Continuity announcement

"And now on the Year-Long Lunch Break, we have some sorrel. Coming up shortly is an explanation of where the holes in the leaves, along with vast amounts of money, come from..."

Sorrel is one of the few edible things in a garden at this time of year. It is perennial, so none of that mucking about with seeds once it's up and running. It doesn't even mind the shade: you can find it growing wild in woods. It is stuffed with iron, but a body can only grab the iron and use it if the sorrel is eaten with something fatty. For example:

Dice a couple of spuds and boil them with a whole (peeled!) onion and a chicken stock cube till the spuds are soft. Remove the onion. Grab about 6 leaves and chop them up very finely, almost until they turn into a kind of green stodge. Drop the stodge in, stir, simmer for a few minutes more. When you serve it, put out a pot of Greek strange yoghurt or similar so that people can dollop it on. In the summer the soup can be eaten chilled, poured over diced hard-boiled egg and cucumber.

Right, back to the holes. As anyone with even a passing acquaintance of a British garden knows, slugs come out at night and leave you with holey leaves if you are lucky, and no leaves at all if you are not. Then in the daytime the slugs all disappear.

Lunchista is often out in the garden during the day doing stuff, like digging, weeding, planting seeds, trimming edges, looking for lost shoes, and so on, but it is just a fact of life that there are no slugs in the garden during the day. So where do they all go?

If you think that they must be somewhere, then you subscribe to a theory known as The Theory Of The Continuity Of Slugs. Other possible theories are that they transform into something else, for example a powder or a vapour, or that they do not exist at all during the daytime but disappear altogether. During the Middle Ages these two other possibilities were taken perfectly seriously by most people: they believed, for example, that if you put out a piece of cheese it would spontaneously change into a mouse overnight, or that flies would form out of a piece of meat. All this in spite of the presence at that very time of a clean-shaven monk called Ockham, who said one must always look for the most straightforward explanation for anything. Lunchista presumes he must have known where the slugs in his abbey garden hung out during the day.

Then, shortly before the French Revolution, the idea that stuff, or to put it more technically mass, didn't spontaneously appear or disappear, was demonstrated scientifically by a lady called Mme Lavoisier (and her husband. It was difficult in those days, even in France, for a woman to get her scientific findings taken seriously). They carefully weighed everything, including the gas let off into the room, before and after various chemistry reactions of the sort you may have done at school, and found the total mass didn't change.

But it seems that in spite of the efforts of the Lavoisiers, and countless other scientists since, Continuity Of Stuff seems to be taking a while to catch on. For a start, have you ever noticed how the most outrageously inconsistent things can happen in dreams and, unless you are exceptional, you are neither surprised nor alerted to the fact that it's a dream.

Beliefs can also disappear. I am not talking about the perfectly sensible changes in belief that happen in the face of new information (for example, a belief that the Falklands lie off the coast of Scotland can disappear after looking at maps). I am talking about what can happen to people's principles when they are made, day after day, to contravene them. Most people, for example, have a fundamental, if slightly hazy, sense of fairness which would under normal circumstances prevent them from deliberately ripping people off. But then they get a job in Sales. And a mortgage. And they find that they must either make people buy more unnecessary, badly-designed or poorly-made stuff every month, or lose the roof over their head.

Now there is some truly excellent stuff available out there to buy: motorbikes that run like a dream, timeless-classic clothes that never go out of style, practically any service that involves refurbishing anything, all are worth parting with money for. People selling this kind of thing are lucky: they can enthuse about it to the punters, straight from the heart. Seller and buyer alike will feel genuine pleasure about the entire encounter.

But there's also a lot of crap for sale, and it's this stuff that needs the most forceful, erm, sales force. They will have to go out there on pain of losing their job, and shift this stuff. The sensation of knowingly having to do the wrong thing is so unpleasant that people will go to enormous lengths to avoid it, for example by convincing themselves that what they are selling is crucial to life's happiness, or is the best on offer, or...you get the idea. The unpleasant sensation has a name: cognitive dissonance. The principle about fairness has to change a bit so that this new belief can sit beside it, and the feeling of cognitive dissonance can be reduced. All this seems to have become a popular topic for research lately, presumably because there is so much of it about.

Lunchista thinks its effect on the economy can be measured. To do this, you would compare the pay offered for jobs in which cognitive dissonance is present (for example an engineer designing weapons) with those with very little (another engineer with the same level of expertise, designing renewable energy kit). The weapons engineer's salary is higher because someone has to offer him or her the price of peace of mind in addition to the price of expertise. It's a trade-off, and some people will accept the extra money because they like having more money, and the stuff doesn't just spontaneously materialise in your wallet, you have to go out and earn it. There's Continuity Of Money, right?

After all, if one lot of people had to slog all their lives for money in jobs they didn't really like, while another lot could just create trillions at the touch of a button, nobody would believe in anything any more and there'd be chaos.