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...