The sound of salesmen

Someone's banging on the front door of Chateau Lunchista, and I'm the only one at home. There is actually a bell in our house, but it doesn't serve the door. It's a small traditional brass thing painted with pictures of reindeer and sunsets, and was originally made to go on a troika, but now it's attached to the far end of a long piece of string extending from the small Lunchistas' attic "den" down to beside the kitchen door. It was thoughtfully rigged up after complaints that I was losing my voice calling people to come and eat: Mr Pavlov (and his dog) would feel right at home here.

So people have to slum it with knocking on our door. It's probably not DDA-compliant, but then neither is the M6.

Back at the door, it's usually one of two things: either the knock comes soon after the neighbouring little lads' football has sailed gracefully over our hedge and is waiting in our back garden to be retrieved, in which case I can just lean out of the window (the Year-Long Lunch Break comes to you from our spare bedroom, which faces the road) and give the go-ahead to retrieve it. Or it's someone propagating something I don't want, like make-up or the wrong sort of religion, in which case I can say "No thanks" without having to come downstairs.

I leaned out of the window and it wasn't make-up or religion this time. It wasn't even footballs. Incredibly it was someone selling something we actually wanted to buy: wall insulation at knock-down prices (oh-oh, Bad Metaphor Day!) subsidised by HMG. I noticed they'd all cleared off by the evening: had I kept my old job, we'd have missed out.

Now I have my suspicions about HMG's motives here. Home energy efficiency is being encouraged as one of the best ways to reduce the UK's Yeti-like collective Carbon footprint, whereas in fact you'd get a much better dent by taking a leaf out of the old Book and getting us all to go vegetarian (or at least beef-and-milk-free) for one day a week. Note for example the Act-on-CO2 Carbon calculator, brought to you by DEFRA who are supposed to be in charge of farming, has no component about food! On the other hand most homes are heated by gas, more and more of which is being imported from Russia. And UK Plc is having trouble dealing with the gas bill: there are only so many Premier League footie-clubs we can flogoff. So I have my suspicions that what HMG are really worried about is not so much that we turn into the next Sahara, or even that Yorkshire (and London) disappear under rising seas to become the next Atlantis, but that we turn into the next Ukraine (and that dispute, by the way, is still bubbling under).

But Lunchista isn't going to look a gift-horse in the mouth, so I signed up. We are not in an area subject to driving rain, nor are we within a mile of the coast (both of these mean your filled walls may not dry out properly), and the space in our walls is wide enough, just, to push rockwool in. I'm told the alternative is to pour in millions of little polystyrene balls which, if you ever had to have any other work done on the walls, would make for interesting scenery in your garden, as well as making it difficult to retrieve any footballs. I suppose if Global Warming really takes off, you could bag it all up and sell it to ski resorts as false snow.

ps. Kudos to anybody who can identify the origin of this post's title.