Life's a swine

Blogs, traditionally, are all about News. Most of them seem to convey information that's much more "immediate" than the musings here on the Year-Long Lunch Break. But, in a break from tradition, Lunchista is going to "do News", just for once, because it has a bearing on the Lunch Break philosophy, and anyway it might be useful.

As I write this, the WHO have raised the swine flu alert level to "5" (the highest being "6") and the first few cases of human-to-human transmission seem to have been found. It appears though that no-one can tell whether this will be another avian flu (yawn) or another 1918. Confronted with this information (or lack of it), on such a gothic evening, what should we all do?

It looks as if we're back to Battenburg Cake.

Because people can travel from one part of the country (or of the world) to another in less time than it takes for any flu symptoms to show, cutting down the risk to zero would involve not seeing anybody, until the whole thing blows over. This is clearly a case of Pink Square No. 3 costing far too much. However there are lots of other Pink Square No 3s which either cost a lot less, cost nothing, or which it is always useful to do, swine flu or no.

There is a lot of talk about the various types of face-mask and why they are ineffective. But Lunchista has to ask, who is telling us this? Why, it's Her Majesty's Government. And they do have to think about appearences rather more than Lunchista does. Specifically, can you imagine the effect on morale if people started going around hiding their faces behind masks? Until fairly recently in these parts, the only people who did this were in the process of committing some crime, in the throes of being tried for it, or hired to behead someone. Think of the opprobrium heaped on "hoodies". You could call it our cultural prejudice: you can see why someone innocently sporting a Niqaab, the full veil, comes as a bit of a shock to the system. In Japan, on the other hand, it is considered the height of rudeness, if you have a cold and have to be out and about, not to wear a mask.

You might have to forego the live footie and the rock concerts (though Lunchista appreciates that a real fan will risk death for the cause). One thing you can forego with the greatest of ease is the wretched "compulsory leisure": by that I mean all those far-too-expensive visitor attractions aimed at children, or more accurately at their parents' wallets.

You could attempt to work from home. Especially if, like Lunchista last year, your commute involves six crowded vehicles a day, at least five of which contain one or more people who are coughing or sneezing. Though that's tough if you're a hotel receptionist or a nurse. You could ease off the working hours if you're self-employed or in short-term posts via an agency.

We now move on to a Pink Square No. 3 which costs very little. A stock of food in the house is always useful. Stick to stuff you eat anyway: in Lunchista's case that's rice, pasta, beans/lentils of various sorts, cheap tins of fish, dried milk (use it for cooking once it's not needed as a store), tins of soup and the ever-useful Italian Plum Tomatoes, bread-mixture if you like your bread with character, honey, and so on. I count medicine as a type of food. Otherwise if there's panic-buying in your town all in one wave, you'll be left short, or else in a shop full of people sneezing (sans masks).

But the two best precautions cost nothing and are good to do anyway. One is simply washing hands, properly, whenever needed. The second is a bit more obscure. Research is beginning to find, not only that we are all desperately short of vitamin D, but also that it's an effective defence against unwanted microbes including viruses. So, you can either have six lunches of fish and deep green leaves every day (which would require a very long lunchbreak) or you can go for a walk in the sunshine.

Or you could tough it out and risk Pink Square No. 2. However, Lunchista's Glasgow-Edinburgh commute included walking past a small nondescript house in which a plague-stricken family were barricaded in and subsequently died. Which is far too Gothic for most people's tastes.

Happy Walpurgisnacht.

The "Sporting Chance" school of gardening

In this shot is something which Lunchista hopes really will turn out pear-shaped: the more botanically-inclined viewer may be able to identify pear-blossom which has just set. But it very nearly didn't happen.

Sometimes the things you buy for the garden with the best of intentions, just drop all their leaves and sit there looking to all intents and purposes as dead as the proverbial Parrot. Or, having justfiiably looked dead all winter, they fail to come out in the spring. This has happened quite a lot in the Lunchista garden, usually to things that were expensive to buy, such as:

A lemon tree
A climbing peach
A grapevine
Some miniature roses
Countless seeds, berries and nuts that go into pots just for the heck of it.

One of the first victims was the pear-tree. We'd planted seven fruit-trees during our first winter here, and in the March they all showed buds. Then blossom in April, and leaves in May. All, that is, except the pear-tree, in spite of the fact that it had received the same TLC as all the others. Lunchista couldn't bear to dig up a tree, so we left it there, its bare branches giving us two fingers every time we looked in the garden. Until June, when it suddenly decided that having no leaves was a bit of a career limiting move, and as they say in the USA, "got with the program".

The lemon was a bit more dramatic: it suddenly decided to drop a full set of perfectly good leaves in the middle of summer, and remained leaf-less for the rest of the year. Then when we fed it some lemon-food the following spring, it put out new leaves. In the autumn. By then it had cobwebs on, giving its dead-ness that extra Gothic touch.

Apparently plants can go into shock. They "play dead" because they're too dry. Or too wet. Or lack some mineral or (more probably) sunshine. The same thing happened to the other plants in our Rogues' Gallery above (all except the peach, which after six months we decided was genuinely dead: its branches were completely dry. You can't win them all.).

And so evolved the Sporting Chance School of Gardening. I'd always thought it was a bit barking and wondered why I did it, but now I've discovered something of a justification, from the world of high finance of all places.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was one of the very few traders to emerge from the 1987 crash with a positive result. A large part of what enabled him to do this came from his understanding of the patterns of highly improbable events, in particular the difference in the statistics behind ordinary physical things, such as for example the heights of pear-trees (which typically have a Gaussian distribution), and human-made ones, such as gains from inventions taking off, or losses from markets crashing or wars breaking out. These typically follow something more way-out, like the wealth-distribution curve found by Wilfredo Pareto, in which it is possible for one individual's contribution to tip up the entire table.

After describing all this in eloquent detail in The Black Swan, Taleb then poses the question, on behalf of the reader, "So what do I do now?" Part of the answer is to go to parties: you never know who might be there and end up putting you onto a "positive Black Swan", that might really take off. Another part of the answer deals with the more pedestrian parts of life.

The Strategy is to split your resources (time, wealth, space in your garden...) 85:15, in fact very much like Mr Pareto's 80:20. Put the 85 into something (apparently) rock-solid, or at least boringly conservative. Then take the remaining 15 and put it into something which, though it's very probably going to just sit there doing nothing, might just take off and land you a good result. Something, in fact, like an apparently-dead pear tree.

The real art is to line up the two sets of assets in such a way that any improbable event causing the loss of the 85% will also result in that remaining 15% coming good in spectacular fashion: for example an entire row of pear-trees. Lunchista assumes this is why this type of investment is known as a Hedge Fund.

Riding out a previous Recession

Some people thrive on recessions. No I don't mean in the sense that their business only comes about when other people are suffering (pawnbrokers, undertakers, drug companies, etc) I mean something a bit more subtle. During a recession, to put it perhaps a bit too bluntly, people stop posing and start thinking.

Who here remembers the 1980s boom? Yuppies barking into mobile phones the size of bricks, flashy cars doing stupid things, people talking about their house price and nothing else, and Walkmans introducing us to the delightful concept of not really being able to talk to anybody anyway. People went about with bank accounts instead of brains. They watched Dallas. Good grief it was boring. Lunchista's job paid less, per month, than the typical monthly rise in sale price of the humblest studio flat. So I did the logical thing: I packed it in, and went off with my savings (the ones that couldn't buy a fraction of a flat) to study something interesting. I emerged from my studies to find a recession in full swing.

All of a sudden everything was cheap. I shared a house with two Chinese lads, it cost less than half what I was paying for a similar place with posher decor during the boom. The place had no heating, next-to-no carpets, and a clothesline on the landing. The decor in my room was just plain white walls with carefully-handwritten nuggets of cryptic wisdom such as:

"Never trust a man in a trenchcoat. Never drive a car when you're dead"

and:

"It's memory that I'm stealing, but your moment when you dream"

It was near an entire street full of curry-houses, the Chinese shop and the Market. The landlord even paid our poll tax for us. In short, it was perfect. We threw parties. Not the sort where you present perfect dishes on perfect tables and talk as politely as you can (backed by your perfect decor) about house-prices and the perils of too much immigration. I mean the sort of parties that spontaneously materialise when you've been helping someone with a spot of decorating/proof-reading/physics, and either beer and curry materialise at theirs, or you ask if they'd like to bring a few bottles round to yours later on and you'll knock up a massive stir-fry.

Because it was in that house that Lunchista learned the black art of stir-fry. And how to clean up afterwards.

Now, any real aficionados will have noticed the "deliberate mistake" in the illustration for this post: Lunchista's present cooker is electric and not gas. But the cooker in our old house was gas-fired and it went like a rocket. And we had a purpose-built rice-cooker, which I am going to assume is absent from your kitchen arsenel, dear reader, but do at least run out and buy a good old-fashioned, indestructible Wok. Smear a bit of sunflower oil over the inside surface and set it on a ring til it just begins to smoke, then take it off. Perfect.

For rice, use one large mug per 4 people who are eating: rinse it in hot water, then put in a pan with 2 mugs cold water for every 4 people. Cover then bring it to the boil, then turn it right down and simmer very slowly while the real fun starts.

Slice up very finely 3-4 oz meat (pork, chicken or turkey are best) per person and put it in a dish where you can cover it with ShaoHsing wine (the stuff in the bottle with the red label. Warning: do not attempt to drink this wine, when raw it tastes disgusting! In fact an unwanted guest helped himself to some once and I like to think that was its own punishment. Better to get someone to pour you a glass of Red, or a beer). If the Chinese shop is closed and you can't get your ShaoHsing, you can slum it with cheap sherry instead. Then pour on lots of soy sauce: dark "mushroom" soy is best. If you're the type who likes to plan ahead, you can do the meat bit the day before and leave it to marinade overnight.

For vegetables, you can use any of: chinese leaves, any veggies from the Chinese shop, broccoli, carrots, bamboo-shoots, water-chestnuts... best to include some things with dark or strong colours. Chop them up finely, also chop up some mushrooms, ginger and spring-onions. The total weight of veggies per person should be 8-9 oz.

Light the gas as hot as it will go. Put the empty wok on it (you might have to get someone to turn off the fire alarm at this point). After a few seconds it should be good and hot. Put in a small amount of sunflower oil and swirl it round. Lift the meat from its marinade and put it in to fry: start stirring after a few seconds. If it flames briefly, don't panic: this means it's good and hot! When all the meat surfaces are fried, lift it out but leave the oil in: it will have some fat from the meat, which will prevent it from getting hot enough to do the veggies, so pour it away safely (these days I carry it out into the garden).

Find the marinade, stir in a teaspoon or so of cornflour.

Pour fresh oil into the wok, heat it up, and add all veggies except the mushrooms and onions. Add a sprinkling of sugar. Again, fry as hot as you can. Add the mushrooms, and when they look done, stir in the marinade. As it boils it will thicken and change colour: add some water if it gets too thick. Make sure it boils.

Put the fried meat back in, add the spring-onions last.

Pour a little water over the rice. It should be slightly sticky, so it can be picked up with chopsticks. Turn the fire-alarm back on. Chow-time!

Now, all this fun and games can make a real mess of a rented kitchen, especially for us because there wasn't anything as fancy as a cooker-hood. So the lads brought in Soda Crystals (not to be confused with the more mild-mannered Bicarbonate of Soda), which they used for cleaning at the Chinese restaurant where they worked.

Looking back, I think the thing that really lit up life at the time was culture, in all its forms. None of it cost any money, which was just as well because the Lunchista income (from a bit of Physics in a professional capacity, for two hours a week) just covered the rent, and I qualified for no benefits. I got involved in singing opera, and I learned a bit of Chinese (and ended up with a Shanghai accent, which I'm told is the equivalent of sounding like a Scouser). For once I had time to read classics (picked up second-hand) like Tess and The Woman In White. We all became avid followers of England's fortunes in the 1990 World Cup and discussed endlessly what made a good match/team/country. Someone found me an ancient bike which I did up. I still have it, and it still goes.

Pascal's Wager, meet Moon...

Well, there was an Earthshine last night and this morning It's raining!! It's gorgeous, it even smells gorgeous. I thought about going out and dancing about in it, but then Lunchista is British, and really that would be a bit OTT. Perhaps I'll just have a nice cup of tea instead.

Anyway, it means Lunchista can finally put in all those seeds that have been hanging about waiting for the right time. Which is where the moon (again), and Pascal's Wager, come in.

Now Lunchista has not, historically, been very lucky with seeds. I put them in, I water them, and then I really don't know what happens to most of them, and very probably neither do they. Chances are it is some permutation of: thirst, drowning, birds, mice, cats, slugs, wrong kind of soil, weedkiller courtesy of the Council (it has happened!) wrong phase of the moon, abduction by aliens.

This year, however, we are taking no chances. This year, we have a Strategy.

First, the seeds are going in in the rain. This waters the soil much better than Lunchista ever can. Then, nets will be stretched over them to keep off the birds (and hopefully the mice and cats, and if I'm really lucky one of the aliens will get its foot caught and I shall be famous). Slugs will be hunted down ruthlessly at night-time with a torch and a brick. The soil has been enhanced with compost (lovingly made of old garden detritus and kitchen stuff of the non-meat variety: we have even been known to collect old seaweed). The council are now too skint to stretch to weedkiller. And finally the whole kerfuffle will take place at the correct time: afternoon, as near as possible to new moon. You are doubtless now entertaining the possibility that Lunchista has finally lost it. However...

There exists a school of thought known as Biodynamics. It has a noble, and very interesting, pedigree, including all sorts of characters ranging from Mr Steiner (of Steiner School fame) to the Soil Association. Lunchista is a fan of the Soil Association and in fact everything in the garden here that has already started to grow, seems to do very well by it. So let's put the moon-phase bit to the test, Pascal's-Wager-style, because we have nothing to lose.

Pascal's Wager applies to those kind of risks for which you have no idea of the odds, but you'd like a favourable outcome. Picture, if you will, a slice of Battenburg cake:


Thank you, ForTheLoveOfBritishFood (who also have the recipe), don't mind if I do.

Imagine the four squares represent a set of the four possible outcomes. Taking these in order row-by-row:
1. You take precautions, it turns out you were right to do so. Yellow smiley square.
2. You didn't take precautions, but you should have done. Pink girlie disaster!
3. You took precautions but you didn't need to. Pink embarrassment or perhaps wasted time or cash.
4. You didn't take precautions, it turns out you didn't need to. Yellow smiley square again.

Now what most people do is compare the two pink squares, then make their choice about precautions. It turns out this is an easy decision in the Biodynamics case because if Mr Steiner turned out to have been right, and Lunchista ignored him, we get pink disaster (no seeds come up). However if we follow his idea and it turns out that the moon phase is an irrelevance we end up with square no. 3, but no time or cash has been wasted and really, do you think Lunchista cares all that much about embarrassment? So, pink square no. 3 it is, please.

Pascal's Wager has been used as an argument in favour of religious practice: you may not know whether or not God exists but you may as well sing along with the choir because spending a bit of time on Sundays (pink square no. 3) is better than spending eternity on the cosmic bonfire (pink square no. 2).

But there's a twist in the tale. Going back to Mr Steiner, supposing that he got it wrong, not in the sense that it turned out that the moon phase didn't matter, but in the sense that the phase mattered but was the opposite of what he said??

Multi-dimensional Battenburg slice, anyone?

Your chance to test the World's Oldest Weather Radar

Lunchista has just noticed that it's New Moon right now. Rather than attempt to take a decent photo of it, though, I have cheated and availed myself of one from the marvellous Matt's Astronomy Site (thank you Matt).

Exactly two months ago a similar moon picture appeared in our local paper. You can tell a new moon from an old one because it's seen in the evening (not the morning) and (unless you are reading this in Argentina, ZA, NZ, Oz etc) the points of the crescent face left. The paper were puzzled about why the rest of the moon's surface was so well lit-up. It so happened that Lunchista knew the answer, and gave them a call.

The light on the non-crescent part of the moon is known as Earthshine. Whereas the crescent is being lit directly by the sun (but you knew that anyway, didn't you), the rest of the surface, if it is showing, is being bathed in faint light which has been reflected from the earth. Or more precisely, from the part of the earth which can be seen from the moon. Any part of the earth (particularly the 3/4 or so of it which are covered in sea) will reflect more light if it is covered in clouds than if there are none and the dark surface is showing.

Now it so happens that wherever on the planet you are, the new moon is always somewhere to your west. Here in the UK that means it is loitering over the Atlantic Ocean. It is therefore quietly telling you whether or not that ocean is covered in clouds. Just like a weather radar, in fact. The most common type of clouds over the Atlantic are the ones around a Low pressure system. Seen from the moon (or on the weather forecast if you can't afford the fare) it looks a bit like this:


In our part of the world these Lows tend to drift from west to east. That means a Low over the Atlantic will soon be over the UK, bringing clouds, wind and rain. Or at the very least it will be lurking out there ready to throw its rotten weather at anyone rash enough to set sail westwards.

Hence the sailor's warning from Sir Patrick Spens:

"I saw the new moon late yestreen,
Wi' the auld moon in her arms:
And if ye gang to sea, maister,
I fear we'll suffer harm."

Will there be earthshine this evening? If there is, will the dry weather finally break, and give Chateau Lunchista's garden a much-needed drink?

Holes in the landscape

Sometimes in the middle of an otherwise busy landscape there are places which remain forgotten for years. They end up unknown, not just by Lunchista (who can usually claim the excuse of being new to a location) but by everybody. They may be bordered by overgrown hedges, or nondescript walls, which everyone simply ignores, or by advert hoardings, which everybody looks at without thinking what lies behind. They are often the site of some terrible industrial mistake, which seemed like a good idea at the time ("We could use that site for the new Asbestos works. It'll be Good For Jobs..." "Hey, you know that big hole where all the clay got dug out for bricks? Why don't we use that to dump all the town's rubbish in?") but left everybody with a mess that was harder to clean up than to hide.

The people who took those decisions will then have doubtless gone home, asked their children to tidy their rooms, and then told them off for hiding everything under the bed.

Years before Lunchista's arrival here, our city got a Natural Environment Trust, whose chair made it his business to find all the holes in the landscape with a view to identifying, and then looking after, all the wildlife within. In the days before Google Earth this was a lot of hard work: walking around everywhere and climbing over the odd wall. His prize find was a huge hole in the east end, surrounded by people's back gardens, where no-one ever went. He once described the sensation of finding it for the first time, as being like climbing through into an unknown other world. By an odd coincidence his name, but for one letter's difference, is Harry Potter.

It turned out to be a former landfill that had been capped off with clay in the 1970s. Nature had already made a good start on it: lots of brambles, bushes, and even some apple trees where the sweet factory had dumped all their unwanted bits of fruit. By the time Lunchista happened upon it, by spotting their wind turbine from the main road, several wildlife landscapes (woodland, meadow, pond...) had been created, as well as a central building run entirely on renewable energy, with its garden and log-store, and a thriving recycling business. And all before any of this became fashionable.

In the several years since then, woods have been planted, a shop has appeared, nature-related courses have started up, the Council's been so impressed it has started giving them money every year, and Lunchista has learned from them which plants will provide a free lunch and which would result in a swift trip to A&E.

I say "them" but it's now "us". Many of this type of place, even those which have no visible signs of work having been done to them, have a "friends of..." which anybody who knows the name of the place can join for a song. If you're new in a city, just put the city name and "friends of" into Google. Or better still, go walkabout (the best time for this is just after lunch, in January. Strange but true).

Every now and then the call goes out, come and help us plant trees (or build bird-boxes, or find out about spiders, or weave fences, or...). And then sit on the varandah (or in front of the stove, depending on the time of year), drink tea and home-made soup and have a chat.

Now who can refuse an offer like that?

Orchard of Promises

Have you ever noticed that you can walk, or drive, past places every day and not have the slightest idea that they even exist? Until, perhaps, somebody asks you about them, or having left the vicinity you happen to return, years later, as a tourist.

Word reached Lunchista that some simple, hard slog was needed to help restore a neglected orchard just a couple of miles down the road. The orchard lies just beyond an out-of-town shopping centre which, appropriately enough, was built on the site of a mental hospital's grounds. It transpired that two-thirds of the orchard had in fact been destroyed in order to build the shopping centre: sadly the mental hospital was no longer around to provide suitable accommodation for whoever came up with that idea.

So, for about a decade, the remaining trees have been offering their fruit each year, unnoticed except for a few locals who were still in the know, the ground staff of the shopping centre who used it as an organic dustbin, and Tescos, who (rumour had it) wanted to pull up the remaining trees to make way for a garden centre.

We turned up one day in late winter. It felt odd walking past all the designer clothes, dressed as if for a spot of fellwalking but with the interesting addition of a bowsaw, a spade and a pair of loppers. It would have made an unlikely (but rather entertaining) story "down the station" if there'd suddenly been a terrorist alert at the shopping centre.

We shovelled half-decayed garden waste away from the tree-trunks, to stop them from rotting. We heaved it all onto a trailer that the groundsmen had helpfully left there. It turned out that everybody was happy to let us get on with it: less work for the groundsmen and something nice to put in the CSR reports of both the shopping centre and their landlords. The groundsmen had never heard of on-site composting, but you can't have everything.

Some of the trees had dead branches, which we lopped off, and during the harder-than-usual winter, rabbits had been gnawing the bark. Lunchista's offer of an air-rifle wasn't taken up though, for some reason.

We have been back twice, and the groundsmen have helpfully lit a bonfire for the wood waste (except the good bits, which have quietly been spirited away to the woodburning stove at Chateau Lunchista). It looks as if all the trees bar one have pulled through, and those which are missing from the rows can be replaced, with local breeds of apple, pear and plum.

If all your apples turn up at once (or you have just cadged some from the ground somewhere and they don't look very presentable) it's easy to deal with. Just peel them, cut into chunks, simmer for a few minutes til soft, mash with a spudbasher, and freeze. Apple puree can be served hot or cold with any permutation of: sugar, raisins, fruit syrup, ice-cream, chocolate, breakfast cereal, rabbit (all right I made that last one up).

The orchard is now Registered, so no-one can demolish it without incurring the wrath of PTES. The Plan is to turn it into a Community Orchard and have picnic tables and events. In the long run, the plan is to still have apples, no matter how expensive, or unreliable, the supply of imported fruit (or indeed rabbits) may become.

stop...press..stop...press...

24th April: It looks as if The National Trust have been following the Year-Long Lunch Break! Funds have been set up for preserving and reviving old orchards. Perhaps we're starting a new fashion.

"My, how you've grown!"

We've all been there. Some of us longer ago than others.

You're visiting, or being visited by, an older relative, and you're standing there thinking that you'd far rather be playing football or climbing trees, and they utter those awful words "My, how you've grown!". Now how on earth are you supposed to answer a greeting like that? You could try the logical approach ("Yes it's because I eat lots of spaghetti, and it's long and thin..."), the contrary riposte ("No I haven't"), or the sociable rejoinder ("Yes, so have you"). You could even branch out into surrealism ("No, I'm standing on your head"). Growing just happens: it's not even interesting. Saying "My, you're breathing!" would sound no less daft to a ten-year-old. Although it might arouse the suspicions of his parents.

We grow, then we grow up. The English language has this amazingly economical way of saying not only that we have finished doing something, but also that we have exhausted all further possibilities of doing it. We eat, and when there's no more we've eaten up. When the stuff is all used, and there's no more to be had, it's used up. The only other language Lunchista knows of which shares this turn of phrase is Chinese: the little suffix "Le" at the end of a sentence tells us that whatever is going on in that sentence has now been completed. Sometimes "Le" also implies that whatever has been done, has been done to the point of perfection. So, we grow, and provided we stay healthy and have enough of the right type of food (spaghetti or otherwise), we reach the best of all possible heights and then we stop. We are then grown-up.

We are lucky that this is all done automatically. What would we do if it took some effort, or some choice, to switch "growing" off? Ten-year-olds grow at the rate of about 5 cm a year: imagine the chaos if that carried on throughout life. A typical retiree, at about 4 metres tall, would be nearly as high as a house.

Most people, given the choice, would like to be "slightly taller than average". So in the end, a choice about whether to stop growing or not would result in maximum possible growth: very few people want to be shorter than average.

Does the phrase "maximum possible growth" sound familiar? Isn't it what most governments, given the choice, would like their country's economies (their GDP) to do? But in a mature economy like ours, where everybody could easily have enough of all they need if the distribution were ever so slightly tweaked, do we really need more "growth"? How about two things to ponder over lunch:

First, think of all the goods and services we use: there's a physical limit to how much of all of them we can cram into our lives. We can only eat so much food, inhabit and fully appreciate so big a house, drive so many miles, take up so many sports, drink so much beer and read so many books: after that the enjoyment palls or we simply run out of time, health or natural resources.

Second, pick any easily-measureable number that represents quality of life: life expectancy, infant survival, people's perceived happiness, you name it, and plot it against income: all this can be done as a lunchtime's entertainment using Gapminder, who already have all the numbers. Of course you get a rising curve on your plot: it is better not to be poor. But, at a level of income just shy of the UK average, the curve flattens out. The very rich do not live any longer, or feel any happier, than the average Brit. We should delight in that curve. It tells us that the present halt in economic growth need not prevent us from having a good quality of life. It also tells us that economic growth is best left to the people in countries who really need it.

There's only one problem. Every time any money is created, so is a corresponding amount of debt. This debt incurrs interest. So unless we are all producing goods faster than this debt grows, there will always be more debt than the total wherewithal available to pay it off. Someone, somewhere, will always go bust. It could be you.

It is not a pleasant thought: we either put up with an economy that grows, providing us all with more of anything than we can ever sanely use, or put up with one that doesn't, launching us all into a game of musical chairs (or Russian Roulette, depending on your frame of mind) with the bailiffs.

So until we change the way that money is created, the economy can never be allowed to be grown-up.

Continuity announcement

"And now on the Year-Long Lunch Break, we have some sorrel. Coming up shortly is an explanation of where the holes in the leaves, along with vast amounts of money, come from..."

Sorrel is one of the few edible things in a garden at this time of year. It is perennial, so none of that mucking about with seeds once it's up and running. It doesn't even mind the shade: you can find it growing wild in woods. It is stuffed with iron, but a body can only grab the iron and use it if the sorrel is eaten with something fatty. For example:

Dice a couple of spuds and boil them with a whole (peeled!) onion and a chicken stock cube till the spuds are soft. Remove the onion. Grab about 6 leaves and chop them up very finely, almost until they turn into a kind of green stodge. Drop the stodge in, stir, simmer for a few minutes more. When you serve it, put out a pot of Greek strange yoghurt or similar so that people can dollop it on. In the summer the soup can be eaten chilled, poured over diced hard-boiled egg and cucumber.

Right, back to the holes. As anyone with even a passing acquaintance of a British garden knows, slugs come out at night and leave you with holey leaves if you are lucky, and no leaves at all if you are not. Then in the daytime the slugs all disappear.

Lunchista is often out in the garden during the day doing stuff, like digging, weeding, planting seeds, trimming edges, looking for lost shoes, and so on, but it is just a fact of life that there are no slugs in the garden during the day. So where do they all go?

If you think that they must be somewhere, then you subscribe to a theory known as The Theory Of The Continuity Of Slugs. Other possible theories are that they transform into something else, for example a powder or a vapour, or that they do not exist at all during the daytime but disappear altogether. During the Middle Ages these two other possibilities were taken perfectly seriously by most people: they believed, for example, that if you put out a piece of cheese it would spontaneously change into a mouse overnight, or that flies would form out of a piece of meat. All this in spite of the presence at that very time of a clean-shaven monk called Ockham, who said one must always look for the most straightforward explanation for anything. Lunchista presumes he must have known where the slugs in his abbey garden hung out during the day.

Then, shortly before the French Revolution, the idea that stuff, or to put it more technically mass, didn't spontaneously appear or disappear, was demonstrated scientifically by a lady called Mme Lavoisier (and her husband. It was difficult in those days, even in France, for a woman to get her scientific findings taken seriously). They carefully weighed everything, including the gas let off into the room, before and after various chemistry reactions of the sort you may have done at school, and found the total mass didn't change.

But it seems that in spite of the efforts of the Lavoisiers, and countless other scientists since, Continuity Of Stuff seems to be taking a while to catch on. For a start, have you ever noticed how the most outrageously inconsistent things can happen in dreams and, unless you are exceptional, you are neither surprised nor alerted to the fact that it's a dream.

Beliefs can also disappear. I am not talking about the perfectly sensible changes in belief that happen in the face of new information (for example, a belief that the Falklands lie off the coast of Scotland can disappear after looking at maps). I am talking about what can happen to people's principles when they are made, day after day, to contravene them. Most people, for example, have a fundamental, if slightly hazy, sense of fairness which would under normal circumstances prevent them from deliberately ripping people off. But then they get a job in Sales. And a mortgage. And they find that they must either make people buy more unnecessary, badly-designed or poorly-made stuff every month, or lose the roof over their head.

Now there is some truly excellent stuff available out there to buy: motorbikes that run like a dream, timeless-classic clothes that never go out of style, practically any service that involves refurbishing anything, all are worth parting with money for. People selling this kind of thing are lucky: they can enthuse about it to the punters, straight from the heart. Seller and buyer alike will feel genuine pleasure about the entire encounter.

But there's also a lot of crap for sale, and it's this stuff that needs the most forceful, erm, sales force. They will have to go out there on pain of losing their job, and shift this stuff. The sensation of knowingly having to do the wrong thing is so unpleasant that people will go to enormous lengths to avoid it, for example by convincing themselves that what they are selling is crucial to life's happiness, or is the best on offer, or...you get the idea. The unpleasant sensation has a name: cognitive dissonance. The principle about fairness has to change a bit so that this new belief can sit beside it, and the feeling of cognitive dissonance can be reduced. All this seems to have become a popular topic for research lately, presumably because there is so much of it about.

Lunchista thinks its effect on the economy can be measured. To do this, you would compare the pay offered for jobs in which cognitive dissonance is present (for example an engineer designing weapons) with those with very little (another engineer with the same level of expertise, designing renewable energy kit). The weapons engineer's salary is higher because someone has to offer him or her the price of peace of mind in addition to the price of expertise. It's a trade-off, and some people will accept the extra money because they like having more money, and the stuff doesn't just spontaneously materialise in your wallet, you have to go out and earn it. There's Continuity Of Money, right?

After all, if one lot of people had to slog all their lives for money in jobs they didn't really like, while another lot could just create trillions at the touch of a button, nobody would believe in anything any more and there'd be chaos.