth in itself that’s bad.

Chris: No, it’s consumption-based growth.

Martin: It’s resource-hungry, waste-heavy growth that’s the issue. We must find different ways to grow that don’t have this negative impact.

Chris: In our very early days, when SAS first formed, we said that we wanted to see a cessation of the discharge of untreated sewage to sea, we wanted to see both the liquid and solid content looked at as a resource rather than a waste. And when you do that you say ‘OK we put it back on the land and that’s what our vegetables grow on’. If we keep pumping it into the sea we’re depleting what’s on the land, so we have to get those nutrients from somewhere, so do we then go artificial? [No], you build the industry around putting it back on to the land.

And the same with water. If you’ve got a high quality final effluent, you can use it as a cooling water. Anglian Water did that. They had a stream that was running dry as it was being used to cool an energy plant. So they took the waste from the sewage treatment works, treated to primary, secondary UV, and they used that to cool the energy plant, so they didn’t have to extract [so much] from the stream. That’s just being intelligent. But putting that together was growth. There were clever people doing that and building the system to allow that to happen. But we do have to have a societal basis where we all understand that we’re all in it together, and at the moment we’re not. Our politics drives us more and more into a split society. And absolutely you can understand if someone is struggling to have a roof over their head and stay warm, things like environmentalism are nice-to-haves. But that requires leadership; genuine, deep, proper leadership.

Chris surfing (Image: Sarah Bunt)

Martin: There was something in the Guardian recently saying that it’s only relatively recently that politicians have focused on the economy as a message.

Chris: That doesn’t surprise me.

Martin: And you’re a proponent of the triple bottom line – social, environmental and economic. Do you have to get the economic bit right first in order to get people to think about the other two?

Chris: You have to try to do all three. Although we do have a lot more money to put into it than we might think – the super-rich don’t need everything that they’ve got. We could have a more fair society and we could build a better infrastructure, and that’s partly what we’ve got to do. So there is a bit of a redistribution of wealth needed.

But you’ve got to make it economically stack up, yeah, because otherwise you’d go bust, and that’s probably the least sustainable thing you could do, because then all the infrastructure that you’ve built is a waste. So [be aware that] everything has an environmental impact and a social impact. But don’t go bust! Try to do as much as you can – any business – and think about what you can put back in. And there are so many quick wins. If you’re a big business leader, make people aware that you’re up for the challenge, that you will take things seriously.

I mean, Black Friday – where did that one come from? You know what Patagonia did on Black Friday? It was amazing. They went from giving 1% of profits to the planet, which they normally do, to 100% for the planet on Black Friday. They probably sold a whole lot, and they probably got better customers. If you buy a Patagonia sweatshirt or something, you treasure it, you value it. If you walk into some big store chain and they’ve got two t-shirts for ten quid, you’ve got to be honest, that’s not good. There’s a backstory behind that which isn’t good. You can’t have two t-shirts for ten quid where everybody in the chain and the environment have been treated well – it just doesn’t stack up.

Martin: I was working with a start-up recently that had the goal of making products that they described as ‘heirloom quality’ which I thought was a great expression. Is there something, then, about educating the public about that? Presumably it has to be market driven.

Chris: And we have to make it fun. I know Tim Smit was a big proponent of that – you can’t make it doom and gloom. You’ve got to have the scary stuff, but then you’ve also got to say actually, we can also make this fun. You know, at SAS I gave evidence at the Coroner’s inquest into the death of an eight year old child, and they concluded that sewage contamination was a possible [source] of infection – they couldn’t conclusively conclude that it was. That’s as serious as it can get.

But then we used toilet humour and a ten foot inflatable poo to get over a damn serious message in a fun engaging manner. We bought shares in every water company, because that allowed us to go to their AGMs, and we went to Southern Water’s and we had a toilet seat that we wanted to put around the neck of the boss because it was his prize for being the worst water company in Britain! And the media loved that.

Martin: If there’s any silver lining to the EU referendum campaign, I suppose, it’s that when both sides used emotion, the winning side presented a more optimistic vision, even if much of it was a tissue of lies, whereas the losing side went pessimistic.

Chris: And that was the wrong message. There was no ‘this is where we’re going’.

Martin: Yep, no painting a picture of the benefits.

Chris: When I look back at SAS, we knew what our aim was, which was to enjoy this amazing thing… there’s nothing better than going in the sea. Unfortunately we’ve got a problem and that’s Margaret Thatcher’s ‘All sewage is treated before discharge’ – a downright lie. She said that on TV and at that moment 400 million gallons of crude were being discharged every day around the coast of Britain. So we knew what our aim was – lovely clean seas, everybody having fun, children, families, all of that. The problem was the shit. The solution was the UV disinfection which was cheaper than building long sea outfalls.

Then you have to create the environment for change, using the media, lobbying, politics, regulators, all of that. Build the team to help you do it, fund your team (we had a turnover of £420,000 by year four), and make it fun. And those are the key principles. And when you’re tired, go back to the very thing that fired you up in the first place. And surround yourself with people who love you and support you. And that applies to everything, I think, whether that be a company or an environmental or social campaign. That’s how to do it. If we all lived our lives like that, that would be great!

Martin: And do you feel quite optimistic for the future?

Chris: It’s always hard, but yeah, I think you’ve got to be optimistic. The human species can do anything. And there’s a great quote by President Eisenhower: ‘This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children’ and that’s so true. If you took the team that currently build cluster bombs – you think about the weapons that we’ve got, the technical complexity, the amount of money in them – and you said: world problem – let’s use these scientists and that resource to solve that problem. Could they do it? Of course they could do it! They’re the best in the world! So take it right back to the Devil’s art – the problem is that our geniuses, our best engineers, everybody, are all working for the Devil. If they were all working for the A-team, of course we could do it. 

Look at the waves outside now – how much energy is coming in there? There’s no lack of energy there [to be harnessed] but the scientists who could be doing it are too busy making cluster bombs!

Martin: Ian Mortimer in Centuries of Change describes the whole sweep of history but takes key moments and shows that progress is in the right direction, despite short term set backs. It’s very humanistic. He ends each chapter identifying the primary agents of change, so he brings it right back to individuals that made a difference, individuals driving it - and change does have to be driven.

Chris: I went into McDonalds recently, and they’ve got waterless urinals. If ever there was a brand that’s come under a lot of pressure, it’s them. And have they reacted? For sure they have. And if they react more, will they become some of the leaders? They could, and that would be my challenge to them. People are always going to want fast food, and while smaller companies will be pushing in the right direction, it’ll be the big boys [that make the biggest difference]. And they’ve got the tools to market it – oh, woah, could they put some good messages out! What if they banned bottled water? Single use plastic bottles. For any big company, there’ll come a point where if they haven’t banned bottled water, it’ll be too late; they’ll be called on it and it’ll be too late. And if you’re a Brand Manager, you have to think of that as well. When’s the point that you’ll get called? And then all your power just goes. It’s within your own…

Martin: …agency. That’s the word we used to hear at Eden.

Chris: Yeah. That is a moment. [And if you haven’t acted, it becomes a liability.] 

Martin: And if you make a choice not to do something, it becomes a creative challenge to find an alternative solution. Rather than take the easy option, do the right thing and make a plan to fill the shortfall from elsewhere. 

Chris: How did we ever end up with bottled water? We’ve got the best drinking water probably in the world.

Martin: It’s absurd, when you think about it.

Chris: There will be people today panic buying water in supermarkets. People will be saying on Christmas Day, “We haven’t got any water!” What do you mean we haven’t got any water? There’s a fucking tap! People who haven’t got any water are the people who’ve got to get up and walk [miles to a well]. The people of Aleppo haven’t got any water! That’s not having water!

Martin: I remember seeing a satirical play by Ben Elton in the Eighties with Hugh Laurie and Bernard Hill called Gasping and it was about a company bottling pure air. Things get past the point of absurdity. We almost have to collectively say ‘no’ to these things, otherwise it will become absurd. Someone once tried to sell me advertising space on women’s (presumably models) chests! And you just have to say ‘No’! That’s just so blatantly wrong and mysoginistic. But you know, and they know, that someone will say ‘yes’. So who’s applying the brakes?

Chris: I’ve seen inappropriate ads online, and people will call them on it. But it comes back to leadership – good creative people stepping forward and articulating this stuff well. How we get them the air space is our real challenge.

Martin: Maybe it is digital channels and social media.

Chris: Yeah. Or PR. We never used to do big mass rallies. I could be anywhere within the UK within 24 hours. Because we generated our own money, we had an income stream, so we could do what we wanted to do. So at any moment, we could go “We need to be in Hartlepool”. We could chuck the wetsuits, board, gasmasks and inflatable poo into the car, ring up Hartlepool and some surfers would meet us. That image was the front page – you never needed the masses -  you didn’t need a crowd and placards and everything.

Martin: A picture paints a thousand words! It’s very impactful, and that’s what the media are looking for. It’s all about packaging it up, back to understanding your audiences again.

Chris: You could say it all with three or four surfers, a gasmark and an inflatable poo.

Martin: A perfect summary! Thanks so much for your insights, Chris.