Busking it

Now Maths A-Level almost certainly isn't your cup of tea, but many moons ago it happened to be mine. However, that is not what today's musings are about.

Young Lunchista was sitting in the classroom one morning, while our teacher was taking us through the finer points of 'partials'. And for once, the said young Lunchista was completely at a loss to understand what on earth our teacher was talking about. Everybody else (six bright lads: we were a fairly small, rural school, where you could look out of the window and see the hills) was listening attentively, as the equations on the board got longer and longer, the assumptions got more and more abstract and Lunchista got more and more lost.

Finally I could stand it no longer, put my hand up and asked for an explanation of how the very first step had been arrived at. So all the algebra was dusted off the board, and the poor chap patiently took it from the top. Our Maths lessons were very civilised affairs: no-one got all sarky if you didn't understand stuff. 'Partials' appeared to be some kind of gradient (which is really just the slope of a line), except that each point could have more than one of them. I was still clueless. How could a point on a graph have more than one slope?

Rinse and repeat.

"I'm sorry sir, I don't get what the things actually are, that we're trying to calculate." Pause. Cue genius.

"Well, imagine you were out on those hills fellwalking. One of those partials is the gradient you would feel if you were walking towards the East, and the other is the gradient if you were going Northwards"

And after a very visible light-bulb moment on my part, the lesson carried on. What still puzzled me as we headed for lunch was that I was usually among the first in our class to get my head round new things in Maths, so why had I been so thick that morning? Unusually, the lads came and sat with me as I ate. "Can you explain what on earth all that was about in Maths? You seemed to understand it..." Cue second light-bulb moment. Jammy gits, they'd just sat there in class letting me ask all the awkward questions! So they all got the full, take-no-prisoners explanation of partials, with mashed spuds and gravy. Because I happen to believe that life is always better if people understand stuff.

That incident, quite apart from revealing the subtleties of partials, and indeed the patience and ingenuity of teachers, first put me on to the idea that people are perfectly capable of sitting there looking as if they know everything while in fact remaining totally clueless. Not only that, but there are times when they actually prefer this option to the alternative of admitting inexperience in order to gain more understanding. Even in a class, where you would think that admitting you haven't got your head round something at first pass wouldn't result in a catastrophic loss of cred.

So as our country, and most of the world with it, lurches into interesting economic times, take a look at our leaders at the G20 summit this week. Are they in fact just a larger version of the lads in Lunchista's maths class all those years ago, sitting hoping for some or other inspiration that will enable them to take the whole matter forward, hopefully to a happy conclusion for all of us? Are they just busking it? Will they, worse still, only bother to gain enough understanding to bail their own selves and their ilk out of the likely ensuing poverty, while not being wise or knowledgeable enough to lift the rest of us out as well?

Funnily enough, the full name for those mathematical descriptions of slope is 'partial derivatives'. The same word, and the same idea, behind the type of trading notorious for its contribution to the instability in the financial system.

Dhal and displacement

There is something delightfully subversive about coming home for lunch in the middle of a working day. For a start it implies that home and work are not too far apart, either physically or mentally. It also tacitly assumes that you actually have such a thing as a lunch-break at work (and indeed a home worth going to), and are not expected to carry on regardless like some sort of automaton who lives in a box. Finally it can make for cheaper, better food.

What is this "physically or mentally" business? Well obviously it's better to be able to get home in a short stroll (or possibly a quiet few minutes on a bike) than it is to have to fight through traffic and then on your return for the afternoon play Russian Roulette for a parking space. The "mental" bit is that I have noticed in several places I have worked that some people actually like to put as big a distance as possible between their work and non-work lives. This would be understandable if their work involved dealing with the darker side of human nature (prison service, social worker, polis), but the people involved here were engineers. What, I wondered without quite being able to find the words, do they find about their job that is so repulsive?

Right, that's enough existentialism on an empty stomach.

Here is a slightly impressionistic picture of the dhal we had for lunch, made by simmering 250g (1/2 lb) of dry orange lentils and tipping into the nearly-done brew one finely-chopped onion and one very-finely-chopped clove of garlic, both fried gently til transparent, and a pinch of chilli powder. The green frilly stuff is corriander, which we chop up and sprinkle on the dhal. This lunch offers energy, protein and vitamins for two hungry people at a cost of about £1. Less still if you have had the foresight to plant up some corriander a few weeks previously.

It also makes sure that if your boss is a vampire he (or she) leaves you unmolested for the afternoon.

Commutes I have known

Let me share with you (as the people of the USA would say. Aren't they generous?) part of the motivation for the year-long lunch break. This picture was taken from our house, at 06:43 one morning, making it just ten minutes before I had to set off for my 90 minute commute to work. That commute gave me a 12-hour day. The picture quality isn't great: it was dark, the camera may have had a special setting for this which would have made the result less grainy, but I was still too sleepy to find it. The moon was on the wane, and setting, and it really was that colour. It was rather beautiful.

The date on the picture is 5th March 2007. Yes, March. Do you like dark mornings?

I have done three 90-minute commutes and, now I come to think of it, each for two years.

Brighton to London was probably the worst, partly because the commute was in addition to a twelve-hour working day (though to be fair I only did this seven days in a fortnight: there are limits). It was given an extra dimension (mostly in the form of Time) by the fact that nothing ever seemed to work. My 5-minute walk down to the station was the only part of the journey that never went wrong. Sometimes I was working at weekends, and of course so were the railway engineers. This made for a 5 a.m. start if I were to turn up on time for the early shift, and I was lucky to get back by ten. In the winter months my trips fell entirely in darkness, and to cap it all my workplace was underground. I used to ask Security, as I walked out of the gate at the end of the day, "What was the weather like today?", just to get my bearings.

The late shift brought its own interesting variations on a theme. I didn't have to get to work until mid-day, so at least there were no dark mornings. I got to have a look at the wonderful Sussex countryside on the way in and all the delightful realia of British Rail Southern Region, like the shadow of the Balcombe viaduct over the fields and all the little stations with their fretwork and their flower-planters. But the trip back...I couldn't even fall asleep, because for much of my time there they hadn't yet caught The Southern Region Rapist. For all I knew, at any moment my skills in delicate negotiations, or unarmed combat, could be called upon, and that notorious graffito (written over the communications cord: "This is your last chance to stay a virgin") would somehow lose its funny edge. Although I would at least have a chance to follow a noble family tradition: my grandmother, it is rumoured, once successfully defended her honour with a hat-pin.

Sometimes migraine would get at me during my working day, and I would be hallucinating all the way home. CCTV wasn't all the rage in those days like it is now, so it is possible that I got away with losing my lunch in the planters at Victoria Station unseen. The pain came on in waves, and it really wasn't clever to move about if it was at its worst, or even look around too much. Which explains my accidental presence in the first-class compartment one evening. The guard who checked my ticket must have looked very stern (how was I to know? I couldn't bear to open my eyes) but I was one better: I probably looked like a ghost. "Please. don't. ask. me. to. move. I'll. be. sick..."

Why on earth did I do it? Well, because neither I nor any normal person could afford to live in London during the 1980s property boom. Not if they had any expensive hobbies, like eating.

Glasgow to Edinburgh was somehow a much more friendly affair. For a start the trains were quiet enough that you could acually hear people talking, and the views of the Campsie Fells are spectacular. It also involved the wonderful (and at that time absolutely rock-solid reliable) "Clockwork Orange". The full journey embraced two very different weather zones: all too often I'd be dressed for mild Glasgow rain, only to reach the East coast and be greeted with clear skies and either frost or tee-shirts (or both! Think Geordies only a bit further North).

There's a long climb from Waverley Station to the Royal Mile: depending on where you cross the road you can take 60-odd steps up a ginnel (I should have found out what the Scots call ginnels...) or inside one of the pillars of South Bridge. My path, on the days when I chose the latter, took me past a little cafe which I never even noticed, let alone went into. Which is a pity, because for much of that year one of its customers was a poor single mother, possibly making her coffee last all day, while she sat beside her sleeping child and wrote a children's fantasy novel: a very unfashionable idea at the time. Her name was Jo Rowling.

Somehow when I embarked on commuting from York to Leeds I thought it wouldn't be quite as bad. How could it possibly take 90 minutes when you can get from one station to the other in just 26? Well, the job, which I had thought was going to be totally marvellous and The Best Job In The World, was three miles out on the West side of Leeds. Incredibly those three miles (which I could have cycled had there been a proper route. You know, the sort with no fast-asleep drivers or 40-tonne lorries on) added over half an hour to each trip. When it was working as planned, that is.

I noticed a correlation between the time taken for that part of the commute, and the price of Copper. When the commodity price hit its high point the local entreprenneurs would tool up and help themselves to vital Copper bits of railway signalling gear, and we'd all be left stranded.

I say "we all", but I lie. Only myself and one other of this firm who prided themselves on offering "Low-Carbon solutions" to their clients took the train to work. Two others, to their credit, walked or cycled in. The remainder, over 60 people, all drove. Sometimes their delay stories were even worse than mine.

"So, what do you do?"

For those who have set out on a year-long lunch break (or indeed a lunch-break of any longer than about two days) this question is a minefield, cunningly disguised behind a plate of something rather nice, being proffered in your direction by someone who, and this is the master-stroke, is otherwise perfectly friendly and pleasant. In a previous recession I happened to be at a party in which nearly everyone I asked, replied in the past tense: "I was a (fill in incomprehensible job title in the finance industry here)". After three or four of these it became evident that it was much more fun to ask people if they were into Heavy Metal.

But supposing that, rather than being at a party, you find yourself catapulted into fame in the local paper, by some random misfortune like a gas explosion, or by coming first in the local fun-run or winning the lottery. How is the reporter going to describe you?

If you've just finished studies, this is dead easy: An (insert interesting topic here) graduate. Perhaps this is why gap-years are usually done at this time in life. At the other end of the scale, if you know you've finished with the wonderful world of work for good you are of course a retired (insert fascinating career choice here). However to pull off this stunt you need to look reassuringly old and wise: this is not a popular tactic with about 51% of the population. But what if you have just lost your job? Or supposing you left it because it was unbearable, unethical, or you just couldn’t face another day working for an enterprise whose management, in their wisdom, had seen fit to re-brand it “WIMP” because it made it sound more Client-Focussed? Will our newspaper reporter be happy with the answer: "I'm a Heavy Metal fan", or indeed with information about any other activity, no matter how fascinating or unusual? Well, no. The guy wants to know your profession, because the means by which you acquire money, for some reason, is supposed to reveal something deep and meaningful about the real you.

Of course in most cases this is a pile of tosh. The vast majority of jobs (really, apart from Doctors and Lawyers, who has a profession these days?) are far too boring to reveal anything at all about the type of people who do them. What's more, recent research has revealed that three quarters of working people in the UK are in occupations which are completely incompatible with their type of character.

This means our reporter might as well describe you using your star sign. This may or may not tell their readers more about you than the epithet "unemployed". But sadly, "unemployed" it will be.

Unless, of course, you have a Plan.

First, the party line (or the paper epithet) is "I gave up my boring/stressful/unethical/too-far-away job to go and do Y"

Central to the plan is a "Y".

And that is what The Year-Long Lunch Break is all about.

Out to Lunch

It all started with DogEatDoggo (some names have been changed to protect the Guilty). Someone, more probably some committee, high up in the adminisphere of our innovative, people-focussed enterprise had thought that using it would make us all more efficient. So DogEatDoggo it was, because everybody else was using it, and in spite of the fact that none of us wanted it.

Let’s just say that, for one reason or another, it started to fail in its appointed task of making us more efficient. Invoices weren’t being sent out. Bids weren’t being put in. Engineers with 40 years’ experience, who could repair entire power stations just by looking at the plans and making one phone-call, found themselves helpless in front of tick-boxes that wouldn’t tick. My “Computer Says No” poster no longer made people smile.

A colleague joked that he’d left a previous job just to avoid it. And promptly put in for early retirement. I was already working my notice and so could afford to view all this with blissful detachment, which probably didn’t do much for my popularity there. At three in the afternoon one day my boss, having struggled all day until then to accomplish something which would have been the essence of simplicity under the old system, marched out of the office announcing “I’m off for lunch. See you next January; I’m off for a year-long lunch break!”