It is now!

Just a quick final note in case you are wondering about Lunchista, and possibly about how to follow on from a year-long lunch break.

Well let's just say that the Year-Long Lunch Break was a launch pad. And Lunchista's new blog comes to you from Space. Do join me.

They think it's all over...

There comes a time when a blog must live up to its title. Ladies and gentlemen, in the case of the Year-long lunch break, that time is 19th March 2010. A look back through Lunchista's musings will reveal an entire year of activities, thoughts, people and other curiosities. It also leaves me with the strange thought that as I write this post, the small spherical object on which I sit is hurtling through roughly the same bit of space as it was when I transmitted the first post, immortalising my boss, his exasperation, and an unknown committee at my former workplace. If I accidentally dropped anything there, now's the time to have a quick look for it.

So, what was the plan? "What do you do?". Well, there were never mighty empires to be built (too expensive, too unfriendly). The plan was to live in a place, rather than fall into the trap of using it as a dormitory. To find, learn about, and take part in, the many and various things that attempt to make local and national life better, and to do all that without much need of anything elaborate, like money.

As for the vexed question itself, well Lunchista did make the papers once during the Year-long lunch break, and the radio too, and for these purposes has been described as a "Sustainability Activist". I have also been the inevitable "Unemployed" (at the jobcentre) and "Housewife" (for our new insurance) as well as "Energy spokesperson" (for our Party), "Trustee" (for the Orchard and the Nature Reserve), "Consultee" (various campaigns) and of course "Urban Guerrilla" (gardener, that is).

I remain all those things, but for now anyone who has shared the Year-long lunch break will just have to imagine what happens next. Or better still, take a year-long lunch break of your own. You know it makes sense.

A spot of Perestroika

Over the years, in the intervals (both long and short) between bouts of paid work, I have developed a taste for basic D.I.Y. Since this often involves re-arranging things it has, in Chateau Lunchista, acquired the nick-name "Perestroika" (literally "Restructuring", in Russian).

It started with cheap rented flats: I would rescue and restore pieces of old furniture. Two "Directors' Chairs" (discovered in an overgrown garden) which I re-strung in the early 1980s are still being used here at Chateau Lunchista to this day. I sanded and repainted an ancient chest of drawers one summer day as a break from writing up stuff about electromagnetic scattering. In some flats I'd offer to redecorate. The delight:expenditure ratio of brightening up a room was beyond belief.

It got easier with practice: a friend who decided to follow the 1980s fashion of property development bribed me to paint all the woodwork in his latest acquisition. The weirdest episode of this kind must have been the Valentine's Day I spent shovelling rubble out of a 1st-storey window.

All of which meant that when the first Chateau Lunchista was acquired, after the real hardcore stuff (they had to take the floor away because it had dry rot, and then we decided that since we were in Glasgow we'd better have some heating installed too) none of the decorating had to be paid for. Or the extra electrical connections. Or hoisting the chandelier. We found that the best colours to paint with were ones that made it look as if the sun was shining into the room, even if it was dull outside. Then I bought reams and reams of Damask for a song at Dalston market and made them into curtains (using material with a striped pattern makes this much easier).

We've also had the experience of moving into a house which was, well, sad. Nothing was dramatically wrong with it, it just needed a change of atmosphere.

Sanding the floorboards really brings some light into a room. Then it was a matter of getting rid of four rooms' worth of dull wallpaper: I bought a steamer, and spent days with steam and loud Heavy Metal while everybody else was away. Even wallpapering is far easier than it used to be in days gone by: no-one makes wallpaper that tears or deforms anymore, and there are step-by-step illustrated leaflets floating around in most D.I.Y. emporia these days.

All of which meant that, on starting out on the year-long lunch break, I was able to finish off a lot of annoying odds and ends in the present Chateau Lunchista. There was a cupboard in Lunchista fils' bedroom where some kind of plumbing massacre had taken place, leaving holes in the wall and floor, and piles of old plaster. It's amazing the size of hole you can use pollyfilla on, and the transformation wrought with a tin of white paint. Someone had left the shelf brackets in, so I was even able to make slatted shelves by sawing up planks from an old pallet and painting them white.

Finally there was the hole in the kitchen floor. Breakfast bars are the height of fashion these days but that left nowhere in the kitchen where we could eat dinner, at least not all at the same time. So we got it removed by a professional, and underneath it we discovered the hole in the floor. The only reason I felt able to take it on was that our next-door neighbour put me up to it. Ah the joys of a positive attitude! That and a full collection of tools for that and all possible other D.I.Y. jobs.

It took me two days to chisel away blobs of concrete to make the hole the right shape to lay tiles in. Little shards of it riccochet round the room, so I had to don safety goggles. Then we discovered the tiles were a few millimetres too big, and had to get some smaller ones. You have to 'comb' the cement out until it's completely straight: this took me so long that the stuff was nearly dry by the time I'd got it right. Then the tiles just sat there looking odd until the following day when I could finally put the grouting in between them. I got it smeared all over the place to start with, until I found out that there are special tools for doing this. Oh well you live and learn.

The point of recounting all this is to say that at the start of any one of these jobs Lunchista had nothing to lose. Had anything gone wrong, or simply turned out beyond what either Lunchista or her other half could do, it could either be abandonned (in the case of the old furniture) or we could just pay someone to do it. As it is, we've saved a lot of money, we have the satisfaction of looking at our own work, and we've learned something.

Stern stuff

I've always liked spring evenings. Of course technically it isn't quite spring yet, not until the 21st. But it's a light early evening as I walk across the fields to the University, and it's about 6 degrees warmer than it has been. That is, it is about 6 degrees, and everything's no longer frozen. Birds are singing. Trees and grass smell of, well, trees and grass.

It was actually a bit of a gamble. I only heard about this evening's event yesterday, and hadn't realised until today that I'd be able to make it. Free tickets were available by phone or email. I emailed, and got no reply. Towards the end of the working day (4:30) I phoned too, but everybody in the Economics Department must have finished work early.

And can you blame them? Lord Stern (of Stern Review fame) had been invited to give a talk on his experiences at the infamous COP15 (that's Copenhagen climate talks to you and me). The fact that Lunchista had no ticket (free or otherwise) made me the official gatecrashing delegation, but I don't take up much room and I usually behave myself. In fact no-one was checking for tickets, and a handful of us late arrivals were quietly ushered in just as the Vice-Chancellor was finishing his introductory speech. Perfect.

The lighting (this "dramatic lighting from above" lark seems to be becoming fashionable) made Lord Stern's features look slightly Indian. I found myself wondering whether he, like Lunchista, had a slim Indian strand in his family tree, possibly dating back to some aristocratic liaison in those enlightened times before the Victorians started frowning on that sort of thing.

He lovingly described the characters, atmosphere, mistakes and successes of the Copenhagen talks, in particular how, because every decision had to be made unanimously, it reminded him of Student politics. Thinking back to when I was a student, many of our campus wannabe politicians were students of Economics, so that must have resonnated for practically everybody in the room. Somehow campus politics just didn't appeal as much to us Physicists, which perhaps explains a lot.

One of Copenhagen's successes, which I must admit had passed me by at the time, was the REDD anti-deforestation programme, by which countries with more trees than money can be bribed to keep their trees. The biggest failure, on the other hand, appeared to have been the idea of writing a "provisional" agreement in advance (with a view to saving time) which, naturally, offended every representative who wasn't directly involved in it. Oh well, you live and learn.

There followed lots of talk about future growth while reducing Carbon emissions. I wondered whether he'd ever had a chat with Prof Tim Jackson. There was even time for questions at the end: I would dearly have loved to ask about this but I felt I'd already pushed my luck a bit!

Put a spell on you

Quite a few "traditions", especially those involving people a lot younger than Lunchista, make their way from West to East across the Atlantic. You know, like Rock'n'Roll, Trick-or-Treat, and, erm, Spelling Bees. I'd never given any of this much thought until Lunchista fils came home from school one day proudly brandishing a letter which explained that he was on their school team for the Times Spelling Bee. Apparently they'd been doing practice rounds in class and he had turned out to be rather good at it.

Isn't life strange? Because Lunchista's spelling is absolutely appealing, and marvellous other half hails from a land where spelling simply isn't an issue. In fact if you think about it, most non-English speakers do: whatever their countries' other tribulations, they don't have the effects of 1066 and the Great Vowel Shift to deal with. Thank you Polyglot Vegetarian for an example of one such alphabet.

Parents were warmly invited, in fact encouraged, to come along and cheer on. The regional heats were being held forty miles away on a Monday afternoon. Lucky Lunchista, not having to be at work on a Monday! (by this time of year in my old job I'd usually used up my meagre allowance of annual leave, even including the extra days I "bought" instead of having a pension).

The venue was one of those Multiplex cinemas. The teams, rather melodramatically lit from above, lined up at their desks with the silver screen behind them, while the parents sat in the darkness. Rules were run through, in quite some detail because this was apparently only the second ever national Spelling Bee held in the UK. I was relieved to hear it would all be refereed using a British (as opposed to transatlantic) dictionary.

About a quarter of the players, at a guess, were bilingual, including two of our team of four. Interestingly, they did just as well as everybody else, demonstrating as they did so that bilingualism is good for the brain. Except perhaps when culture got in the way: one lass who had come swathed from head to foot in black kept getting given words like "cognac" and "bodice". I was beginning to wonder if it was a put-up job.

Lunchista fils' team won! Strangely, neither he nor I could remember any of the words he'd had to spell. Even more strangely, that's supposed to be a sign of real concentration, of being "at one" with the game.

Double Vision

Nobody really had any idea what a Charrette was. Except Lunchista, because in her previous job, some arbitrary chain of contacts had landed our firm with the chance to take part in one. In East London, of all places. And so I'd been dispatched down south to a swanky hotel in Greenwich, to help a panel of architects, urban planners and property finance experts come up with interesting ideas for a regeneration project for the lucky citizens of Deptford. Lunchista's contribution had been to consider anything in the area connected to energy and sustainability.

The idea is to put together something like a brainstorming session, except instead of taking an hour or so and producing a list of possible ideas on a flip-chart, this was to take a week (plus extra days for feedback from, then to, the public) and produce proper architects' plans for what to do with the entire area. The name derives from the carts upon which Parisian art and architecture students of the previous two centuries would dispatch their project work so as to meet examiners' deadlines. The same carts, I might add, upon which undesireables were dispatched to the guillotine. But I digress.

Our city has so many giant projects ongoing, and so many possibilities, that Yorkshire Forward had decided we were in need of some serious brainstorming, to come up with a Vision of what the city should look like over the next 25 years, and how it should work. All local organisations, including our Party, were invited along. The panel, as in the Deptford excercise, weren't locals but were given several days to get to know the area's geography and apply their brains afresh to problems with which we ourselves may have become too familiar. We were offered two whole days of presentations and feedback on a range of subjects (such as Transport, Parks, Communities...). And someone with a wicked sense of humour had allotted Lunchista the subject of Business.

So as I sat down round the table with five other consultees and our panel representative, I was wondering which parts of our beautiful city all the others wanted to obliterate with large lumps of Business. But it didn't quite happen like that. Everyone around the table was so enthused by the possibilities offered by the University's expansion programme (which is already under way, and includes a science park, a theatre, a swimming pool and for all I know a spaceport) that they decided that, at least as far as buildings were concerned, was all the growth we need, for now. They then decided that the best business area to grow in was renewable energy: the Council, even as I write, are putting together a feasibility study for precisely that. Then how about a total refurb of the city's office space? And growth in local, organic food?...And...isn't it great that the time-frame of our "Vision" stretches over the time when all this work needs doing, but not into the unknown territory beyond, when the economy will still need Growth but he rest of us will already have all we need, or indeed are able to afford?

Now when asked to a process such as this, it's useful to know in advance who started it, and what they might be looking for. In this case, as I mentioned, it was Yorkshire Forward, and they (after all it is their job) are looking for Prosperity. So when the time came for each panel representative to sum up what their table had put together, I was fully expecting, for example, the Transport table to express a collective want for more road space, but we were instead treated to a delightful prospect of an entire city centre without cars.

I wonder how far all the inspired ideas from this far-from-cheap excercise will propagate up the edifice of government? After all the very same government are still encouraging us to buy more cars, and reports still bemoan the recent reduction in road traffic as a sign of the Recession. All the while they're cheerfully shelling out for adverts to persuade people to reduce their Carbon footprints (for example by driving less).

Lunchista gets double vision when extremely tired. Might HMG be tired?

The lost hour

Allow me to recount one of the strangest commuting days that Lunchista has ever had. It happened round about this time of year, which is why I'm reminded of it now, as the trees start to revive.

It started out normally enough, with a bus journey so routine that I have forgotten that bit altogether. But that was just to lull the unsuspecting Lunchista into a false sense of security. The first of my two trains, being late, was more crowded than usual: so much so that it was standing room only at the ends of the carriages, and not a hope of walking through into the warm, quiet bit where the passengers (remember them?) were supposed to be. Not if I wanted to get to the doors in time to get out at my stop, anyway.

Things started to go wrong just before the doors opened: I heard a bit of a kerfuffle behind me and felt a hand groping down my back. A young, smartly-dressed lass had collapsed and lay mumbling on the floor. Somebody who could spare more time than I could on the way to work called for help as soon as the doors opened. Another commuter nearby went to help the fallen girl. I only hope they knew what to do: I had ten seconds to sprint over the footbridge to my next train, or be made to feel terrible about being half an hour late in. Curiously enough, if I'd actually had any work to do when I got there, it wouldn't have been so bad, and I wouldn't have felt so guilty. Isn't that strange? As it was of course I felt terrible anyway: there were so many other people who looked as if they were doing something to help, but how will I ever know if they actually were?

There followed a working day so unremarkable that it slipped out of my consciousness as soon as I left the building to go home. My walk to the station, a third of a mile uphill and another third down, had to be brisk for two reasons: first, if I timed it just right I got straight on a train without having to wait half an hour, and second, there had been a murder nearby. I was always glad to get to the top of the route so I could see where I was going. That day I saw something else: a teenage couple were walking along chatting, when the lass suddenly, and without comment, threw up. Both continued on their way as if nothing had happened. And they hadn't even been drinking.

The way downhill is quite steep, lined with a staircase of classic blackened millstone houses: anyone parking there has to have a good handbreak. A white van pulled in just as someone was crossing the road. As I walked by it was obvious that the van hadn't hit him, but even so he just toppled over onto the tarmac. You don't forget the sound of a head hitting the road. I had to get there first in case anybody tried something daft, like moving him, or trying to drive round him and failing. People came out into the street, including a lady who said she was a nurse and knew what to do. Someone rang for an ambulance.

After all that I began to wonder, why today? What was it about this particular Monday that had done this to so many otherwise healthy-looking young people?

Those light evenings that everybody looks forward to in the spring, have a price. Some people will sail through the twice-yearly disruption to their daily rhythm. Some, like Lunchista, are a bit more sensitive but will at least try to make sure that they get enough sleep. Many will not realise that an hour of sleep has been taken from them as "the clocks go forward". I wonder how many accidents are caused by these discontinuities in time? Or how many people know that the idea was originally dreamed up by a golf enthusiast who wanted to give the Working Classes an extra hour of daylight in the summer in which to, well, work?

Vikings!

Every year at about this time our city gets invaded by Vikings. Some of them are local, others come all the way from Norway, Denmark and suchlike places to join in the fun. They race their long-boats down the river, hoist huge sail-like banners painted with sagas in the square and set up stalls demonstrating bits of Viking workaday life in the shopping centre.

It can get quite surreal in the streets: like anybody else, seasonal Vikings need a break from life's stage from time to time, so you also see them, still in their huge woollen robes with metal helmets, leather wrist-straps and sacking gaiters, talking on mobile phones or getting cash out from a hole-in-the-wall.

It's noticeable how well-adapted the simplest of things can be: the Vikings looked much warmer in their woollen and fur kit than the shoppers in their skimpy little nylon coats. We sampled Viking bread (heavy and tasty), cheese (a bit like a solid version of condensed milk), and soup (savoury and filling). You could also have a go at grinding flour: the result, still with its full quota of protein and vitamins, obviously made for better bread than its modern equivalent. Lunchista fille was asked if she could make good cheese: apparently this was a crucial life skill for any Viking lass on the pull.

There was a slave auction in the guildhall. The Viking legal system (yes there was one!) recognised two types of slaves: captured slaves and debt slaves. Vikings facing the dark-age equivalent of not being able to use the hole-in-the-wall could work for their creditors for a set time or, if there was no work needing doing, they could be sold off to pay off the debt and go and work their time for someone else. A debt slave had various rights, including the right to finish their time unharmed and not pregnant (pregnancy by your boss counted as a type of harm).

This gave them more rights than many of their decendents until about, ooh, the 1920s.

Last blast of winter

Imagine for a moment that Lunchista had the patience to record the temperature in various places within a big triangle over most of central England, every day since about 1659. Luckily, since delegating is almost as difficult as time travel, I don't have to pull off such a feat, because it has already been done. The Central England Temperature Series is the longest-running set of weather data in the world. Here, courtesy of the Met Office, is a graph of the results, averaged for every day of the year.

Notice anything odd about next week? Such as, it has the lowest average temperatures of the whole year?

I'll get my coat.

Flippin' pancakes!

Incredibly there exists such a word as "Eatertainment". It was coined by the Advertising community to express the idea that in order to get "today's high-maintenance kids" to eat their food, there needed to be some entertainment value in it for them. Given the kind of guff that's been advertised as "food" for children over the years, Lunchista can only assume that "eatertainment" is necessary to distract children from the feeling in their guts that what it being proffered isn't, strictly speaking, food in the original and genuine sense of the word.

In 1930s America, in the depths of the last depression, some of the first and most interesting Nutrition findings were made. One series of experiments, for example, verified that a slimming diet in an otherwise healthy and sane person would inevitably lead to a slower metabolism and an unbeatable obsession with food. In a different set of experiments, toddlers in an orphanage were given exactly what they wanted to eat. An array of different foods, ranging from the sweet through the savoury all the way to quite strong stuff like cod-liver oil, was put before each child, and they were given any help they needed to eat whatever pleased them. Some of the rickety children chose the cod-liver oil, over and over again, until they recovered. Everybody's health improved over the course of the experiment. There were at the time no adverts in orphanages, and affordable television hadn't been invented yet.

But there is a time for Eatertainment: that time is Pancake Day!

Melt an ounce of butter slowly, and stir in 4 ounces of flour to make a smooth paste. Then, bit by bit, stir in two whisked eggs, followed by 10 ounces of milk. It should end up as a smooth liquid that will coat the back of a spoon. Now the fun starts...

Melt enough butter to just cover the bottom of a frying pan, then pour in enough of the batter mixture to just cover that, swirling it around until it covers the full circle. After a minute or so on the heat, it should start to peel away from the sides. A little later and you can test to see if it's free from the pan: if not, slide a spatula underneath to free it. Then, well, have a look at the footage at the top of this post (or its mirror-image if you are right-handed). Fry for another couple of minutes on the other side, and serve it to the first person who's got to the table!

There is a Russian proverb, "The first pancake never works out". So even if it doesn't look that promising, have another go: things can only get better! The mixture described here will do between 6 and 8 pancakes.

Army Catering

In reviving any neglected Orchard, there comes a time when you have to admit that some of the trees are leaning over, falling over, dead in parts or simply overshadowing themselves. For most fruit-trees (but not plums or almonds) that time is now, when they are fast asleep and no sap would get lost. So we had to take the bull by the horns (or at least the saw by the handle) and make a start on pruning the poor trees into shape. Our chief Orchardista had decided to make a day of it by inviting the local fruit-tree expert to give us an illustrated pep-talk in the morning (in the delightful and newly-redecorated Social Hall), after which we could all have a spot of lunch and then head out with our "implements of Destruction" and do our worst.

On finding out that the Social Hall kitchen would be at our disposal, Lunchista offered to make soup. Then it transpired that 30 people had expressed interest in coming along. Which meant Army Catering: my favourite kind! Especially when there's any kind of project in the offing as well.

At the back of the largest cupboard in Chateau Lunchista's kitchen there lurks a giant stainless-steel saucepan: I think it holds 10 litres but I've never bothered to measure it, because the inside kind of expands into the fourth dimension, and whatever gets made in it there always seems to be plenty to go round. It was originally bought for making Elderberry Syrup, but it has also been used for making puree and preserve with previous fruit from the Orchard.

Out it came. Into it went a scaled-up version of the following (adapted from the Cranks' Recipe Book):

A spud, an onion, a carrot, a cooking apple, 2 cloves of garlic, all diced as in the picture, then gently fried until the onion is transparent. A large spoon of curry powder, 2 pints of veggie stock (Vecon is good) and a tin of the ever-useful Italian tomatoes then go in on top. Then bring it all to the boil while stirring, turn it down and let it simmer for half an hour. I did all this (ably assisted by Lunchista fille) the previous day and left it overnight. In the morning I got out one of those hand-held blenders and whizzed it smooth.

Why Mulligatawny? The rationale was fairly straightforward: if it's vegetarian then anybody can drink it, and if it packs a bit of heat then each mugful will warm us up more. It also turned out, by a happy coincidence, to be our chief Orchardista's favourite soup.

Haggis, neeps and tatties

We see here the ingredients (well, the non-alcoholic ones at any rate) for Burns Supper here at Chateau Lunchista. The more eagle-eyed will have spotted the "V" mark on our haggis, it's a vegetarian piece made out of nuts, pulses and veggie oils. Very savoury, very healthy and (I'm reliably informed) goes well with the old Water-of-Life. It's one of the easiest meals there is to get ready, too: the haggis goes in that steamer (yes the one I bought for 20p at the car-booty, plus the lid I found in a leftover box at The Waste street-market in Dalston) for an hour or so, the spuds are boiled and mashed, as are the neeps. Simple.

Which is just as well because out of the blue there came a TV programme I really wanted to watch: mad* Geography professor Nick Middleton is investigating why we're having such a cold winter, and how to survive it. In the process he travels to Scotland and lets himself get exposed to hypothermia, and buried in the snow. It is of course against such eventualities that the original haggis was designed to protect the intrepid drover, crofter or infrastructure maintenance engineer.

It happens that Lunchista's first ever taste of Burns' Night took place in an unknown pub somewhere in a deeply-wooded area of the Home Counties, twenty years ago today. I was on a train coming back from a meeting in London to my cheap-and-cheerful flat on the coast, when our journey came to a complete halt. A tree had been blown down across our route by what turned out to be the UK's worst storm of the 20th century. The train then trundled backwards to a station we had just left, and the lights went out: they must have had to cut the power to the third rail for the sake of any maintenance crew. Our guard stepped off to make a call down the line. He then came along through each darkened carriage and explained that, given that the nearest suitable heavy-lifting gear was in Cardiff, this was going to be a long wait. Cue surreal twist:

"...but I'm told there's a pub a hundred yards down that road who are offering free tasters of Haggis and Whisky because it's Burns' Night. You won't miss the train, because when the engineers arrive I'll come along too". Beat that for service! He was as good as his word, and two hours later made sure we all found our way back to the train. Suitably warmed and fed, we proceeded on our way.

And what was this meeting that had caused Lunchista's part in all the drama? A meeting for Meteorologists, of course!


*editor's note: "mad", uttered by Lunchista, is a term of respect.

Worst of days, best of days

For the last couple of years at work, I remember reading that the Monday of the third week of January is, officially, the day of the year when most people feel at their worst (kudos to Bryony, who had to resign from the Sustainability Committee last month in order to start her new job today!). It's a combo of dark mornings, paying for Christmas, cold weather, failing at (or having to put up with) new-year resolutions...and that's probably what lies behind all those holiday adverts you get on tv this time of year. Why content yourself with bills in just January when you can book 2 weeks in the sun and have bills til October?

But Lunchista has, as ever, stumbled upon a cheap and cheerful alternative: today is also International Optimism day. Apparently it is celebrated, not by buying, or even making, presents but by doing stuff. Their first four suggestions are:

-Write a list of simple things that make you happy, and share it
-Write down 3 things you're grateful for
-Call someone you haven't spoken to for ages
-Say hello to someone you see everyday, but never speak to

Well most of the things I write about in The Year-Long Lunch Break make me happy. And I'm grateful I didn't have to get up before dawn this morning...and finally, I don't think there's anyone I see every day (including during my commuting days) that I don't say hello to.

Winter Warmer: the veggie challenge

In Lunchista's early days of attempted vegetarian cookery, the same problem used to present itself over and over again: I just couldn't find a vegetarian dish that filled me with quite as much warmth, sleet-proof-ness and sheer alcohol tolerance as was offered by meat dishes. Given that wine appeared more often in my life than central heating (or indeed heating of any sort), this was a serious issue.

Now you know those old eejits who talk about "Things they wish they'd known at eighteen"? Well, here's mine. It is the recipe for the warmest veggie dish I know that doesn't actually involve weapons-grade curry powder. The only drawback is, it needs a bit of forward planning (unless you cheat), but it serves 4 hungry students, or one lazy student all week, even if they're vegan.

Soak 200 grammes of chick-peas overnight, then boil them for an hour (perhaps while you're reading some classic literature or tidying up after the last party). Alternatively cheat, and get 1 lb of already-cooked chick-peas.

Peel and slice into chunks 2 spuds, 3 carrots and 3 parsnips, cut up a celery or a fennel. Dice 2 red onions, a clove of garlic, a lump of ginger and some mint leaves. Make up 300g of veggie stock and drop in some threads of saffron. Grab a tin of the ever-useful Italian tomatoes and a large frying pan (or that wok, including a lid). Find 1/2 a teaspoon crushed chillies, or mild chilli powder.

Heat up a little vegetable oil in the wok, and cook all the vegetables slowly until they are soft, then lift them out of the oil and put them aside. Fry the garlic and ginger, then add the onions, mint and chillies/powder. When the onions are soft, tip the tomatoes in, simmer for a few minutes then add the chick-peas and some of the juice in which they've been cooked. Add the stock and the cooked vegetables, then simmer the lot for 25 minutes, and serve.

If there's any left over it will keep for days and days, because there is no meat and hardly any fat. This would have been extremely useful for the young Lunchista, who often came home from parties hungry. It's far cheaper and healthier than burgers or kebabs, and at 1 a.m. can of course be eaten in the relative safety and comfort of your own kitchen.

Iceland under pressure

This winter, the back-end of last winter (with that cold spell in February) and the winter of 1962-3 all have something in common. Apart, that is, from their obvious coolness. They all involve the absence of the usual "Low" over or near Iceland.

Here it is (thank you, South Downs Hang-Gliding!) in its natural habitat:
Wind, like the mythical Haggis in that joke about it always having to run round mountains clockwise because its left legs are longer than its right, blows clockwise around the Highs and anticlockwise around the Lows: in other words, that Iceland Low brings in lukewarm damp weather from the Atlantic. But now all that's gone, and in its absence we get to share in the sort of winter they have in mainland Europe: land cools down more than sea does. Wind that blows off this cool land comes up against the damp air over the sea, but instead of rain we get snow.

Meanwhile, somehow or other the good people of Iceland have to muddle along without their usual Low. Or indeed without their once-highly-successful banks. Banks whose returns were so high that HMG insisted any local Council not using them as a repository for their spare cash was in need of investigating, capping and probably The Lash to boot.

The banks' collapse seems to have caused the instantaneous disappearence of some 3 thousand million pounds, and of course that begs the question, who should pay? Depositors who thought they'd get "something for nothing"? HMG, who forced local authorities to use the banks because the numbers looked good? Us, the voters, who insisted on local councils offering "Value for Money"? The Icelandic government, who forgot to regulate their banks? Or the average Sigurd or Rúna who, indirectly and very temporarily, enjoyed the profits and must now vote on whether or not they want to give up something like £10,000 each?

I can see where the idea came from for that superstition about not being caught pulling a silly face when the wind changes direction.

School's out!

This good old-fashioned, unreconstructed, take-no-prisoners winter is still with us, much to the delight of all at Chateau Lunchista. The smaller Lunchistas returned to school on Monday (4th) and were looking forward to finding as many ways as posible of getting round that boring, litigation-culture-inspired rule that forbids the throwing of snowballs in the playground. Towards the end of the morning I settled down to start scribbling, and not long afterwards the 'phone rang. It was Lunchista fille, informing us that school had given up for the day because the heating wasn't working, and she'd gone home with a friend, presumably for a pleasant afternoon building snowmen, chatting and drawing cartoons.

A few minutes later Lunchista fils piled in and announced with obvious glee "Peak Oil has reached our school!" Apparently the tank was empty, the next delivery of the vital substance being either badly procrastinated or stuck in the snow somewhere. During Science, they'd had to light the Bunsen burners to keep warm. No oil delivery was due until the day after tomorrow, he said, so could we go sledging tomorrow?..

And so an exciting afternoon was spent by the lads in the street investigating the structural properties of snow necessary for building the largest snowman, the ballistics of snowballs, and the coefficient of friction of ice (and how to minimise it). They also confirmed the finding that a body loses 25 (yes, twenty-five) times more heat through wet clothes than dry ones. The following day we took the sledge to a particularly good ice-run down by the river, and built a snowman striker (complete with football) to take a shot at the goal on the playing field in which someone had thoughtfully constructed a snow-goalie.

Today we'd been advised to listen to the local radio to find out whether or not the school would be open. I haven't listened to the radio for years, though we do at least still have a working radio in the house. I'd forgotten how bad commercial radio could be: the guy kept saying "...and school closures, coming up shortly..." then there'd be adverts, sporting fixture lists, trailers for interviews coming later with celebs I've only just heard of, traffic news (protracted by the huge number of road and airport closures because of the snow), followed by a piece of music I'd always profoundly disliked but which, having been shot at me first thing in the morning, remained embedded in my head for hours.

Finally we gave up and looked on the school's web-page. School was up and running. So off went the small Lunchistas, in their wellies in something like six inches of snow.

Now that I can sit and think, the obvious question that occurs is: what on earth is an urban school doing messing about with oil, when gas is available, cheaper and (for those who care about such things) emits less in the way of greenhouse gases? It's also more reliable: one thing I discovered from my foray into radio news this morning was that if Transco fail to deliver, those households left gas-less are entitled to £300 a day compensation.

And it wasn't a one-off: the smaller Lunchistas' previous school also suffered an empty oil-tank one New Year, with a use of oil over the holidays that bordered on the suspicious. Nothing was ever proven, though: no-one at the school had the slightest idea how much energy the place really used. I wonder if there's a posse who go round schools with a lock-picker and a length of hose while everybody else is busy stuffing the turkey? If so, I wonder why I've never heard a case of these people being caught?