Support your local

What is the most-abused word in the English language? I mean, this year, because fashions in word-abuse come and go. Anyone remember "Aspirations" (from the 1970s)? "Care" (from the 1980s, once used notoriously by the PM to describe her attitude to the National Health Service)? More recent victims have included "Empower", and there is at least one word which has been abused so badly it has effectively died and had to be replaced. "Sympathy" (which literally means "the same feeling") is now no longer strong enough for those who wish to profess their fellow feeling. These days it has to be "Empathy" (which also literally means "the same feeling"), thank you, and nothing less.

But all that is just the warm-up act to the most-abused word of this decade. That word, in case you've just come back from an extended holiday on another planet, is "Sustainable" (and its relatives). Appropriately enough, it looks like remaining so for quite some time. It all started in 1987 with a nice clear definition by the then Norwegian PM Gro Harlem Bruntland:

"Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"

and it's been downhill ever since, a recent landmark (well all right then, low-tide-mark) being Lunchista's home city's adoption of a "sustainable growth strategy for retail" or somesuch, which presumably means they'll carry on building shops forever.

But (and this is a big But) one abiding characteristic of abused words is that, from time to time, they turn up in places where their use is entirely justified. An example of this happened in Lunchista's front room yesterday.

Our Parish Council has created a Sustainability Working Group, whose job it is to advise the said Council on all matters to do with Sustainability, which Lunchista interprets as "the black art of how to use things (including abstract things like Goodwill and aesthetics) without using them up". Lunchista was invited on board. Meetings rotate around various venues, so Lunchista offered the front room.

One of our first jobs is to look at how the Parish Council's own places can be made more sustainable. Lunchista's suggestion to start with simple energy audits led to the interesting revelation that for some of these places the bill-payers, and even the owners, were not known. Going from my previous experience of this type of work, this is not unusual. You nearly always find that energy efficiency isn't a physics problem, it's a chain-of-command problem. Except chains of command are So Last Century and we now have "Partnership working" instead, which gives everybody the opportunity to advance their career by blaming someone else. Meanwhile it transpires that our most important building has just had a total refit, so the most Sustainable thing to do with it now, in all probability, would be to leave it alone.

Next, and a bit more interesting, is to look round our parish and find all the people and places which are already quietly getting on with being sustainable, and see if any of them needs any help. While doing that you often come across places which provided local needs in times gone by but are now derelict and could, with a bit of TLC and the right Insurance, be brought back into use. Like the old Orchard, for example. Or old manor gardens, woods that could be coppiced, water-mills, tythe-barns, you get the idea. All of these classic pieces of infrastructure could carry on being useful indefinitely, without the need to constantly source petrol/plastic/electricity or take away rubbish (other than things you could just bung on the stove or the compost).

However the liveliest bit of all, at least in this particular meeting, was talk of what we'd like HMG to do to help all this stuff happen. Welcome to the shiny new Sustainable Communities Act, which came about after some nifty campaigning, and enables anyone whose Council has signed up, to put in ideas for national laws which can come in on the side of people who are working on a local scale to do the sort of thing that our Sustainability Working Group is trying to do.

The deadline for the first round of ideas is 8th May (VE Day no less).

For those who can't come up with ideas on an empty stomach, I offer scones, made and brought home from school by the same younger member of our family who brought you Vegetarianism and Football.

Put the oven on gas mark 7. Rub 50 g of butter into 200 g of self-raising flour. Add in 50 g of either sugar or grated cheese. Then gradually stir in 120 g of milk, until you have a smooth dough. Roll it out onto a floured board and put circular pieces onto a greased tray. Bake for 15 minutes.

The scones were not very sustainable, in that they didn't stay around for long.