The laundry lasses' working day

"Places with chairs you're not allowed to sit on" said Lunchista fille in disdain as the idea was floated, in the delightful sunshine of Saturday morning, to cycle ten miles to Beningborough Hall. As a description of Lunchista's own feelings, a generation ago, trailing round stately homes with her parents because it was too rainy to go to the beach/park/funfair, it was a genius one-liner.

But it wasn't raining, Beningborough Hall has a playground in its grounds (complete with picnic tables), there's plenty of other space to run around in (including a HaHa you can jump, fall or be pushed off), and there's an art exhibition where you can make your own portrait and have it emailed home for a laugh. To top it all, if Lunchista fille deigned to join us it meant that I would be riding my wonderful ancient bike, which is a bit of a museum piece in its own right and would probably feel right at home there.

Moreover, these days stately homes have an interesting new slant that wasn't there in the 60's: for anyone of a self-sufficiency bent, they're becoming something of an object lesson, and a good-looking object at that.

The gardens, for example, are once again providing fruit and veggies for people to eat on-site, and as if that's not enough the National Trust is begining to set aside some of its land for allotments. Expertise is being sought about reviving the growing of Mediterranean and even tropical fruit by taking advantage of sunshine or waste heat trapped in walls: one place we've visited in Cornwall had pipes taking heat from the kitchen through to its garden walls (for growing lemons) and greenhouse (pineapples!), and a team of plumbers was being assembled to get them up and running again. There are pantries and ice-houses instead of fridges and freezers. How cool is that? The only downside of all this is it can bring on a serious case of Garden Envy.

But Lunchista might not have been the gardener. I might, as John Rawls said, have been anybody, including one of the laundry lasses, who worked in the room in the picture at the top of this post. Sitting on top of a formidable mangle was a timetable of their working day, starting with arriving at 4 a.m. to light the boiler, having walked in from a nearby village. Their boss arrived a little later to check that the things they had left to soak were, well, soaked. There followed at least two bouts of washing (possers, washboards, brushes, you get the idea) and two of rinsing for everything, between each of which it all had to be put through the mangle. The schedule ended with the clothes being hung out to dry at mid-day (outdoors if fine, on the indoor pulley in the picture if wet). At least their working day wasn't much longer than Lunchista's. It also took advantage of the cooler part of the day for the hardest part of the work, and I noticed the place faced South, with huge sash-windows, for plenty of light and air. But there's no denying it was a thankless slog.

Now a lot of people, including Lunchista in the past, would say that it is the presence of Electricity in our daily lives that frees us from all this. It is, after all, "the silent servant" which does the hard physical slog so that we don't have to. But we are more than electrified Victorians. For example, we no longer expect our morals to be called into question if we should turn up for a day's work in straight-cut, lightweight and practically-coloured clothes rather than the multi-layered, white, wedding-dress-like apparel of the lasses in the photograph.

Which means that if, for some reason, electricity should desert us in the future, then rather than having to go back to washday Victorian style we could use hand-powered washing machines like these, or even one of these, which looks like much more fun:

Interlude

Here's a little something I've put together for people who are too busy to sit and watch their sunflowers come out. I hope it brightens up somebody's Monday!

Value Engineering

There are some places on these islands whose sunlight really is special. Lunchista has lived in Glasgow (but almost anywhere on the West Coast of Scotland will do as an example), and stayed near Aberdyfi in Wales, but the Lake District has this light too. Somehow the sun looks brighter if its light is falling onto steep, dark terrain. The less charitable could also point out that sunlight looks brighter here simply because it is so rare, and I'm afraid the numbers from the Met Office back them up. You've got to seize your moment.

Famille Lunchista were lucky enough to catch possibly the best day of the summer for a boat trip on Ullswater (although to be fair this followed a prescient look at the forecast). A 1930s style boat took us half the length of the lake (about six miles) to a classic country hotel where we had lunch on a terrace with stunning views. It, too, had something of the 1930s about it, even down to the waitress's uniform (full length black dress plus white pinny). It was all very unhurried, un-crowded and, unlike most tourist destinations I've been to of late, generally not a system under stress. Or so we thought.

Value Engineering is the black art of getting the most "value" out of some enterprise, by paring off any inputs that aren't strictly necessary while still delivering, just, what people expect, and have paid for. It was originally applied to straightforward mass-production and the like, where it made for more-efficient processes and less waste, but has since then spread into areas in which, to put it charitably, it is less appropriate. Such as Tourism, and infrastructure design.

We walked back to the lakeside in time to see the previous boat to ours come along. It was rather smaller than ours, and could only just take on the people queuing at the jetty. The motor started up... and then the driveshaft failed to engage. From the crew's conversation with their base we jaloused that the boats were checked thoroughly every morning, and that these smaller ones had had extra checks because they had been drafted in to replace the route's largest vessels, which could not be used that day because the lake's water-level was the highest it had been for 20 years after our unusually wet July.

The crew explained that a tow was needed and that this meant all the passengers had to disembark. They thanked us for our patience. Then the real system failure happened. It transpired that the jetty only had space for one boat to moor, so we all had to wait until the Park Rangers' motor-launch (complete with tow-rope) had done its stuff before any of us, now a total of about 300 people (including all the passengers in our boat, which as we joked was in a "holding pattern" out on the lake), could go anywhere. All because someone, somewhere, had decided that the cost of a few extra planks couldn't be justified because, well, they'd never be needed...

We were there for an extra three hours.

Most tourists want to cram as much as possible into their day, rather than simply sit somewhere and soak up the atmosphere. But as far as I was concerned, none of this really mattered: not having value-engineered our day, we didn't have to be anywhere else in a hurry. The jetty was warm wood, the view was beautiful, Lunchista fils lay his head on his rucksack and had a quick kip, Lunchista fille looked at the shapes of the mountains, and I was lost in memories of various children's stories set in this type of landscape: Swallows and Amazons, the Moomins, that kind of thing. Nobody got cold or hungry, and we only slightly regretted not staying on at the hotel terrace for cream tea. Even the dog didn't throw a wobbly.

I got to explaining to Lunchista fille about the layout of the Lake District and how it had come about: the lakes are mainly the routes of glaciers, radiating downwards and outwards from the central mountains, like the spokes of a wheel. Opposite our spoke, for example, is Wastwater, and then the coast.

Sitting on that coast is a place whose bosses and operatives, I really hope, never get the idea of Value Engineering into their heads...

St Swithin's Day update

The Met Office has just cancelled the "Barbecue Summer" we were supposed to be having, and no wonder. Received wisdom here at Chateau Lunchista is that anyone wishing for sunny and/or warm weather must never, under any circumstances, utter the word "Barbecue". The correct terminology, if we wish to invite people for charcoal-powered alfresco nosh in fine weather, is "An offering of burned meat to the Great God Pluvius".

Meanwhile, sixteen days into the St Swithin forty, here at Chateau Lunchista we have had a grand total of 2 (two) days without rain. It has also been incredibly windy for summer: this is the first time in five years that Lunchista has had to tether sunflowers to stop them blowing down (having first had to right them: not a cheery task!).

By the way if you've ever wondered what to do about vegetarians and barbeques, apart from the obvious veggie "kebabs", Haloumi cheese makes a damn fine grill and doesn't melt (and it can go in kebabs as well).