Urban Guerrilla

It started with conkers. Ever since the invention of string, it seems, people like Lunchista fils have collected conkers every autumn, threaded them on string, striven to make them as indestructible as posible (by means fair or foul) and smashed them into each other.

Academics have recently pieced together the story of the invention of string, or at least, why it caught on so rapidly. As the ice-age tightened its grip on our ancestral landscape, the cave-family who were able to use a sharp bone and some string to piece together their furs to a more figure-hugging shape, including new-fangled luxuries such as shoes, obviously had a life-enhancing piece of technology worth sharing. It's interesting to speculate that the existance of patents in those early days would probably have done for the human race.

Meanwhile, as the more serious-minded family members stitched together their winter survival kit, some bored five-year-old was probably experimenting with the head-bashing potential of one of granny's pieces of this new-fangled string stuff with a nut threaded on the end...on his little sister's head. The family's continued survival thus rested on the invention of the game of conkers as a substitute activity. But I digress.

What usually happened at Chateau Lunchista was that the conkers would be collected all right, but then just thrown round the garden and forgotten about...until nature took its course and small horse-chestnut trees started appearing everywhere. Lunchista dug them up and put them into pots. They were later joined by some stray Hazels, grown from nuts that had gone past their "use-by".

Then a suitable road-verge appeared: people kept veering off it in their trucks and demolishing, over and over again, the same piece of wall. We thought a hedge might be a better bet, keeping the HGVs off the wall, while also providing a softer landing. So the trees got planted out in front of the wall. That gave Lunchista a taste for that kind of thing.

Hazels and rose-hips (the big fat irregularly-shaped type) spilled out onto the path from the station to my previous workplace. They all came home, got planted, and are now growing in our garden. The lawn under an oak tree at Castle Howard was covered in acorns when we visited one day last autumn. Erm, then it wasn't: some of them are in the loo-rolls in the picture, and some took off last year. Planting them out is the difficult bit. It hasn't stopped me from collecting more seeds of various sorts, though.

It took ages before I could find a place that isn't mowed, dug over or napalmed with weed-killer on a regular basis. I had to content myself with lobbing apple-cores and plum-stones (dozens and dozens of them, from fruit from the orchard) out of the car window if our trips took us along country lanes.

Until the day, just over a month ago, when I spotted a perfectly good gap in a hedge. It was just the right time of year too.

So I loaded a potted oak sapling into a JJB bag (and covered it with another bag), stuck in a trowel and set off, in the middle of the afternoon when everybody's at work. Getting from the path to the chosen place was a pain: it was full of nettles! I also noticed how loud a carrier-bag can be, and how long it can (seem to) take to get a plant out of a pot. I'd picked a place that looked as though it had a nice view: that way, if people happened to come by I could pretend to be looking at something. This came in handy when 2 joggers hove into sight.

I quickly dug a hole, stuffed the contents of the plant-pot in, pushed a load of dead weed stems over the patch of bare soil, trod it down a bit, picked up my stuff and scarpered. It poured with rain that night, so hopefully the tree got a good start. It's also bang up against a wire fence, so no strimmers or accidental boots.

A month on and not only has the neighbouring path been completely mown (missing my tree) but floods have come, and washed a load of old twigs over it. It looks as if I'd picked a good place: the tree's neither been strimmed down nor washed away.

Nearby is a huge old apple tree that probably escaped from somebody's orchard. It dropped hundreds, possibly thousands, of little apples. Not much good for eating, but brilliant as "seed bombs". They are now scattered in the brambles all along the path, among the nettles along the edge of a nearby field, and in the long grass the strimmers have missed under a fence along the main road South out of the city. Of course apple seeds don't usually "grow true" but even so, they'll still produce fruit of some kind, or at the very least grow into trees and improve the landscape.

On my way back, I also got rid of two stuffed pockets full of beech nuts. They are lining a verge between the road and a field, currently under water, where 700 houses are to be built. It turns out that Lunchista is in good company: Admiral Collingwood (Nelson's second-in-command at Trafalgar, no less), thinking about the need for timber in the future, used to plant acorns wherever he could.

Barking? Possibly. But who would you rather put in charge of your future: Admiral Collingwood, or someone who'd arrange to build 700 houses on a flood plain?

Surreal interlude

Someone asked, how would your morning routine look if you wrote it up as a story? So, with apologies to the late Spike Milligan and the rest of the Goons...

Greenslade: This is the BBC (FX: penny in mug) Ah, my Jobseekers’ Allowance has arrived bang on time! And now we bring you a Newsflash live from the Cube Farm War. Major Bloodnok and his troops are poised to demolish the last cube-farm on British soil, bringing a long-awaited end to their reign of terror.
FX: galloping charge, gunshots, ricochets, war cries
FX: alarm clock
Lunchista Bloodnok (for it is (s)he): Aaaarrgh! Blasted alarm clock! Where’s me mallet?
FX: alarm clock being smashed with mallet
L.B.: Monday morning...I must muster the troops! Eccles, Bluebottle!
Eccles: erm...yes?
Bluebottle: I heard you calling capting, I heard my capting call
Wild applause from audience
L.B.: Troops, rise and shine! There’s nothing like a big bowl of hot, steaming porridge to set you up first thing in the morning
Bluebottle: but this is nothing like a bowl of porridge capting. It’s all full of lumpy goo.
L.B.: Here, try adding some of these unexploded strawberries, that should do the trick
FX: Fireworks
Bluebottle: it’s burnded a big hole in the table capting
L.B.: Battle-scars, me young lad. Gives it Character. Seagoon, answer that phone!
Seagoon: what phone?
FX: phone rings
L.B.: That one!
FX: phone off hook
Seagoon: Fort Lunchista speaking.
Aussie Ambassador: G’day! Aussie embassy here. Listen, mate, could you help us out? Young Bruce left his trousers at Karate last night, and the dog ate his spare pair. If he turns up to school without trousers, he’ll get a detention and we’ll miss our plane to Australia. Just when we’d sold the house and raised the cash for a new life soaking up the sun on the beach with the Barbie. We’re desperate...
Seagoon: Don’t worry, we’ll attend to it.
FX: phone down.
Bluebottle: Capting, I was working all night in the lab-burra-terry inventing these...they’re Inter-Continental Ballistic Trousers!
Seagoon: Brilliant, young lad! We’ll take them round to the Australian embassy so those fine fellows won’t be denied their new sun-drenched Antipodean life.
L.B.: Right, troops, everything packed? Eccles: homework?
Eccles: erm...yes
L.B.: cooking ingredients? Pans? Kitchen sink?
FX: clatter of kitchen implements
Eccles: yes.
L.B.: Right then Eccles, off you go! Bluebottle...books?
Bluebottle: yes capting.
L.B. You’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet.
Bluebottle: but capting, they’re the only feet I’ve got...
L.B.: yes, but you’ve put your shoes on my feet! And they’re so small I can’t get them off. Here, hand me that saw
FX: Sawing. Large wooden object falls on floor. More sawing and another wooden object.
L.B.: right, you can use my legs for today. I won’t be needing them because I’m going to be spending all day in bed.
Bluebottle: Farewell, capting!
FX: door. Rapidly receding footsteps. Pause. Whoosh of rocket taking off in the distance.
L.B.: ah, there he goes, and another family are saved from a life of drudgery. Only twenty-four million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go!
FX: snores.

Editor's note: Lunchista fils really does have an Aussie schoolfriend, who lives just round the corner from Chateau Lunchista in "The Australian Embassy". Sadly (at least, for us) it is true that they are leaving these soggy Isles for The Lucky Country in the not-too-distant future. And Lunchista fille really has, on occasions, had to bring her own cooking implements to school!

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.

Leonids

At this time of year the Earth and all who sail in her are apparently passing through the tail of a shattered comet. Any detritus near enough to us gets pulled towards the planet and burns its way through the atmosphere, offering us as it does so the Leonid Meteor Shower.

And no it's not named after the old Soviet bloke with the eyebrows ("Thy name is immortal, thy deeds are unknown"), but after the constellation of Leo, where the shower appears to come from. So all you need to do is, find Leo. As luck would have it, Lunchista fille has a map: we bought it at Techniquest, the science exhibition in Cardiff (well worth a visit if you want some entertainment for anyone between the ages of 4 and 12). Here it is.

Leo spends some of its time near the sun, but that's in August so needn't bother us here in November. But it also spends a lot of its time below the horizon, including, when looked at from anywhere in Europe, the entire evening. This means the best time to see it, and the accompanying meteor show, is the wee small hours of the morning. The Planisphere in the shot is set up to show what you can see in the sky at 4 a.m. (GMT) tomorrow morning. Note the flash, which has obscured some of the "sky", is about where the sun would be at this time of year, making our shot even more realistic.

Leo's head looks a bit like a back-to-front question mark, and zooming in to our map shows Leo's head is in the Southeast, about halfway up from the horizon (the edge of the "window") to the zenith (the point where the straight and the curved red lines in the window cross). The dotted white line passes through all the signs of the zodiac and shows how the sun moves around it in a year: each dot is a day. The points of the compass look the wrong way round because you are holding the map over your head.

So the plan here at Chateau Lunchista is for all interested parties to get out of bed ludicrously early and either go up to the attic (from where, the two small Lunchistas assure me, stars can be seen) or failing that, to set out into the playing-field with our jim-jams covered in several extra layers.

It's funny to think that there's always a cloud of meteor debris lurking at this one particular spot that we pass through every November. Given that as we go around the sun, the sun itself is circling the middle of the galaxy, the debris must be following us around. It would always "see" us at the same time of year. Which brings Lunchista to an odd thought: supposing there were an alien spaceship parked about a month further along our orbit. Every time we passed by, we'd be celebrating Christmas. The aliens on board would form the impression that humans in this part of the world spent all the time in over-elaborate, too-brightly-lit places, either eating too much or getting into debt buying things nobody needs.

And of course they'd be completely wrong. Wouldn't they?

Your very good health

It has been officially ascertained by Her Majesty's Government that being out of work is bad for your health. This "truth universally acknowledged" is based on simple statistics: a greater fraction of the unemployed seek medical help than do their employed counterparts.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is Lunchista's considered opinion that in this case Her Majesty's Government are talking (to use a physicist's technical term) spherical objects.

A large chunk of the workforce in the UK is over the age of 35. By this time in life most people have some nagging health problem like back pain, knee joints that play up, headaches, unexplained tiredness, sugar balance that's going a bit wrong, that kind of thing. Never quite bad enough to cry off work, but still something we'd rather do without. But we carry on regardless, out of lack of time, lack of faith (in our ability to describe the problem to the medical profession, or in their ability to put an end to it), or sheer inertia: and anyway we're healthy enough to hold down a job, so we must be ok.

But then, for some reason completely unconnected with health, we might pack it in. Or the P45 arrives. Sociologists and psychologists and people who know far more about that sort of thing than Lunchista does, say that this often causes people to re-assess their whole lives. You know, what do I want out of life, how can I make my life better, and so on. And I've got all this time...I know, I'll go along and get my knee/back/permanent cold sorted out. Because our healthcare is free, but time-consuming, for employed and unemployed alike.

And so Lunchista is taking her sinusitis to the Doctor's, who have already offered some Antihistamine (in case I'm allergic to something) and an appointment with a specialist (which I can take up at short notice because I have no need to book time off work). Meanwhile our Primary Healthcare Trust are no doubt wrestling with the problem of how on earth Unemployment can increase the chances of Sinusitis: a phenomenon recently identified by their statisticians. Obviously further research is necessary.

And what of Lunchista's real state of health? Well, three days after my final day in my previous job, my teeth stopped bleeding. None of my other habits had changed: same food, same address, same amount of excercise (i.e. shamefully, not very much), same water supply, same teeth-brushing routine, same toothpaste and brush.

Of course I haven't had to see anybody about this: our wonderful Health Service therefore remain blissfully unaware that packing in my job may have saved my life.

Value Engineering 2: Hallowe'en

Sometime last week it occurred to Lunchista that Hallowe'en was going to fall on a Saturday. Great, I thought, the smaller Lunchistas are going to have a whole day to put together costumes for Trick-or-Treating.

Or perhaps not.

On the Friday evening Lunchista fille came back from football practice and announced that there was going to be a match the following morning, half-term notwithstanding. It also transpired that everybody (everybody small, that is) wanted to go to Underwater Hockey, which has now become a semi-regular feature of our Saturday afternoons.

So at ten in the morning we arrived at the local footie-pitch and I spent the next ninety minutes cheering on the Lunchista fille squad and drinking large amounts of tea while talking about other people's holidays (there seems to be some kind of friendly rivalry about who can go the furthest: well we've been to Pluto so there). The weather was perfect: no wind, hazy sun, cool enough to play but mild enough to stand still and watch. To crown it all, it was a home win.

Meanwhile the men of the household had done the weekly food run, and as an extra bonus had found by experiment that this is possible by bike. Lunch was swifter than usual because there was "dead-easy chicken soup" already made. This gave us just enough time to hook up the bike trailer, load up the "implements of destruction" and head off to a convenient dead tree.

We'd never noticed this particular dead tree until it blew down in a gale, right across the cycle-path that leads to The Planets. Mr Lunchista had had to cycle into somebody's field to get round it. Next time he passed by, it was (and I quote) "chopped into handy bite-sized chunks" which, bit by bit, and with smiles from the odd passer-by as we go, have been making their way to our garage and then onto the woodburner. It's absolutely-dry Beech, too, one of the best for burning.

We sawed and loaded up about 30 kilos of it (works out as about a week's worth if it's not too cold), before heading back, just in time to load up the cozzies and towels, and the weekend Yorkshire Post for my edification and delight: Underwater Hockey isn't exactly a spectator sport. And so I've no idea how the game went, except everybody seemed happy with their performance, and not too exhausted to...

...make a pumpkin-lantern and put the finishing touches to that Vampire and Grim-Reaper ensemble (witches are apparently So Last Year). The Grim Reaper went out before dinner with the other assorted death-heads, whereas the Vampire was doing the after-dinner shift with her equally pale-and-interesting companion. After all you really don't want hungry vampires roaming the streets: the effect on the economy would be catastrophic.

The whole day had worked out so well: maximum entertainment, minimum hassle, no wasted time and practically no cost.

But it all relies on so much: food in the shops, petrol in the car, water to spare for the pool (though I'm reliably informed that Underwater Hockey's big in Australia). And nobody cold or desperate enough to fight us over that dead tree.

At about this time last year, two major banks came within hours of failing: failure which would have brought the usually smooth-running, and value-engineered-to-perfection, system that supplies us with all the basics, juddering to a halt.

If that, or anything like it, happens again, and we're not as lucky, are we ready for the Nightmare Scenario Value Engineering 2 - Hallowe'en ?


Dead-easy chicken soup (not for the squeamish): take the carcass, bones and all, from yesterday's roast and put in a pan, then cover with water, add a bit of salt, bring to the boil, turn down and simmer for as long as you like. The longer it's done for, the more gelatin comes out of the bones, which means that when the soup cools again it kind of "sets" and you can spread it on toast. It's also full of minerals that everybody is short of. When the soup's luke-warm, spread sheets of newspaper next to it, lift out the bones and any gristle, and wrap them in the newspaper (if your dusties are on strike this can actually go on the woodburner!). If you don't need the calories then you can take the fat off the top once the soup's completely cold. It will keep in the fridge for ages, and practically any vegetables, especially winter ones, will go well in it.