Leafletised!

How did all that lot get there? Well, in the run-up to an election (and a possible 'flu pandemic) these particular individuals were delivered by Royal Mail as part of a Freepost agreement, but quite a lot of other agitprop arrives at Chateau Lunchista by the hands of total amateurs, who deliver it as volunteers.

In our city the Council can provide you, if you ring up and ask, with special stickers with a recycling logo on and the legend "No Junk Mail Please: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle" or somesuch, to stick on your letter-box and ward off the worst offenders, such as plastic envelopes containing CDs with information about expensive hearing aids (it has happened).

Let's just say that in complete contrast, the type of missive delivered by Lunchista (newsletters from our Councillors, information about recycling, Warm Front and the like) is rather more public-spirited, occasionally even useful, and at the very least anyone who doesn't like it it can lob it on the compost, in the recycling or on the woodburner.

If you want a nice quiet morning or afternoon getting to know your immediate neigbourhood while clocking up a spot of excercise, then "leafletising" (as one of the smaller Lunchistas calls it) takes some beating. It's far cheaper than getting a dog, and there's no muck to clean up afterwards. It is also a totally shameless excuse for a quick kneb at people's gardens.

It's a slightly strange sensation walking around in the middle of a weekday: I'm used to there being far more people about. Apparently of the 60 million Brits, only about 30 million actually work in a job. Knock off an additional 10 million or so who are at school, and there should still be a good third of the population around somewhere. It's a fine day (difficult to deliver leaflets if it's raining: they get soggy and won't go through the brushes in people's letter-boxes), there are front gardens, the nearby shops are open, it's peacetime, so where is everybody?

I wonder, is sitting in your front garden reading or watching the world go by, something of a lost art? Because the only person I have ever seen doing this in a street near us, was at least a generation older than me. Every morning at 7 am (yes, really!) he would walk out of the old folks' home on the corner with his cushion and sit on the wall: well, perch on it really, because a high hedge overgrew the wall, meaning that no-one from the old folks' home could watch the world go by from the comfort of their lawn. I always used to say hello. You wonder what people did in their past: perhaps he once took part in a daring escape from a PoW camp. Perhaps he was a spy (or perhaps he still is).

So, here's Lunchista, bag over shoulder, setting off for the usual round of about 300 houses. There's a certain ettiquette: after all you are the ambassador for whatever it is that the leaflets are promoting. Gates have to be opened and closed (not climbed over); walls between neigbouring gardens should be walked around, not jumped over; dogs should be talked to, even the ones that scare you witless. And above all, because so few people are in, the leaflets should completely disappear into people's doors, instead of poking out all day saying "hey Mr Burglar, nobody's home here!". This happened once at Chateau Lunchista: I was near the door at the time, so the baseball-cap who'd delivered the leaflet got an impromptu lecture about crime prevention. It was only fair: the leaflet in question was, of course, about Crime Prevention.