Has "Top Gear" really been going that long?

Yes, and The Year-Long Lunch Break has the proof, in the form of a rare sighting of what, some say, is The Stig's Ice-Age ancestor.

All we know is, that toboggan handled like a dream...

Midwinter

I'd forgotten how much I love it when it snows. All of a sudden it all goes quiet. All the mundane stuff in your typical streetscape disappears and gets replaced by works of art. There's a kind of odd glow, even before you open the curtains, because the reflected light is coming from a different angle than usual. And it's blue instead of grey.

It started yesterday afternoon, and carried on through the evening. The Sustainability Committee were treated to mulled wine, roast chestnuts and mince pies. We lit the stove. Sadly though, Lunchista fils let it go out, even after an explanation about how the privilege of lighting it leads to the responsibility for keeping it going. And I thought I was good at delegating...

It turns out that of the six of us on the Committee, two other than Chateau Lunchista have got woodburning stoves. Which made Lunchista glad that she had put "Treeplanting" on the agenda for our meeting. It transpires that the City Council are willing and able to supply trees at next-to-no cost. Now all we have to do is find some land whose owner doesn't mind the arrival of something as pleasing and useful as trees (especially when immortalised by Ansel Adams) You'd think that wasn't too difficult. Wouldn't you?

For mulled wine, pour two bottles of cheap red wine, the cheaper and redder the better, into a large (non-Aluminium) pan and put on a low heat. Add about half as much again of water, an orange studded with cloves, six tablespoons of sugar or honey and a few tablespoons of liquer. Slice up two more oranges and two lemons and add them in. Ready after 20 minutes on a low heat. Make sure it doesn't boil, or you start to lose the alcohol.

Rabbit, rabbit...

I found out last month that there exists a professional local rabbit-shooter, who's out and about protecting people's veg. and even goes to the allotments near the Orchard every now and then. Then he sells the rabbits (thank you Heart of England Raptors for the picture).

Lunchista is now on his list of buyers: free-range (and probably fully Organic) rabbit casserole for 4 for a measly two quid! Bon apétit!

Worth the candle

It's getting towards the shortest day, that time of year when in this part of the world there exists such a thing as "Four o'clock in the evening". There have been some pretty long days, though, for the heads at the COP (where COP apparently doesn't stand for COP-enhagen, or even a football stand in Liverpool (recent viewer poll question: "Marmite or Custard?"), but is actually short for "Conference of the Parties". Earlier on in the week, candle-lit vigils had been organised around the world, to give all the heads there a bit of a boost.

Because Lunchista has it on good authority that all the poor guys want is to be confident in the knowledge that, if they come up with some drastic agreement which means we no longer have the right to get up before dawn and drive 90 minutes to a pointless and overheated (or over-air-conned, or both) job each day, we're not going to vote them out of office. Or burn them out, depending on your country's constitution. And so Lunchista grabbed some of our emergency supply of candles, and a pretty painted jar to put them in, and headed off to take part.

That jar has a bit of a story.

Way back in 2003 Lunchista, along with rather a lot of other people, just couldn't see any point in going to war in Iraq. Better government? Not usually to be found while you're being bombed. Terrorism? All the terrorists were elsewhere at the time. Oil? Already got ours, under the North Sea. Jobs? The forces already have a useful line in peacekeeping and disaster relief. And that's before you start on the "moral" thing. Even Colin Powell, a military man from the crew-cut to the boots, didn't rate the idea, on the grounds that there wasn't an "exit strategy". Sensible chap.

So as part of an international wave of protests one Sunday, I organised our own small effort under a tree at a nearby roundabout. We put out only a hundred or so flyers, made a banner (the sheet and gaffer-tape method), stood at the spot and waited...and were joined by dozens of people! Not to mention a phone-call from the local press, who gave us a couple of column-inches. And a Sunday evening, when most people below retirement age are heading from where they like to be, back to where their work makes them live, isn't exactly quiet on the roads: lots of people saw our message.

As we were packing up after our appointed hour I noticed that someone had left their home-made night-light in the tree. I let it stay there for a few days in case they wanted to return and claim it, but they didn't, so I did.

Back to this weeek, and here we are at 5:30 pm on Saturday in a shop-lined city centre square, lighting our candles. As luck would have it, that time in our city centre was "not optimal" for silent vigils, or indeed silent anything. Someone, in this case the City Council in a filthy great truck, has to clean up after a whole week of the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy. Why they had to do this by reversing around the entire square (as opposed to going forwards and sparing us 20 minutes of safety warnings) is anybody's guess. Perhaps it was a two-fingered gesture to a past government election campaign. I can only hope that our MP, who was good enough to join us and read out the first part of our "Declaration", wasn't offended.

Is it all worth it? Well it might be time to think of Battenburg cake, or even Mr Pareto with his 20% of the effort leading to 80% of the result. The cost to Lunchista of taking part in all this was one candle (you could be more energy-efficient, but who would take a "CFL-lit vigil" seriously? And anyway, I was glad for some of that energy-lost-as-heat on my hands). The odds of success are unknown, but the possible reward is, well, about the size of a small planet.

Skip to my Lou

Lunchista has been back to the scene of the building-work, though to be honest it looked more like the scene of the crime. The object of the game was to make it look like somewhere that someone would like to live in, or at the very least go to work on as a "project" and then live in.

I'd never hired a skip before: it wasn't easy trying to imagine "Three cubic metres" over the phone, or working out whether the huge pieces of blockboard from the old floor (which were 200 miles away at the time) would be longer than "seventeen hundred millimetres". In the end I went for a bog-standard size skip like the one in the picture (thank you Snowmanradio), complete with drop-down ramp which, might I add, is an absolute must unless you happen to be a 20-stone Olympic fridge-thrower.

I arrived on a Friday morning and set to work on the garden. It might, I thought, look better if it wasn't strewn with junk, so out it all came. Now Lunchista, in 20 years as a "student and young professional" in the 1980s and 90s, moved house about 15 times. And each time, I took all my things with me. But this bit of basic housekeeping, judging by the state of the garden, seems to have gone right out of fashion. I unearthed no fewer than six wooden chairs, all beyond use through having been left to the mercies of the Great British Climate. Then two clothes-drying racks, a zed-bed, a wheeled table, a beer-barrel, several track-suits and, incredibly, an unopened ten-litre tin of sunflower oil. You could do a couple of hundred miles on that. Later on I spotted a tee-shirt, in the first-floor gutter of all places. Luckily the same people had considerately left a gardening-fork, two shovels and a stiff broom. There was even a brand-new pair of working boots in the dry part of the shed.

The fence had blown down, which meant I could see that next door had a compost dalek. Other than that, their garden was in an even worse state than this one. A very elderly lady answered the door and said she'd never used it but I could help myself. I thanked her and removed some of the junk from her garden too.

The skip arrived at mid-day, which meant starting the real work. It had rained every day since the building work had finished, doubling the weight of the blockboard and old carpet, and making most of it too heavy to lift, so each piece had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the skip. I found myself wondering whether this was really an optimal use of time for someone with a bad back and a Ph.D. Then it was 3 pm and the realisation dawned that not only had I not had any lunch, but the light would start to go in 90 minutes, so I might as well carry on to the bitter end.

At which point my life was saved by an all-day breakfast at the local Greasy Spoon, followed by a hot shower.

The following day was a bit easier: all that was left to do was tidy up the living bits of the garden, get rid of the dead bits of fence, sweep the muck off the path and patio and unblock the drains. Declared before lunch.

I wondered what all this activity would actually be worth compared with, for example, a typical day's work in an office. That house will eventually be sold: the speed with which this happens, and the eventual price, both depend on the buyers' enthusiasm. This may (or may not) be helped by being able to see all the way to the pretty patio at the end of the garden, or indeed to the foot of the front wall.

The odd thing is that, because of the way house prices in the UK these days so totally dwarf the wages for ordinary work, any effect Lunchista's two days of labour may have will be measured in thousands, rather than hundreds, of pounds.

This month's Job Vacancy

Cleaners Required

Key responsibilities will include working closely with residents, cleaning and maintaining their homes and motivating other staff members. Recruits will gain a valued understanding of the cleaning industry.

(from a genuine job advert)

Urban Guerrilla

It started with conkers. Ever since the invention of string, it seems, people like Lunchista fils have collected conkers every autumn, threaded them on string, striven to make them as indestructible as posible (by means fair or foul) and smashed them into each other.

Academics have recently pieced together the story of the invention of string, or at least, why it caught on so rapidly. As the ice-age tightened its grip on our ancestral landscape, the cave-family who were able to use a sharp bone and some string to piece together their furs to a more figure-hugging shape, including new-fangled luxuries such as shoes, obviously had a life-enhancing piece of technology worth sharing. It's interesting to speculate that the existance of patents in those early days would probably have done for the human race.

Meanwhile, as the more serious-minded family members stitched together their winter survival kit, some bored five-year-old was probably experimenting with the head-bashing potential of one of granny's pieces of this new-fangled string stuff with a nut threaded on the end...on his little sister's head. The family's continued survival thus rested on the invention of the game of conkers as a substitute activity. But I digress.

What usually happened at Chateau Lunchista was that the conkers would be collected all right, but then just thrown round the garden and forgotten about...until nature took its course and small horse-chestnut trees started appearing everywhere. Lunchista dug them up and put them into pots. They were later joined by some stray Hazels, grown from nuts that had gone past their "use-by".

Then a suitable road-verge appeared: people kept veering off it in their trucks and demolishing, over and over again, the same piece of wall. We thought a hedge might be a better bet, keeping the HGVs off the wall, while also providing a softer landing. So the trees got planted out in front of the wall. That gave Lunchista a taste for that kind of thing.

Hazels and rose-hips (the big fat irregularly-shaped type) spilled out onto the path from the station to my previous workplace. They all came home, got planted, and are now growing in our garden. The lawn under an oak tree at Castle Howard was covered in acorns when we visited one day last autumn. Erm, then it wasn't: some of them are in the loo-rolls in the picture, and some took off last year. Planting them out is the difficult bit. It hasn't stopped me from collecting more seeds of various sorts, though.

It took ages before I could find a place that isn't mowed, dug over or napalmed with weed-killer on a regular basis. I had to content myself with lobbing apple-cores and plum-stones (dozens and dozens of them, from fruit from the orchard) out of the car window if our trips took us along country lanes.

Until the day, just over a month ago, when I spotted a perfectly good gap in a hedge. It was just the right time of year too.

So I loaded a potted oak sapling into a JJB bag (and covered it with another bag), stuck in a trowel and set off, in the middle of the afternoon when everybody's at work. Getting from the path to the chosen place was a pain: it was full of nettles! I also noticed how loud a carrier-bag can be, and how long it can (seem to) take to get a plant out of a pot. I'd picked a place that looked as though it had a nice view: that way, if people happened to come by I could pretend to be looking at something. This came in handy when 2 joggers hove into sight.

I quickly dug a hole, stuffed the contents of the plant-pot in, pushed a load of dead weed stems over the patch of bare soil, trod it down a bit, picked up my stuff and scarpered. It poured with rain that night, so hopefully the tree got a good start. It's also bang up against a wire fence, so no strimmers or accidental boots.

A month on and not only has the neighbouring path been completely mown (missing my tree) but floods have come, and washed a load of old twigs over it. It looks as if I'd picked a good place: the tree's neither been strimmed down nor washed away.

Nearby is a huge old apple tree that probably escaped from somebody's orchard. It dropped hundreds, possibly thousands, of little apples. Not much good for eating, but brilliant as "seed bombs". They are now scattered in the brambles all along the path, among the nettles along the edge of a nearby field, and in the long grass the strimmers have missed under a fence along the main road South out of the city. Of course apple seeds don't usually "grow true" but even so, they'll still produce fruit of some kind, or at the very least grow into trees and improve the landscape.

On my way back, I also got rid of two stuffed pockets full of beech nuts. They are lining a verge between the road and a field, currently under water, where 700 houses are to be built. It turns out that Lunchista is in good company: Admiral Collingwood (Nelson's second-in-command at Trafalgar, no less), thinking about the need for timber in the future, used to plant acorns wherever he could.

Barking? Possibly. But who would you rather put in charge of your future: Admiral Collingwood, or someone who'd arrange to build 700 houses on a flood plain?

Surreal interlude

Someone asked, how would your morning routine look if you wrote it up as a story? So, with apologies to the late Spike Milligan and the rest of the Goons...

Greenslade: This is the BBC (FX: penny in mug) Ah, my Jobseekers’ Allowance has arrived bang on time! And now we bring you a Newsflash live from the Cube Farm War. Major Bloodnok and his troops are poised to demolish the last cube-farm on British soil, bringing a long-awaited end to their reign of terror.
FX: galloping charge, gunshots, ricochets, war cries
FX: alarm clock
Lunchista Bloodnok (for it is (s)he): Aaaarrgh! Blasted alarm clock! Where’s me mallet?
FX: alarm clock being smashed with mallet
L.B.: Monday morning...I must muster the troops! Eccles, Bluebottle!
Eccles: erm...yes?
Bluebottle: I heard you calling capting, I heard my capting call
Wild applause from audience
L.B.: Troops, rise and shine! There’s nothing like a big bowl of hot, steaming porridge to set you up first thing in the morning
Bluebottle: but this is nothing like a bowl of porridge capting. It’s all full of lumpy goo.
L.B.: Here, try adding some of these unexploded strawberries, that should do the trick
FX: Fireworks
Bluebottle: it’s burnded a big hole in the table capting
L.B.: Battle-scars, me young lad. Gives it Character. Seagoon, answer that phone!
Seagoon: what phone?
FX: phone rings
L.B.: That one!
FX: phone off hook
Seagoon: Fort Lunchista speaking.
Aussie Ambassador: G’day! Aussie embassy here. Listen, mate, could you help us out? Young Bruce left his trousers at Karate last night, and the dog ate his spare pair. If he turns up to school without trousers, he’ll get a detention and we’ll miss our plane to Australia. Just when we’d sold the house and raised the cash for a new life soaking up the sun on the beach with the Barbie. We’re desperate...
Seagoon: Don’t worry, we’ll attend to it.
FX: phone down.
Bluebottle: Capting, I was working all night in the lab-burra-terry inventing these...they’re Inter-Continental Ballistic Trousers!
Seagoon: Brilliant, young lad! We’ll take them round to the Australian embassy so those fine fellows won’t be denied their new sun-drenched Antipodean life.
L.B.: Right, troops, everything packed? Eccles: homework?
Eccles: erm...yes
L.B.: cooking ingredients? Pans? Kitchen sink?
FX: clatter of kitchen implements
Eccles: yes.
L.B.: Right then Eccles, off you go! Bluebottle...books?
Bluebottle: yes capting.
L.B. You’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet.
Bluebottle: but capting, they’re the only feet I’ve got...
L.B.: yes, but you’ve put your shoes on my feet! And they’re so small I can’t get them off. Here, hand me that saw
FX: Sawing. Large wooden object falls on floor. More sawing and another wooden object.
L.B.: right, you can use my legs for today. I won’t be needing them because I’m going to be spending all day in bed.
Bluebottle: Farewell, capting!
FX: door. Rapidly receding footsteps. Pause. Whoosh of rocket taking off in the distance.
L.B.: ah, there he goes, and another family are saved from a life of drudgery. Only twenty-four million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go!
FX: snores.

Editor's note: Lunchista fils really does have an Aussie schoolfriend, who lives just round the corner from Chateau Lunchista in "The Australian Embassy". Sadly (at least, for us) it is true that they are leaving these soggy Isles for The Lucky Country in the not-too-distant future. And Lunchista fille really has, on occasions, had to bring her own cooking implements to school!

No such thing as a free launch

I can't remember how I got on the publisher's email list, but I get sent an astonishing number of announcements of new publications: fascinating stuff about energy, life, predicaments, forests, money, you get the idea. I wish I had time to read them all.

Sometimes events get announced, but they're always in London. There was one I particularly wanted to go to: Tim Jackson, who as far as Lunchista can tell seems to be a Professor of Everything, has written up the latest findings of the Sustainability Development Commission (who advise HMG about, yes you've guessed, Sustainability), as a book, and this was the official launch. Sparkling conversation with fascinating people, and wine and nibbles: sounded like Lunchista's ideal soiree. Pity it's 200 miles, and about as many pounds sterling, away.

Then events conspired to take Lunchista down south anyway: to sort out building-work, of all things. So I booked a place.

After spending the day with three lads heaving pieces of floor around I was glad the hot water worked and I could have a shower, put on a posh frock (full-length), walk safely across the newly-repaired floor and head out into the night and the pouring rain. I couldn't believe that rain: it wasn't like November, it was more like August. Except without the warmth, and with a Force 9 thrown in.

If you stay away from our wonderful capital for long enough, and then suddenly arrive there, it doesn't half look, well, desperate. Not desperately poor, or ill, or run-down, but just desperate to do business. Add in the rain and the gale and it was beginning to border on the surreal. Arriving at the launch Lunchista (and the friend whose sofa I was borrowing) must have looked like something the cat dragged in. Our only consolation was that we were all in the same boat. Which is in a way what the book is about. It goes like this:

Everybody wants economic growth. But on a finite planet you're eventually going to run out of, well, planet. So you want economic growth without resource-use growth. Except (carefully-documented chapter) we've never really managed to do this, and it might even be impossible. Oh, and as if that's not enough, in our part of the world the race for economic betterment, without social betterment, is doing our heads in. So, how about going for quality-of-life growth instead?

All of which provides something of a talking-point over your wine and nibbles.

I bought the book, I even got it signed. But lurking in the back of my mind is the fate of government advisors whose advice the government doesn't like.

Leonids

At this time of year the Earth and all who sail in her are apparently passing through the tail of a shattered comet. Any detritus near enough to us gets pulled towards the planet and burns its way through the atmosphere, offering us as it does so the Leonid Meteor Shower.

And no it's not named after the old Soviet bloke with the eyebrows ("Thy name is immortal, thy deeds are unknown"), but after the constellation of Leo, where the shower appears to come from. So all you need to do is, find Leo. As luck would have it, Lunchista fille has a map: we bought it at Techniquest, the science exhibition in Cardiff (well worth a visit if you want some entertainment for anyone between the ages of 4 and 12). Here it is.

Leo spends some of its time near the sun, but that's in August so needn't bother us here in November. But it also spends a lot of its time below the horizon, including, when looked at from anywhere in Europe, the entire evening. This means the best time to see it, and the accompanying meteor show, is the wee small hours of the morning. The Planisphere in the shot is set up to show what you can see in the sky at 4 a.m. (GMT) tomorrow morning. Note the flash, which has obscured some of the "sky", is about where the sun would be at this time of year, making our shot even more realistic.

Leo's head looks a bit like a back-to-front question mark, and zooming in to our map shows Leo's head is in the Southeast, about halfway up from the horizon (the edge of the "window") to the zenith (the point where the straight and the curved red lines in the window cross). The dotted white line passes through all the signs of the zodiac and shows how the sun moves around it in a year: each dot is a day. The points of the compass look the wrong way round because you are holding the map over your head.

So the plan here at Chateau Lunchista is for all interested parties to get out of bed ludicrously early and either go up to the attic (from where, the two small Lunchistas assure me, stars can be seen) or failing that, to set out into the playing-field with our jim-jams covered in several extra layers.

It's funny to think that there's always a cloud of meteor debris lurking at this one particular spot that we pass through every November. Given that as we go around the sun, the sun itself is circling the middle of the galaxy, the debris must be following us around. It would always "see" us at the same time of year. Which brings Lunchista to an odd thought: supposing there were an alien spaceship parked about a month further along our orbit. Every time we passed by, we'd be celebrating Christmas. The aliens on board would form the impression that humans in this part of the world spent all the time in over-elaborate, too-brightly-lit places, either eating too much or getting into debt buying things nobody needs.

And of course they'd be completely wrong. Wouldn't they?

Your very good health

It has been officially ascertained by Her Majesty's Government that being out of work is bad for your health. This "truth universally acknowledged" is based on simple statistics: a greater fraction of the unemployed seek medical help than do their employed counterparts.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is Lunchista's considered opinion that in this case Her Majesty's Government are talking (to use a physicist's technical term) spherical objects.

A large chunk of the workforce in the UK is over the age of 35. By this time in life most people have some nagging health problem like back pain, knee joints that play up, headaches, unexplained tiredness, sugar balance that's going a bit wrong, that kind of thing. Never quite bad enough to cry off work, but still something we'd rather do without. But we carry on regardless, out of lack of time, lack of faith (in our ability to describe the problem to the medical profession, or in their ability to put an end to it), or sheer inertia: and anyway we're healthy enough to hold down a job, so we must be ok.

But then, for some reason completely unconnected with health, we might pack it in. Or the P45 arrives. Sociologists and psychologists and people who know far more about that sort of thing than Lunchista does, say that this often causes people to re-assess their whole lives. You know, what do I want out of life, how can I make my life better, and so on. And I've got all this time...I know, I'll go along and get my knee/back/permanent cold sorted out. Because our healthcare is free, but time-consuming, for employed and unemployed alike.

And so Lunchista is taking her sinusitis to the Doctor's, who have already offered some Antihistamine (in case I'm allergic to something) and an appointment with a specialist (which I can take up at short notice because I have no need to book time off work). Meanwhile our Primary Healthcare Trust are no doubt wrestling with the problem of how on earth Unemployment can increase the chances of Sinusitis: a phenomenon recently identified by their statisticians. Obviously further research is necessary.

And what of Lunchista's real state of health? Well, three days after my final day in my previous job, my teeth stopped bleeding. None of my other habits had changed: same food, same address, same amount of excercise (i.e. shamefully, not very much), same water supply, same teeth-brushing routine, same toothpaste and brush.

Of course I haven't had to see anybody about this: our wonderful Health Service therefore remain blissfully unaware that packing in my job may have saved my life.

Value Engineering 2: Hallowe'en

Sometime last week it occurred to Lunchista that Hallowe'en was going to fall on a Saturday. Great, I thought, the smaller Lunchistas are going to have a whole day to put together costumes for Trick-or-Treating.

Or perhaps not.

On the Friday evening Lunchista fille came back from football practice and announced that there was going to be a match the following morning, half-term notwithstanding. It also transpired that everybody (everybody small, that is) wanted to go to Underwater Hockey, which has now become a semi-regular feature of our Saturday afternoons.

So at ten in the morning we arrived at the local footie-pitch and I spent the next ninety minutes cheering on the Lunchista fille squad and drinking large amounts of tea while talking about other people's holidays (there seems to be some kind of friendly rivalry about who can go the furthest: well we've been to Pluto so there). The weather was perfect: no wind, hazy sun, cool enough to play but mild enough to stand still and watch. To crown it all, it was a home win.

Meanwhile the men of the household had done the weekly food run, and as an extra bonus had found by experiment that this is possible by bike. Lunch was swifter than usual because there was "dead-easy chicken soup" already made. This gave us just enough time to hook up the bike trailer, load up the "implements of destruction" and head off to a convenient dead tree.

We'd never noticed this particular dead tree until it blew down in a gale, right across the cycle-path that leads to The Planets. Mr Lunchista had had to cycle into somebody's field to get round it. Next time he passed by, it was (and I quote) "chopped into handy bite-sized chunks" which, bit by bit, and with smiles from the odd passer-by as we go, have been making their way to our garage and then onto the woodburner. It's absolutely-dry Beech, too, one of the best for burning.

We sawed and loaded up about 30 kilos of it (works out as about a week's worth if it's not too cold), before heading back, just in time to load up the cozzies and towels, and the weekend Yorkshire Post for my edification and delight: Underwater Hockey isn't exactly a spectator sport. And so I've no idea how the game went, except everybody seemed happy with their performance, and not too exhausted to...

...make a pumpkin-lantern and put the finishing touches to that Vampire and Grim-Reaper ensemble (witches are apparently So Last Year). The Grim Reaper went out before dinner with the other assorted death-heads, whereas the Vampire was doing the after-dinner shift with her equally pale-and-interesting companion. After all you really don't want hungry vampires roaming the streets: the effect on the economy would be catastrophic.

The whole day had worked out so well: maximum entertainment, minimum hassle, no wasted time and practically no cost.

But it all relies on so much: food in the shops, petrol in the car, water to spare for the pool (though I'm reliably informed that Underwater Hockey's big in Australia). And nobody cold or desperate enough to fight us over that dead tree.

At about this time last year, two major banks came within hours of failing: failure which would have brought the usually smooth-running, and value-engineered-to-perfection, system that supplies us with all the basics, juddering to a halt.

If that, or anything like it, happens again, and we're not as lucky, are we ready for the Nightmare Scenario Value Engineering 2 - Hallowe'en ?


Dead-easy chicken soup (not for the squeamish): take the carcass, bones and all, from yesterday's roast and put in a pan, then cover with water, add a bit of salt, bring to the boil, turn down and simmer for as long as you like. The longer it's done for, the more gelatin comes out of the bones, which means that when the soup cools again it kind of "sets" and you can spread it on toast. It's also full of minerals that everybody is short of. When the soup's luke-warm, spread sheets of newspaper next to it, lift out the bones and any gristle, and wrap them in the newspaper (if your dusties are on strike this can actually go on the woodburner!). If you don't need the calories then you can take the fat off the top once the soup's completely cold. It will keep in the fridge for ages, and practically any vegetables, especially winter ones, will go well in it.

Kosher bacon buttie

Half-way through half-term, and we're having something of an Indian Summer. It would, I thought as I heard the sound of arguing over the computer from upstairs, just be a total waste of these last gorgeous days, not to go out somewhere. Could we make it, on our bikes, to a particularly nice spot I vaguely had in mind, and back, in time for Lunchista fille's rendez-vous at the flicks with her friend just after lunch? Turned out no, because her bike's tyres were flat, and our new, unfeasibly-compact, technologically-advanced bike-pump was (a) lost, and (b) totally lacking in anything as technically downbeat as instructions.

Which meant that Lunchista fils and I set off alone, after much protesting on his part.

Now Lunchista has the sense-of-direction of a deranged fruit-fly, but fils happened to know a nice route beyond the ring-road that would (allegedly) take us round in a big circle, through nice country, entirely off-road. It started with a ride down the entire length of the local golf course: it's a very long thin course and, for extra entertainment, seems to include part of the ring-road. People were driving golf-buggies over a special little bridge. I was rather glad fils was wearing his helmet. Part of the path, along absolutely flat land with rows of trees, running beside a fosse, reminded me of the opening sequence to "Secret Army" with its roads through the Low Countries.

The golf-course includes a large area of land still marked as "Common" on the map. Hence the old ditty:

The law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the Common.
But then it lets the villain loose
that steals the Common from the goose.

Beyond the golf-course lay grazing land, which (we found out from a notice on a stile) was also an SSSI bristling with ground-nesting birds. And, erm, cows. We were halfway through the field beyond this, in other words in the middle of nowhere, when fils suddenly announced:

Ten minutes to ice-cream!

What???

And sure enough, ten minutes further on down the line there was a campsite, with a cafe, with a terrace, and (yes!) ice-cream. So I bought him one, and sat down with a mug of tea while he went off to investigate a nearby lake, and give some passing anglers a hand chasing the cafe's chickens off their grubs. It was idyllic: the terrace had a pergola (half of which was discreetly covered with perspex, in case it rained), up which newly-planted clematis were making their first steps. In a couple of years' time, I thought, it would be like my favourite place on earth, the pergola (now sadly demised) at the CAT.

Apart from the serious-looking chaps who had come for the fishing, we seemed to be the only visitors. I got talking with the chap who ran the place, who'd been a farmer there since the 1950s, but now looked like one of those classic "Farmers Diversifying" success stories you regularly find in the Yorkshire Post Country Supplement (every Saturday). The cafe, for example, had been there less than two years, and the fishing was taking off to the extent that they'd just excavated another lake. He seemed even more outraged than Lunchista about the Common, and also knew the name and address of the owner of a disused piece of land whose predicament had been puzzling Lunchista for years. What's more, as a farmer he happened to know that cows, amazingly, never step on birds'-nests. Not even when they're on the ground.

I could have sat there all afternoon, but for two things: it was lunchtime, and I'd run out of cash. There was a gorgeous smell of bacon butties, so I asked about cards, or even cheques, but no go. So non-existent bacon butties it was, then (the only Kosher type: well, better that then Zen ice-cream I suppose), and we'd have to have lunch at home. Such is life.

One consolation was our haul from today's sortie: in addition to fresh air and sunshine, we'd picked up lots of pine-cones (we dry them, spray them gold and use them for Christmas decorations), and a golf-ball. I checked with fils and he reassured me that, yes, it had stopped moving before he picked it up...

Postal strike

"My old boss lives round here somewhere...I wonder which is his house?" The street, part of a little knot of recently-built roads which collectively formed a dead-end, was new to me, and to Lunchista fille who had asked to come with me to pick up a package of leaflets from somebody's porch. We kept going round bends that led the wrong way, in roads which all seemed to have been named after Vikings. Well, whatever floats your boat I suppose. There was no-one to ask the way: it was a Tuesday morning and it was easy to see that the place, with its immaculate, open-plan gardens, was completely deserted.

"Listen..."

"What??"

"...nothing. Isn't it quiet?"

And it really was. The older, straight road that led to the one way into the little knot of roads, is itself a dead-end, and as if that wasn't enough we were low enough down to be shielded from the otherwise-ubiquitous noise from our city's ring road. In other words, nobody would break the silence by coming in here unless they were utterly lost, or had some connection to the families in the neat modern houses.

Eventually, right at the far end of the little knot, we located our leaflets under a porch. We noticed wind-chimes hanging there, but even they were silent. I picked up the bundle and we headed back.

It's funny what you notice when things are so quiet: not just sounds, but unusual sights too. Perhaps, like in the American joke about driving down a street looking for the right house-number and turning down the car radio so as not to miss it, we all have a bit of synaesthesia lurking in our brains.

"Hey look at that post-box" There was a banana-skin directly underneath it, but also a note that someone had stuck on near the slot. We went over to see what it said. Someone had posted a letter but forgotten to put a stamp on it: they must have gone back home, fetched a stamp, some cellophane, tape and a pencil and paper, and written the note that we could see, asking whoever collected the letters that day to stick on the missing stamp. As we stepped out into the straight road, we noticed the post-van coming down. We decided to wait and see what the reaction would be, so we carried on walking until he had driven round the corner and had time to stop at the post-box and get out. Then we turned round to kneb.

And he'd gone.

No van, no postie. He must have driven right past all of it. Then I thought, perhaps it's easier for him to turn the van at the end of the knot and then pick up the letters on his way out. So we picked a convenient low front garden wall next to a tree, just within line-of-sight, and we waited. And waited. And, have you ever noticed that, if you have no business waiting somewhere (a bus-stop would have come in handy, or even a dog), it just seems like ages? It's easier with two people than just one because you can always chatter as if you've just bumped into each other or have suddenly developed something urgent and complicated to say (in our case it could have been, for example, the crucial but convoluted logistics of practically any arrangement involving school). We were there for 15 minutes (we timed it).

We could have walked to the end of the knot and back in that time, probably twice, so where was our postie? We gave up and turned to go: we'd just have to put up with never knowing whether the mystery letter would have been delivered.

Then in the few minutes it took us to walk back up the straight road away from the little knot, several other vans drove past us and went in. A florist's. An electrician. Generic tradesman's white vans (several). A red van (not a postie). A fishmonger for heaven's sake: I hadn't seen one of those since I was Lunchista fille's age. All within the space of about five minutes. None re-emerged.

We wondered if someone had maliciously called them all to the same address. Had they all got it in for our postie? Was someone in the knot running a Red Diesel racket? Or had the entire far end of the knot, just after we'd left it with its silent wind-chimes, been devoured by a Black Hole?

Mean Time

"I'm really looking forward to not having to get up early tomorrow morning!" said Lunchista fille over dinner last night. It's half-term week, so as well as no school, there's no football practice either. Suddenly an entire Saturday morning is open to us to do with as we see fit. Which is just as well, because "350" had decided to declare today a Day Of Action and our city's humble contribution to the worldwide array of stunts many and varied was to form a human chain, complete with Mexican Waves, around the Minster at the eminently civilised time of 11:30 in the morning.

We got there early and immediately bumped into our local eco-enthusiast par excellence (of course) who, knowing that Lunchista is something of a lapsed astrophysicist, mentioned a conversation he and his son had been having about how far it was possible to travel in a lifetime, assuming that you could, over a long enough distance, accelerate to about nine tenths the speed of light. Of course it would be a lot longer than an 80-light-year round trip given that, as your ship accelerates, the time would pass much more slowly for you on board than it would for your stay-at-home relatives, or indeed for any (stationary) aliens you might intend to visit.

The worst bit would be coming home to find everybody you care about passed away or aged beyond recognition. And, assuming Climate Change plays out as currently expected, in our case we'd find our city (presently only some 20 metres above sea-level) about 50 metres under the (all too real and not very Mexican) waves.

I wondered if the son in question had ever listened to the lyrics of '39 by Queen, written by fellow lapsed astrophysicist Brian May. And, walking round to find the event's organisers, I couldn't help wondering also if the Minster, which has been there for the best part of a millennium, would manage to stay around for a second one. At which point I bumped into the organiser of the Nature Reserve, who has been trying to assemble enough of us for a meeting to launch a new "outreach" programme. There are ten of us, and he's had to resort to putting all possible names, dates and times into a spreadsheet in the effort to solve the logistical conundrum involved in assembling us all. How little time everybody seems to have. Even the Year-Long Lunch Break is passing at a disturbingly rapid rate: now more than half gone.

Both mainstream and "skeptics" invoke Time repeatedly in their spiel: skeptics will say either that we still have plenty of it, or else that if you travel back through enough of it you'll see lots and lots of "Climate change" due to volcanoes, the sun, cosmic rays, you name it. And it never killed anyone, did it? On the other hand, listen to anyone serious talking about Climate Change for long enough (in my case about 2 minutes will do) and you rapidly develop a sense of "time running out".

All Lunchista can do is offer you an extra hour tomorrow morning before you have to get up. What can we do with this precious, and some would say illusory, extra time?

Light my fire

People seem to bear a serious grudge against this time of year. They complain that "the clocks are going back" and then invariably start a campaign to stop the change to Greenwich Mean Time, as if that would somehow prevent winter, or by extension, old age or that tough deadline at work. Elaborate plots are spun to avoid the worst of the cold and the dark: many of these involve flying off long distances and spending unfeasably large amounts of money. Lunchista has never done this and wonders what it would be like: on returning to an airport submerged in the general dreich-ness of a Northern Temperate Maritime (translation: dark, cold and damp) winter, would I feel worse than if I'd stayed put and got used to it, or would I somehow feel "recharged" by the extra hours of sunlight?

Sadly, unless you happen to be Goldman Sachs, "winter sun" holidays create the sort of holes in the budget that aren't exactly enablers for year-long lunch-breaks. Lunchista would therefore offer an alternative strategy: do as we have done. Instead of running away from autumn, by chance we've done something that improves it: we got a woodburner in. Lighting up has become something of an autumn ritual: a landmark which, unlike Hallowe'en, the clocks going back or the leaves dropping off the trees, is warm and cheerful.

We did it when speculation surfaced about the Gulf Stream packing up. It turns out that reports of its death were somewhat exaggerated, but we're glad we took the plunge. There are two- to three-week stretches on either side of the heating season when a stove is about right but firing up the entire central heating system (and the bills that come with it) would be a little OTT.

We started to notice how many lumps of dead tree people left lying about. In fact a combination of landscaped workplaces, other people's gardens, council tree-felling, and DIY projects has meant that in the six years since we first lit up we have never had to pay for any wood. It generally starts to appear about this time of year, and we quietly ask if people mind, and if they don't, we load it up and bring it home, where it has to dry out for a few months. Then it gets sawed up and stacked in the garage.

So, since last week, every evening when the darkness closes in, instead of mourning it we have something to look forward to. It's funny how much of a difference it makes, being able to look into the flames. I mean, you couldn't tell ghost stories in front of a radiator, could you?

Car Booty

The Party kitty was, well not quite empty, but perhaps feeling a little peckish. An election was, well not quite imminent, but in the offing. The Meeting was collectively wondering what to do about this undesireable state of affairs, when somebody mentioned a car boot sale.

Now as you can imagine this isn't something Lunchista could take on alone, lacking a boot, a car and indeed permission to move anything larger than a bike (with or without trailer) along the public highway. So I offered to be co-pilot to whoever took this on. And somebody (let's call him Will) rose to the challenge. It turned out that, lurking in Will's garage, was a load of stuff he wanted rid of. You know the kind of stuff that's absolutely indescribable until you look at it and try to enumerate it, and even then it can be a challenge. Old camera gear, board games, a bathroom cabinet, shoes, well-used sports kit, ugly ornaments. And that was before the call went out to everybody else to take a long look at their wardrobes, bookshelves, cupboards and (for the better-off) garages and perhaps even sheds (though we're not the kind of party to have many punters with stables and outbuildings...yet!).

More and more stuff arrived at Will's house. I never asked (out of a kind of British politeness I suppose) but I'm willing to bet he was beginning to regret taking this on. Then a promising weekend materialised: the local car-boot, held at a former airfield, turned out not to need bookings, and the weather chart just said

HIGH

so we went for it. In mufti, so as not to scare off people (the vast majority of the population, in fact) who vote for parties other than ours.

By the time we got there things were already in full swing, and we drove past rows and rows of colourfully-laden tables, following directions and gestures, to a spot under a tree in the far corner. We had driven through the entire "field of combat", and it was massive!

As soon as we got out of the car and openned the boot, a crowd gathered round and people jostled for position to see what we had on offer: some of our things got sold before we'd even unfolded our table's legs. I began to get a bit worried about the money tin, especially now it already seemed to have quite a lot of money in it. As the morning grew hotter (it was high summer, literally, and we were becoming thankful for that tree and its shade) the action continued, at a scarcely less frantic pace. I couldn't get over the number of people there, or indeed the variety of languages that chattered past us.

We hadn't bothered to label prices for anything and it turned out that was just as well: better to adapt your price to your punter, using as a guide their apparent affluence and/or enthusiasm. If they stopped to ask, they were interested. If they didn't, my sales pitch became "come over here out of the sun, we're the coolest pitch at the airfield today!" or if people hesitated: "just because we're in the shade, doesn't mean we're shady!".

We took turns to sit on the one deckchair we'd brought along (there hadn't been room in the car for another), and were glad to have had the prescience to have brought along something to drink, and sunhats.

By about 2 pm we realised that most of the bulky stuff had gone, the crowds were beginning to thin out and the heat was just ludicrous. The shade from our tree was long gone and I had resorted to using my umbrella as a sunshade, far-Eastern style. A particularly long lull gave us a chance to consult the money-tin. It contained an indecent sum of cash and we decided to beat a retreat.

In case you may be wondering why I'm writing about summer exploits (and not even this year's, at that) when in fact we're facing the back end of October, it is for two reasons. Firstly to reminisce about hot weather (which is always kinder to memories than it is to real people at the time), and secondly to "compare and contrast" with a more recent car boot session.

Just last week we were back at the booty: same personnel, same venue, same vehicle. But making a wild difference to our fortunes were the range of goods we had on offer (lots of glass ornaments this time, and no ancient camera kit or home-made jewellery), the ambient temperature (although it was still bright and sunny) and of course the times of credit crunchiness to which we are now exposed.

One or more of those factors made the difference between clearing nearly £100 last summer, and our more recent, but rather less impressive, net total of £25. Sadly, however, it doesn't look as if we're in line for a bail-out from the government.

Space Invaders

"What d'you do if you see a space-man?"
"Dunno"
"Park in it-man!"

The quality of jokes circulating at Lunchista fille's school never ceases to amaze. But I quote this one because it describes, quite nicely, what a bunch of us got up to on International Car-Free Day: we invaded some space. In fact we happen to know that we invaded exactly 18 square metres of space.

Now that particular 18 square metres of space isn't much to look at. I must have walked past it dozens of times, and never really noticed it. And there'll be people who drive past it every day, who'll see it but on whose brains it will make no impression whatever, because their attention will be elsewhere. That probably includes a lot of people who have actually parked their cars on it at some time in the past. And that's why we had to go there quietly before the day's events and "case the joint". The area, the cost, the distance from the nearest place where we could store things, how early in the morning it would start to get busy, and so on. I volunteered to be the first to arrive, and my mobile number went on the press release. Then I looked at the weather forecast and shuddered.

And so, at 7 a.m., aided and abetted by my other half (who is very tolerant about all this) and his bike-trailer, we arrived on our bikes with two deckchairs, a huge potted palm and a banner. Incredibly I've never had to work a parking meter before: I was pleasantly surprised that it actually produced a ticket, rather than simply eat my last pound coins, smile at me and leave me stranded on the wrong side of the law without a witness. Some of the meters here even have solar panels on top.

At this point the big guns rolled in. Trike-trailers, drafted away from their usual task of picking up the recycling from our city's best narrow streets, had been loaded with turf the night before. Our resident eco-enthusiast had bought it the day before that, ensuring not only that the nearest DIY emporium actually had it in stock, but also that he knew someone to whom he could sell it on afterwards: total cost, zero.

So we laid down the turf. We put up a table and got out the deckchairs, next to not one but by now two huge potted palms, and a parasol brought along by some brave soul unfamiliar with the term "equinoxial gales". Mind you my banner was also struggling, but people (including the gentleman from the Press who turned up at 8:30) were still able to make out the blurb:

People Park, not Car Park

Car-Free Day Sept 22

The table was graced with a cloth, two self-service tea-urns with cups, milk, sugar, and plates full of Danish Pastries. There was also a basket of apples from the Orchard. The idea was to have a picnic breakfast, and to offer some to hungry commuters.

Now there are people out there who write fascinating research tracts in fields with names like "Psycho-geography", about phenomena such as "mental maps", "sense of place" and "connectivity", whose description of our activities would sound a bit odd at first blush, but bear with Lunchista as she leaves her home turf of energy and matter to foray into the ever-changing world of intangibles.

Apparently what we achieved was to turn a "non-place" into a "place". Oh all right, the first person to come up with the term "non-place" was called Marc, did it in French and spent far too much time indulging in existentialist contemplation of the meaninglessness of his modern life, probably while smoking too many Gauloises, and so didn't follow his idea through very well. So instead, how about an American chap called Eric talking in a straightforward, no-nonsense way about how he first came to notice that his home-town was becoming "nowhere", instead? Or even, how about Will Self?

For three hours or thereabouts, in fact until our ticket ran out, we chatted, drank tea, waved to passing drivers, offered our breakfasts, read articles and (in my case) were quietly thankful that the weather forecast had got it wrong, and the sun was shining. A jolly lass in a red dress and dreadlocks from the local radio turned up and Lunchista, as the person whose number had been given on the press release, was interviewed live on air. City councillors came along, including the former leader (on his bike as ever), and our favourite LibDem (because he's such a character) who took our leaflets out into the 5 lanes of raging traffic and handed them to passing commuters. We had turned a bit of space that nobody gave a second thought to, into something that was (apart from the incredible noise level from the traffic) really rather worth something.

Late morning took me into the city centre, where I could sample the delights of a street I'd never walked down before, because the pavements are narrower than I am and it had always been full of traffic. But the Council, as a bit of a dare, had closed it to traffic for the day (using a row of massive planters of flowers: it looked rather good). Suddenly you could walk down it, and look at the shop windows, at the same time. People had brought their wares out into the street. The buildings were visible, in that you could afford the time to look up at them: everything from mediaeval to art deco. It reminded me of Diagon Alley from Harry Potter: it really was another world.

The radio station rang again: heck, they couldn't get enough of us! I was back on the air, live from the studio, and by a delicious irony for "Drive", the afternoon commuters' show. No doubt some of the listeners will have thought Lunchista was a bit barking. But I wonder how many are, even now, beginning to plot their escape?

Where there's Muck there's Brass

"Find out how your Water Works!" said the email. It was from our water company, and I had to think for a while before I remembered how on earth they had come across my email address.

It all started with the premiere of "The Age of Stupid" in our city: Lunchista was asked to make up the numbers for a press stunt on the river bank. In the event our local eco-enthusiast par excellence turned up on his bike with the usual trailer full of cadged wood bits for his stove and stole the show, so I needn't have bothered. Except that, watching his small daughter skipping stones into the river, and totally innocent of our activities, was a bloke called Dave. We got talking, it turned out he worked at the water company and I happened to be curious about where our used water goes, so I gave him my email address.

The email offered a choice of times, so I chose the quietest, mid-afternoon during the working week. They'd booked one of the corporate-type meeting rooms (complete with bar) at the race-course. Togged up for a bike-ride to a working site, Lunchista felt distinctly under-attired for such a posh venue. But it was either that or wading through pools of muck in my green velvet cocktail dress and tiara. No contest, really.

The opener was one of those bland and eminently forgettable corporate films, following a perfect and immaculate family as they go through their perfect and immaculate day using whatever it is that the company provides. I'm sure there are college courses in making those videos.

Then things got interesting. Stepping off the coach at the site you're hit by the smell: the drop-off point happens to coincide with the part of the site where the waste water arrives. Mostly it's from the city's loos, but when there are floods some of the water washed off the streets gets in here too. The main contributor to this hum, though, was the grille that separated out all the insoluble things that people, in their absent-mindedness, flush down the loo. These all end up in a skip, from which, our guide told us, someone's false teeth were once retrieved...and they carried on using them!

Next stop was a giant metal shed in which lurks an Anaerobic Digestor. The stuff putrifies and gives off Methane, which is caught, purified (for example there's some Sulphur in there that has to go), and then used in essentially a miniature gas-fired power station. The electricity from this powers most of the rest of the site, and the heat is piped off to be used in one of the other processes further down the line. The stuff is now "sludge", which is a lot less unpleasant than before, but still brown and murky. The bacteria that start to digest this seem to work like a "yeast plant", in which some is tapped off at the far end and re-used to start the process off at the input end.

By now I was either getting used to the smell, or in the grips of sinusitis again. Or else perhaps it really was the case that this bit of the site was just plain less smelly. After that it was time for a spot of aerobics (not for us, but for the sludge). This stage is polished off in the bit of a sewage works that everybody's seen, in which water-jets come out of long gantries that sweep slowly round a giant circular pool. We came up to the edge of the 50-yard wide pool, and the water coming away was clear. It smelled slightly "earthy", but that might just be because we're all used to a spot of Chlorine these days.

I got out my camera for what would have been a terrific shot of the circular pool reflecting our city's two famous landmarks (the Minster and the old Chocolate Factory) and the absolutely cloudless sky...but no photos were allowed on site, and they didn't sell postcards, so I'm afraid you'll have to make do with a picture of our tour-guide's file. Which is a pity, because they also have something of a wildlife reserve, next to where all the solid results of the enterprise are composted in long rows. There's an arrangement whereby local farmers can ring up and ask for deliveries of the end result, to use as fertiliser. With no heavy industry (not even chocolate manufacture) in the vicinity, this stuff remains refreshingly free of things like Cadmium, which were a problem in other places in the past. It also means we get to keep things like Phosphorus and Iodine, without which the whole of life on land would collapse, swiftly followed of course by Lunchista's house price.

I also noticed there were no flies on the site. And it was spotless. And all this for only 17 million quid, the sort of sum they find down the back of the sofa during a bank bail-out.

Small price to pay to stop the country going down the toilet.

Stars on Reasonably-Priced Guitars

"I don't suppose you know this one?" We were having a barbecue (I can use this term now because the said event, having already been and gone, can no longer be spoiled by rain) and our neighbour strolled back in with his guitar, pulled up a chair and started playing...only my favourite, ever, piece of soft rock in the known universe! Of course knowing all the words I pretended to use my wine-glass as a mike and sang them...

Actually, Lunchista knows all the words to practically everything from three of the last four decades. Sometimes it even comes in useful. But when I was working I often thought, how nice it would be to be able to play stuff, too. Now I don't have to start off all on my own.

Many years ago, when Lunchista fils started school, he was offered the chance to learn one of several musical instruments. This can be a minefield. But Lunchista, by a happy coincidence, had some help, in the form of a book "The right instrument for your child". Having found out what kind of sound someone would like to make, or who they'd love to be able to play like, you don't necessarily also think "do they like the physical sensation of holding and operating this machine? Does it demand anything of them which they would find uniquely difficult? Do they like to play with a load of other people or are they more the solo, self-contained type?". Unless you're particularly perceptive, of course, or you've had a look at that book or something like it.

So guitars were in. We bought him this nice little machine for 20 quid. Lessons happened during the school day (I love the word "peripatetic"!), so no driving around on dark winter evenings or postponing dinner while trying to learn complicated notes on an empty stomach. At the end of the first day we found Lunchista fils sitting in pride of place at the after-school club, delightedly playing the first notes he'd learned. That was five years ago.

On packing in my job I suddenly found that I had time to sit and listen to him practice. The nice thing about guitars is you can just leave them standing around and pick them up whenever you have a few moments that you feel like filling in with a few notes. So we had two guitars permanently loitering with intent in the living-room. Then one of the tuning-keys on Lunchista fils' machine snapped. Not wanting to throw it out I took our plight to our local music and bits shop (who sell individual guitar strings: that's my kind of market). The chap went round the back and returned with a spare set of three keys for a machine-head. They were a different shape than ours, and I'd never taken a machine head to bits before, but what the heck.

I spread out all the bits on the kitchen table (having first wiped off all the jam from breakfast). I got out Chateau Lunchista's entire collection of screwdrivers, and a saucer (non-flying) to put all the bits in that would otherwise roll onto the floor...

And in fact, if you take everything off in order, remember what you've done and don't lose any small bits, it's actually quite easy to put on a new tuning key. Which meant that Lunchista fils had something of a unique machine to take to his Grade 2 a couple of weeks before he left his old school, and I had a load of guitar spare parts in the tool box with the screwdrivers.

One day during the summer holidays the phone rang and Lunchista fils happened to be the first to get to it. He listened for a moment and then his face lit up..."YES!!!" It was his teacher, who had taken the trouble to ring up to tell him he'd passed. And that the new school was on his peripatations.

Lunchista estimates that the total cost of all this musical activity, for both small Lunchistas (Lunchista fille plays keyboard), amounts to about a tenner a week. That's less, apparently, than an average woman of my age spends on hairdressers.

Don't cheek yer Elders

As someone born towards the end of the school year, Lunchista got rather used to hearing this phrase in the playground, and always thought it might be put to better use elsewhere. So here it is, dusted off and re-purposed, as an offering to the readership of The Year-Long Lunch Break to add to your anti Swine Flu arsenel.

It all started three years ago, on the garage roof at our old house. Lunchista shinned up with a pair of loppers to take down some huge branches that were overshadowing our garden. On closer inspection (Lunchista's eyesight was never fantastic) the branches proved to be absolutely dripping with berries. Not wanting to waste them, we put them all in a bucket and then rang round the rels for ideas on how they might be used. Kudos to Lunchista's mum for knowing how to put them to good use. Here's what we did.

We sat outside with a bucket and pulled all the berries gently off the stalks. This is rather time-consuming, but if it's not done the result has a bitter taste which makes it useless for things like eating. It also happens to be the kind of job you can do while discussing the finer points of existentialism, listening to some nice home-made music (or joining in), or taking the occasional swig of wine. The advantage of working outside is obvious once you bear in mind that elderberries were used for dying clothes in days gone by. For the same reason it's a good idea to be wearing dark clothes (of course anyone discussing existentialism will already be in black, so no problems there), and not to be needed at some venue demanding clean-looking hands at any time in the near future.

Once this has all been done (except perhaps the conclusion of the existentialism argument, which can wait til another day), tip the berries into a pan, put in just enough water to cover them, then bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes or so. Then go and find an old muslin, or a pair of old tights (not fishnets!). I've found that the best way to set up the berries for straining through the cloth overnight is to spread the cloth across a sieve placed over a big bowl, pour the berries and juice in, then pick up the corners of the cloth to tie up to a sturdy fixing point.

The next day, just add some wine-mulling spices and sugar, then simmer the juice until it becomes a bit thicker like a syrup, then pour into a jar that can be sealed. We have found that it keeps in the fridge for years. We use it like Ribena (but with hot water) and it's a real pick-me-up to fight off the effects of colds and flu, especially with honey, or some port, brandy or whisky.

It's been pouring with rain since we picked our berries this year, so I have had to blag a picture for this post (thank you Felicity ThriftyLiving) instead of going out and taking my own. It has also been difficult to find many berries that haven't been eaten by birds as soon as they're ripe.

Plum job!

Great news! Tescos have officially declared they no longer want to build a link-road through the Orchard. And can you blame them? Our Orchard now has Management, a Constitution, and its own pedestrian crossing.

More to the point, it's bursting at the seams with delicious fruit: plums are good-to-go and there are lots of windfall apples and pears lying around (though these are better for hand-to-hand combat than for actual eating at the moment). Four of us met up there for a fruit-picking session, armed with a small step-ladder and one of these:
I was only there for about 20 minutes and came away with 14 kg of fruit (to put this into perspective, that's about 1/4 of Lunchista's body weight). And this doesn't include the several bags full that made their way to the Sustainability Committee's stall at the local show, where they were given away to anyone within earshot, most of whom, on coming a little closer to see what was going on, said "Well I never knew that was there!" (or variations thereof).

This is just as well: Lunchista has it on good authority that there's a chance that, like Terminator, Tescos might be back...

The laundry lasses' working day

"Places with chairs you're not allowed to sit on" said Lunchista fille in disdain as the idea was floated, in the delightful sunshine of Saturday morning, to cycle ten miles to Beningborough Hall. As a description of Lunchista's own feelings, a generation ago, trailing round stately homes with her parents because it was too rainy to go to the beach/park/funfair, it was a genius one-liner.

But it wasn't raining, Beningborough Hall has a playground in its grounds (complete with picnic tables), there's plenty of other space to run around in (including a HaHa you can jump, fall or be pushed off), and there's an art exhibition where you can make your own portrait and have it emailed home for a laugh. To top it all, if Lunchista fille deigned to join us it meant that I would be riding my wonderful ancient bike, which is a bit of a museum piece in its own right and would probably feel right at home there.

Moreover, these days stately homes have an interesting new slant that wasn't there in the 60's: for anyone of a self-sufficiency bent, they're becoming something of an object lesson, and a good-looking object at that.

The gardens, for example, are once again providing fruit and veggies for people to eat on-site, and as if that's not enough the National Trust is begining to set aside some of its land for allotments. Expertise is being sought about reviving the growing of Mediterranean and even tropical fruit by taking advantage of sunshine or waste heat trapped in walls: one place we've visited in Cornwall had pipes taking heat from the kitchen through to its garden walls (for growing lemons) and greenhouse (pineapples!), and a team of plumbers was being assembled to get them up and running again. There are pantries and ice-houses instead of fridges and freezers. How cool is that? The only downside of all this is it can bring on a serious case of Garden Envy.

But Lunchista might not have been the gardener. I might, as John Rawls said, have been anybody, including one of the laundry lasses, who worked in the room in the picture at the top of this post. Sitting on top of a formidable mangle was a timetable of their working day, starting with arriving at 4 a.m. to light the boiler, having walked in from a nearby village. Their boss arrived a little later to check that the things they had left to soak were, well, soaked. There followed at least two bouts of washing (possers, washboards, brushes, you get the idea) and two of rinsing for everything, between each of which it all had to be put through the mangle. The schedule ended with the clothes being hung out to dry at mid-day (outdoors if fine, on the indoor pulley in the picture if wet). At least their working day wasn't much longer than Lunchista's. It also took advantage of the cooler part of the day for the hardest part of the work, and I noticed the place faced South, with huge sash-windows, for plenty of light and air. But there's no denying it was a thankless slog.

Now a lot of people, including Lunchista in the past, would say that it is the presence of Electricity in our daily lives that frees us from all this. It is, after all, "the silent servant" which does the hard physical slog so that we don't have to. But we are more than electrified Victorians. For example, we no longer expect our morals to be called into question if we should turn up for a day's work in straight-cut, lightweight and practically-coloured clothes rather than the multi-layered, white, wedding-dress-like apparel of the lasses in the photograph.

Which means that if, for some reason, electricity should desert us in the future, then rather than having to go back to washday Victorian style we could use hand-powered washing machines like these, or even one of these, which looks like much more fun:

Interlude

Here's a little something I've put together for people who are too busy to sit and watch their sunflowers come out. I hope it brightens up somebody's Monday!

Value Engineering

There are some places on these islands whose sunlight really is special. Lunchista has lived in Glasgow (but almost anywhere on the West Coast of Scotland will do as an example), and stayed near Aberdyfi in Wales, but the Lake District has this light too. Somehow the sun looks brighter if its light is falling onto steep, dark terrain. The less charitable could also point out that sunlight looks brighter here simply because it is so rare, and I'm afraid the numbers from the Met Office back them up. You've got to seize your moment.

Famille Lunchista were lucky enough to catch possibly the best day of the summer for a boat trip on Ullswater (although to be fair this followed a prescient look at the forecast). A 1930s style boat took us half the length of the lake (about six miles) to a classic country hotel where we had lunch on a terrace with stunning views. It, too, had something of the 1930s about it, even down to the waitress's uniform (full length black dress plus white pinny). It was all very unhurried, un-crowded and, unlike most tourist destinations I've been to of late, generally not a system under stress. Or so we thought.

Value Engineering is the black art of getting the most "value" out of some enterprise, by paring off any inputs that aren't strictly necessary while still delivering, just, what people expect, and have paid for. It was originally applied to straightforward mass-production and the like, where it made for more-efficient processes and less waste, but has since then spread into areas in which, to put it charitably, it is less appropriate. Such as Tourism, and infrastructure design.

We walked back to the lakeside in time to see the previous boat to ours come along. It was rather smaller than ours, and could only just take on the people queuing at the jetty. The motor started up... and then the driveshaft failed to engage. From the crew's conversation with their base we jaloused that the boats were checked thoroughly every morning, and that these smaller ones had had extra checks because they had been drafted in to replace the route's largest vessels, which could not be used that day because the lake's water-level was the highest it had been for 20 years after our unusually wet July.

The crew explained that a tow was needed and that this meant all the passengers had to disembark. They thanked us for our patience. Then the real system failure happened. It transpired that the jetty only had space for one boat to moor, so we all had to wait until the Park Rangers' motor-launch (complete with tow-rope) had done its stuff before any of us, now a total of about 300 people (including all the passengers in our boat, which as we joked was in a "holding pattern" out on the lake), could go anywhere. All because someone, somewhere, had decided that the cost of a few extra planks couldn't be justified because, well, they'd never be needed...

We were there for an extra three hours.

Most tourists want to cram as much as possible into their day, rather than simply sit somewhere and soak up the atmosphere. But as far as I was concerned, none of this really mattered: not having value-engineered our day, we didn't have to be anywhere else in a hurry. The jetty was warm wood, the view was beautiful, Lunchista fils lay his head on his rucksack and had a quick kip, Lunchista fille looked at the shapes of the mountains, and I was lost in memories of various children's stories set in this type of landscape: Swallows and Amazons, the Moomins, that kind of thing. Nobody got cold or hungry, and we only slightly regretted not staying on at the hotel terrace for cream tea. Even the dog didn't throw a wobbly.

I got to explaining to Lunchista fille about the layout of the Lake District and how it had come about: the lakes are mainly the routes of glaciers, radiating downwards and outwards from the central mountains, like the spokes of a wheel. Opposite our spoke, for example, is Wastwater, and then the coast.

Sitting on that coast is a place whose bosses and operatives, I really hope, never get the idea of Value Engineering into their heads...