No such thing as a free launch

I can't remember how I got on the publisher's email list, but I get sent an astonishing number of announcements of new publications: fascinating stuff about energy, life, predicaments, forests, money, you get the idea. I wish I had time to read them all.

Sometimes events get announced, but they're always in London. There was one I particularly wanted to go to: Tim Jackson, who as far as Lunchista can tell seems to be a Professor of Everything, has written up the latest findings of the Sustainability Development Commission (who advise HMG about, yes you've guessed, Sustainability), as a book, and this was the official launch. Sparkling conversation with fascinating people, and wine and nibbles: sounded like Lunchista's ideal soiree. Pity it's 200 miles, and about as many pounds sterling, away.

Then events conspired to take Lunchista down south anyway: to sort out building-work, of all things. So I booked a place.

After spending the day with three lads heaving pieces of floor around I was glad the hot water worked and I could have a shower, put on a posh frock (full-length), walk safely across the newly-repaired floor and head out into the night and the pouring rain. I couldn't believe that rain: it wasn't like November, it was more like August. Except without the warmth, and with a Force 9 thrown in.

If you stay away from our wonderful capital for long enough, and then suddenly arrive there, it doesn't half look, well, desperate. Not desperately poor, or ill, or run-down, but just desperate to do business. Add in the rain and the gale and it was beginning to border on the surreal. Arriving at the launch Lunchista (and the friend whose sofa I was borrowing) must have looked like something the cat dragged in. Our only consolation was that we were all in the same boat. Which is in a way what the book is about. It goes like this:

Everybody wants economic growth. But on a finite planet you're eventually going to run out of, well, planet. So you want economic growth without resource-use growth. Except (carefully-documented chapter) we've never really managed to do this, and it might even be impossible. Oh, and as if that's not enough, in our part of the world the race for economic betterment, without social betterment, is doing our heads in. So, how about going for quality-of-life growth instead?

All of which provides something of a talking-point over your wine and nibbles.

I bought the book, I even got it signed. But lurking in the back of my mind is the fate of government advisors whose advice the government doesn't like.