The Year-Long Lunch Break

It is now!

2010-06-25T17:09:00.003+01:00

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...

2010-03-19T16:00:00.005Z

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.

Good morning, this is your seven o'clock Nuke

2010-03-19T13:19:00.006Z

This happened a while ago, but I couldn't help being reminded of it as nuclear power makes its way, once more, into the headlines. It all started on my way home from work one dark evening: my mobile rang, and on the transmitting end, struggling not to fall into any of the string of tunnels and other black holes that rendered my commute an impossible place to do business, was our Party's chief organiser-of-all-things.

The local radio station were to host a debate and phone-in about the pros and cons of nuclear power, but with a horrible twist: this test of knowledge, logic and oratory was to take place at 7:00 a.m. the following morning. That is, after I should have set off for work but cruelly before I was properly awake. I've been interested in energy for as far back as I can remember, and a member of the Party for nearly a decade. If not me, who? I agreed to let the radio station ring our house: most of my commute, having an escape velocity greater than the speed of light, provides a poor venue for this sort of thing.

I had to ring a workmate on his mobile, and ask him to be the one to break the news to my boss that I was going to be an hour or so late in. Of course my boss may find out before that: his long drive in coincides with my journey, and I know he always listens to the radio while on the road.

So after breakfast the following morning, instead of having to rush out into the darkness I'm sitting around waiting to put a cool, sensible case to the Great Yorkshire Public. I made notes. I still have them. Here they are...

Pros
1. Volume of fuel: very low That is, not a constant supply of large volume (for example Drax power station burned some 10M tonnes of coal last year, all of which has to be mined and transported) 7% of UK’s electricity was produced there.
2. Pollution: No CO2 or acid rain Very low Carbon Emissions during operation. No fossil fuels are being burned: the heat for the steam comes from nuclear reaction
3. Safety: better than it was ‘Next generation’ of pebble-bed reactors which cannot continue reacting if cooling-power is shut off. So far very few UK people are known to have suffered illness or injury due to nuclear power activities here.
4. Economics: French lessons France has managed with 70% of its electricity being produced from Nuclear power stations. Finland is building a new one.
5. Skills: we have some! 50-year history of development and the French have offered skills’ exchange
6. Land take: low Nuclear power station itself does not take much space
7. Security Nuclear power plus electric transport could between them wean us off oil.

Cons
1. Volume of fuel: Uranium is only energy-dense once it has been refined:
the ore is < 1% U235, and that figure is falling. Energy return will become negative with very ‘dilute’ U235
2. Pollution "Flowers report" (1960s) recommended no go-ahead without addressing the problem of how to dispose of the waste. Exactly how (geological, but where?)
3. Safety: still under wraps Pebble-bed reactors are still in the prototype stage and not yet fully tested. Their Graphite pebbles are of course flammable, so though they can survive power-down they cannot survive fire.
4. Economics: counting the full costs
Insurance, paid for by HMG
Security arrangements: paid for by HMG Human costs of mining: paid for by other people not in a position to make informed choice Decommissioning: costs unknown (£70bn for what we have so far), profit-takers long gone! Building: has been possible for years but nobody has given it a go (meanwhile 2 GW of wind power has been built and another 3 GW is planned) Cost overruns: Olkiluoto 3 reactor 18 months behind
5. Skills: where? Builders, of anything, in short supply
Ageing physicists! Drain on skills, money and other resources that could be used to make a cheaper electricity infrastructure
6. Land take: risk it may be high Mining and spoils Can’t afford land loss due to an accident
7. Security Setting a bad example (Iran) Transport of materials (Terrorism) Power stations as targets (planes)

The phone rang and the fun started: they let the pro-nuclear chap have his say first and I couldn't believe my luck: his name was something like Dr Graves. Not that I'd say anything in such poor taste over the airwaves...

It is a strange fact of life that, like Sven-Goran Ericcson's football players in their "Zone", if you really get in to something, and enjoy it, and rise to the occasion, you can't remember a thing about it afterwards. But later on, early-bird party colleagues congratulated me on a job well done. I was rather disappointed that, as it turned out, my boss hadn't heard a thing.

A spot of Perestroika

2010-03-18T18:32:00.005Z

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

2010-03-15T12:55:00.004Z

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

2010-03-14T15:55:00.004Z

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

2010-03-09T21:46:00.006Z

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

2010-03-04T15:35:00.010Z

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!

2010-02-24T15:37:00.006Z

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

2010-02-18T21:41:00.010Z

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!

2010-02-16T18:11:00.003Z

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

2010-02-03T15:03:00.005Z

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

2010-01-25T22:00:00.006Z

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.

Urban Guerrilla 2: Bring back the Birch

2010-01-23T20:50:00.006Z

It was white, it was silent, it was strange and it made everything look unfamiliar. But it wasn't snow that greeted Lunchista this morning, it was fog. You get a lot of it round here, but it had been a while since I'd seen it as thick as this. There was a birch tree I'd never noticed before, because it was usually camouflaged against a load of other greenery behind: but today that other greenery had disappeared into the mist, throwing the birch-tree into sharp relief. Which reminded me: you have to seize your moment.

The thing about birch trees is, they grow like weeds. They seed themselves all over the place and then, practically anywhere warm enough to lack permafrost, but cool enough to have seasons, they shoot up like mad. They pull up goodies from the subsoil and then drop them, in the form of leaves, onto the surface every autumn. Other trees will start to grow where birches have taken the lead. Wildlife loves them.

Someone I know found a load in their garden, decided they'd rather have an uninterrupted lawn (it was a small garden on a terrace with a fantastic view, so fair enough), and so let me remove them and pot them up.

They sat in pots on our decking for ages. One of them, in just 2 years, had grown taller than me. Which was rather embarrassing. How was I going to plant out a six foot tree without being seen? Darkness is all very well but being out and about with a trowel (or worse still a spade) after dark has bad connotations.

But walking around with a tree poking out of a carrier-bag in the fog at some perfectly sociable time like ten in the morning could just mean that Lunchista had arranged, a few days previously, to drop it off somewhere. Perhaps to a friend's place, where I was going to help them plant it out in their garden, before sitting down to a nice cup of coffee and a chat. Or perhaps I'd just bought it from a garden centre and taken the bus.

The fog was so thick I could hardly see to cross the road, so when I reached the spot I had in mind it's a fair bet that nobody driving past could have seen me hop over the low fence into the strip of rough grass beyond, and set to work. Digging was surprisingly easy, because the soil was so wet. After I'd finished, everything dirty including the gardening gloves and the spare bag on which I'd knelt, just went back into the original carrier and I was on my way. Just another figure walking along with a carrier bag.

I could even take a look at how the first tree was getting on. Just a quick short-cut past this parking-place and...ah, perhaps not! The entire car-park was under water. The top of the litter-bin just broke the muddy surface: without the rest of its distinctive profile it resembled the top of the Tardis. Shame I didn't have my camera, but you can't have everything. You can have the general impression, though. Thank you Law Wai Hin for the atmospheric birch trees.

Worst of days, best of days

2010-01-18T21:05:00.007Z

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

2010-01-12T22:33:00.006Z

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.

A poem for my love

2010-01-11T11:32:00.007Z

I'm sorry to disappoint, but the title of this post doesn't mean that Lunchista's going to come out all Byron and Shelley. At least, not in public.

Near where I used to work, there was (and in all probability still is) a rather run-down shopping centre. Built with the best of intentions, in the 1970s I would guess, it has now "gone the way of all shopping centres" in that its offerings are limited to: an "amusements" arcade (though I never, in two years of lunchbreaks, saw anybody emerge from this establishment laughing, or even smiling), a tanning studio, a Pound Shop, two chemists, several charity shops, two sandwich chains, a bank, a bookies and a pawn shop.

Now to be fair the Pound Shop sold some pretty useful things: Lunchista's purchases there included pairs of good quality warm pyjamas and assorted things for the garden. But I knew the descent was still ongoing when the supermarket at the far end of the square, which had been quietly cultivating the more subversive end of the market with things like fairtade organic nuts and living plants (and to which I used to naturally gravitate for my lunch), folded and was replaced with a Tesco's. This of course meant I had to bring in my own lunch, every day. But I digress.

Next to the supermarket was a "card" shop. And it's a fair bet that, in this cold, wet space between Christmas and Easter, they're starting to display Valentine cards. But that's not the end of it. Oh no. We must have Growth. It's no longer good enough to send your love just one anonymous card: this time of year the shop fills up with all sorts uf useless (mostly plastic) things as well. I was going to say cheap plastic things, but they're not even that: some are quite costly, and I might add that this is not exactly the flush side of town. Places like this, when all's said and done, are there to rip off the people who can least afford it.

People who study the reasons why we are driven to spend money against our better judgement tell us that there exists such a thing as the "Language of Goods". That is, the person who is buying the costly teddy is using the said furry animal as a substitute for saying something (in this case, presumably variations on the theme "I love you"). But who wants a substitute at a time like this? Why not cut out the middle-man and say the original thing? Why not do what people used to do in the days before so many goods were available, and write, or even make or grow, something unique?

Now people are going to say, that's too difficult. Or, even more obviously, that's too cheap. Or both. But if it's difficult it can't be cheap, because to get it done needs a lot of time, or mental effort, or other things which aren't money but which are nevertheless spent.

And if you do all that, and the object of your affection doesn't appreciate it? Well, perhaps they weren't the right one for you anyway.

Iceland under pressure

2010-01-08T21:55:00.002Z

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!

2010-01-06T13:00:00.005Z

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?

Dark mornings and eccentricity

2010-01-02T22:19:00.008Z

Ah, new year, new start, days getting longer...so why are the mornings still so dark? No it's not because January's cloudier than December, it's a real effect, caused by the earth spinning while taking a sharp corner at high speed. And not a Stig in sight.

Lunchista is of course no stranger to the idea of eccentricity, and it turns out neither is planet Earth, or indeed any of the other planets. Typical diagrams of the solar system show them all filing dutifully around the sun in circles, but in fact all the planets' orbits, our own included, are ellipses. Lunchista and fille once made a rather nice oval flower-bed in Chateau Lunchista's garden, drawing a proper ellipse by putting two stakes in the ground, getting a long piece of string and tying one end to each pole, then walking round holding the string, keeping it taut. Each stake marks a "focus" of the ellipse: the further apart these are compared with the width of the ellipse, the more "eccentric" the ellipse is.

It turns out that the sun lies at one of the foci of the earth's orbit, and that by an odd coincidence the earth passes around that end of its elliptical orbit tomorrow. This means that the earth is at its nearest to the sun right now, and that it is travelling at its fastest along its orbit.

But that's not all: we're still turning at the same old speed, namely once every not-quite-24 hours if looked at by aliens (called, for example, the Sidereans) from another solar system. So, having made one entire turn from the point-of-view of the Sidereans, and travelled rather a long distance round the tight bend of its orbit, the Earth has some catching-up to do: it has to turn a bit more, and that "bit more" is at its greatest at this time of year. The days really are longer. But our watches still give us the same old 24 hours: this means that right now everything (sunrise, noon, sunset) seems to happen about a third of a minute later each day than it otherwise would. Or alternatively from the solar system's point of view, we are making ourselves get up a third of a minute earlier every day than we actually should. That difference is known as the Equation of Time.

For people who like graphs with graceful curves, this graph of the Equation of Time, from the link earlier, is the kind of thing you're going to like:
Ah, and if anyone knows where that egg came from, drop us a line.

The strange day of Christmas

2009-12-29T20:19:00.006Z

People complain that everything's "a bit dead" between Christmas and New Year, and in a way this is as it should be. In the mostly-agricultural past in British latitudes, the "Twelve days of Christmas" represented the one time of year when no work needed doing. Harvesting turnips in the sleet was, thankfully, over, and no breaking up the earth to plant anything (probably also in the sleet) was due to start until perhaps the very end of the following month. Even the cows didn't need milking: before industrial farming, milk was seasonal, too. So, at least work-wise, everything stood unusually still for a short while. The first snowfall would often oblige, at some point during those twelve days, to deepen the stillness.

And so we come to Christmas lunch a few years ago at one particular wing of the greater famille Lunchista, and after the festivities we, too, are pretty much all for sitting around doing nothing. All, that is, except the dog. I needn't name the dog because there have by now been a string of dogs at the house in question none of whom, to put it politely, have been the world's best ambassadors for the idea of dog ownership. So we roused ourselves from our cholesterol-infested stupour, found some warm clothes and the lead, and set off into the early afternoon solstice twilight.

Someone decided that the shortest and most dog-friendly way to a spot of greenery would be to take one of the smaller roads out of the village towards the canal towpath. The road happened to pass over the motorway which, day and night, washes the village in low-level noise.

Standing on the bridge gave a view over something like three miles of the M6: two miles to the north, backed by distant crinkly fells with their dusting of snow, and a mile or so into the altogether more bland landscape in the other direction. I'm always surprised at how much noisier cars are when heard from above than when they are just passing by, but more surprising still was how very few there were on the road. At one point the stretch to our south was completely empty.

We decided to wait and see if that could happen to the entire three miles. Cars seemed to come in clusters (there were of course no lorries, and only very few vans), with longer spaces in between groups. We speculated about where each might be going. Eventually the red lights of the last of a group were all that could be seen before they, too, disappeared round the furthest bend...there!

Three miles of the country's main artery were deserted. The silence was amazing.

It lasted all of 20 seconds.

But every year since then, when we have spent Christmas day at that particular venue, we have always taken the dog du jour for that walk, after lunch, to see if we can catch that stillness again.

Has "Top Gear" really been going that long?

2009-12-22T23:07:00.007Z

Yes, and The Year-Long Lunch Break has the proof, in the form of a rare sighting of what, some say, is The Stig's Ice-Age ancestor.

All we know is, that toboggan handled like a dream...

Midwinter

2009-12-18T12:11:00.007Z

I'd forgotten how much I love it when it snows. All of a sudden it all goes quiet. All the mundane stuff in your typical streetscape disappears and gets replaced by works of art. There's a kind of odd glow, even before you open the curtains, because the reflected light is coming from a different angle than usual. And it's blue instead of grey.

It started yesterday afternoon, and carried on through the evening. The Sustainability Committee were treated to mulled wine, roast chestnuts and mince pies. We lit the stove. Sadly though, Lunchista fils let it go out, even after an explanation about how the privilege of lighting it leads to the responsibility for keeping it going. And I thought I was good at delegating...

It turns out that of the six of us on the Committee, two other than Chateau Lunchista have got woodburning stoves. Which made Lunchista glad that she had put "Treeplanting" on the agenda for our meeting. It transpires that the City Council are willing and able to supply trees at next-to-no cost. Now all we have to do is find some land whose owner doesn't mind the arrival of something as pleasing and useful as trees (especially when immortalised by Ansel Adams) You'd think that wasn't too difficult. Wouldn't you?

For mulled wine, pour two bottles of cheap red wine, the cheaper and redder the better, into a large (non-Aluminium) pan and put on a low heat. Add about half as much again of water, an orange studded with cloves, six tablespoons of sugar or honey and a few tablespoons of liquer. Slice up two more oranges and two lemons and add them in. Ready after 20 minutes on a low heat. Make sure it doesn't boil, or you start to lose the alcohol.

Rabbit, rabbit...

2009-12-16T21:51:00.005Z

I found out last month that there exists a professional local rabbit-shooter, who's out and about protecting people's veg. and even goes to the allotments near the Orchard every now and then. Then he sells the rabbits (thank you Heart of England Raptors for the picture).

Lunchista is now on his list of buyers: free-range (and probably fully Organic) rabbit casserole for 4 for a measly two quid! Bon apétit!

Worth the candle

2009-12-15T09:55:00.007Z

It's getting towards the shortest day, that time of year when in this part of the world there exists such a thing as "Four o'clock in the evening". There have been some pretty long days, though, for the heads at the COP (where COP apparently doesn't stand for COP-enhagen, or even a football stand in Liverpool (recent viewer poll question: "Marmite or Custard?"), but is actually short for "Conference of the Parties". Earlier on in the week, candle-lit vigils had been organised around the world, to give all the heads there a bit of a boost.

Because Lunchista has it on good authority that all the poor guys want is to be confident in the knowledge that, if they come up with some drastic agreement which means we no longer have the right to get up before dawn and drive 90 minutes to a pointless and overheated (or over-air-conned, or both) job each day, we're not going to vote them out of office. Or burn them out, depending on your country's constitution. And so Lunchista grabbed some of our emergency supply of candles, and a pretty painted jar to put them in, and headed off to take part.

That jar has a bit of a story.

Way back in 2003 Lunchista, along with rather a lot of other people, just couldn't see any point in going to war in Iraq. Better government? Not usually to be found while you're being bombed. Terrorism? All the terrorists were elsewhere at the time. Oil? Already got ours, under the North Sea. Jobs? The forces already have a useful line in peacekeeping and disaster relief. And that's before you start on the "moral" thing. Even Colin Powell, a military man from the crew-cut to the boots, didn't rate the idea, on the grounds that there wasn't an "exit strategy". Sensible chap.

So as part of an international wave of protests one Sunday, I organised our own small effort under a tree at a nearby roundabout. We put out only a hundred or so flyers, made a banner (the sheet and gaffer-tape method), stood at the spot and waited...and were joined by dozens of people! Not to mention a phone-call from the local press, who gave us a couple of column-inches. And a Sunday evening, when most people below retirement age are heading from where they like to be, back to where their work makes them live, isn't exactly quiet on the roads: lots of people saw our message.

As we were packing up after our appointed hour I noticed that someone had left their home-made night-light in the tree. I let it stay there for a few days in case they wanted to return and claim it, but they didn't, so I did.

Back to this weeek, and here we are at 5:30 pm on Saturday in a shop-lined city centre square, lighting our candles. As luck would have it, that time in our city centre was "not optimal" for silent vigils, or indeed silent anything. Someone, in this case the City Council in a filthy great truck, has to clean up after a whole week of the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy. Why they had to do this by reversing around the entire square (as opposed to going forwards and sparing us 20 minutes of safety warnings) is anybody's guess. Perhaps it was a two-fingered gesture to a past government election campaign. I can only hope that our MP, who was good enough to join us and read out the first part of our "Declaration", wasn't offended.

Is it all worth it? Well it might be time to think of Battenburg cake, or even Mr Pareto with his 20% of the effort leading to 80% of the result. The cost to Lunchista of taking part in all this was one candle (you could be more energy-efficient, but who would take a "CFL-lit vigil" seriously? And anyway, I was glad for some of that energy-lost-as-heat on my hands). The odds of success are unknown, but the possible reward is, well, about the size of a small planet.

Skip to my Lou

2009-12-11T15:02:00.008Z

Lunchista has been back to the scene of the building-work, though to be honest it looked more like the scene of the crime. The object of the game was to make it look like somewhere that someone would like to live in, or at the very least go to work on as a "project" and then live in.

I'd never hired a skip before: it wasn't easy trying to imagine "Three cubic metres" over the phone, or working out whether the huge pieces of blockboard from the old floor (which were 200 miles away at the time) would be longer than "seventeen hundred millimetres". In the end I went for a bog-standard size skip like the one in the picture (thank you Snowmanradio), complete with drop-down ramp which, might I add, is an absolute must unless you happen to be a 20-stone Olympic fridge-thrower.

I arrived on a Friday morning and set to work on the garden. It might, I thought, look better if it wasn't strewn with junk, so out it all came. Now Lunchista, in 20 years as a "student and young professional" in the 1980s and 90s, moved house about 15 times. And each time, I took all my things with me. But this bit of basic housekeeping, judging by the state of the garden, seems to have gone right out of fashion. I unearthed no fewer than six wooden chairs, all beyond use through having been left to the mercies of the Great British Climate. Then two clothes-drying racks, a zed-bed, a wheeled table, a beer-barrel, several track-suits and, incredibly, an unopened ten-litre tin of sunflower oil. You could do a couple of hundred miles on that. Later on I spotted a tee-shirt, in the first-floor gutter of all places. Luckily the same people had considerately left a gardening-fork, two shovels and a stiff broom. There was even a brand-new pair of working boots in the dry part of the shed.

The fence had blown down, which meant I could see that next door had a compost dalek. Other than that, their garden was in an even worse state than this one. A very elderly lady answered the door and said she'd never used it but I could help myself. I thanked her and removed some of the junk from her garden too.

The skip arrived at mid-day, which meant starting the real work. It had rained every day since the building work had finished, doubling the weight of the blockboard and old carpet, and making most of it too heavy to lift, so each piece had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the skip. I found myself wondering whether this was really an optimal use of time for someone with a bad back and a Ph.D. Then it was 3 pm and the realisation dawned that not only had I not had any lunch, but the light would start to go in 90 minutes, so I might as well carry on to the bitter end.

At which point my life was saved by an all-day breakfast at the local Greasy Spoon, followed by a hot shower.

The following day was a bit easier: all that was left to do was tidy up the living bits of the garden, get rid of the dead bits of fence, sweep the muck off the path and patio and unblock the drains. Declared before lunch.

I wondered what all this activity would actually be worth compared with, for example, a typical day's work in an office. That house will eventually be sold: the speed with which this happens, and the eventual price, both depend on the buyers' enthusiasm. This may (or may not) be helped by being able to see all the way to the pretty patio at the end of the garden, or indeed to the foot of the front wall.

The odd thing is that, because of the way house prices in the UK these days so totally dwarf the wages for ordinary work, any effect Lunchista's two days of labour may have will be measured in thousands, rather than hundreds, of pounds.

This month's Job Vacancy

2009-12-01T18:55:00.004Z

Cleaners Required

Key responsibilities will include working closely with residents, cleaning and maintaining their homes and motivating other staff members. Recruits will gain a valued understanding of the cleaning industry.

(from a genuine job advert)

Urban Guerrilla

2009-11-23T17:43:00.013Z

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

2009-11-23T15:28:00.005Z

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

2009-11-19T13:41:00.006Z

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

2009-11-17T14:51:00.003Z

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

2009-11-05T22:17:00.005Z

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

2009-11-02T17:00:00.009Z

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.

Kosher bacon buttie

2009-10-29T16:51:00.008Z

Half-way through half-term, and we're having something of an Indian Summer. It would, I thought as I heard the sound of arguing over the computer from upstairs, just be a total waste of these last gorgeous days, not to go out somewhere. Could we make it, on our bikes, to a particularly nice spot I vaguely had in mind, and back, in time for Lunchista fille's rendez-vous at the flicks with her friend just after lunch? Turned out no, because her bike's tyres were flat, and our new, unfeasibly-compact, technologically-advanced bike-pump was (a) lost, and (b) totally lacking in anything as technically downbeat as instructions.

Which meant that Lunchista fils and I set off alone, after much protesting on his part.

Now Lunchista has the sense-of-direction of a deranged fruit-fly, but fils happened to know a nice route beyond the ring-road that would (allegedly) take us round in a big circle, through nice country, entirely off-road. It started with a ride down the entire length of the local golf course: it's a very long thin course and, for extra entertainment, seems to include part of the ring-road. People were driving golf-buggies over a special little bridge. I was rather glad fils was wearing his helmet. Part of the path, along absolutely flat land with rows of trees, running beside a fosse, reminded me of the opening sequence to "Secret Army" with its roads through the Low Countries.

The golf-course includes a large area of land still marked as "Common" on the map. Hence the old ditty:

The law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the Common.
But then it lets the villain loose
that steals the Common from the goose.

Beyond the golf-course lay grazing land, which (we found out from a notice on a stile) was also an SSSI bristling with ground-nesting birds. And, erm, cows. We were halfway through the field beyond this, in other words in the middle of nowhere, when fils suddenly announced:

Ten minutes to ice-cream!

What???

And sure enough, ten minutes further on down the line there was a campsite, with a cafe, with a terrace, and (yes!) ice-cream. So I bought him one, and sat down with a mug of tea while he went off to investigate a nearby lake, and give some passing anglers a hand chasing the cafe's chickens off their grubs. It was idyllic: the terrace had a pergola (half of which was discreetly covered with perspex, in case it rained), up which newly-planted clematis were making their first steps. In a couple of years' time, I thought, it would be like my favourite place on earth, the pergola (now sadly demised) at the CAT.

Apart from the serious-looking chaps who had come for the fishing, we seemed to be the only visitors. I got talking with the chap who ran the place, who'd been a farmer there since the 1950s, but now looked like one of those classic "Farmers Diversifying" success stories you regularly find in the Yorkshire Post Country Supplement (every Saturday). The cafe, for example, had been there less than two years, and the fishing was taking off to the extent that they'd just excavated another lake. He seemed even more outraged than Lunchista about the Common, and also knew the name and address of the owner of a disused piece of land whose predicament had been puzzling Lunchista for years. What's more, as a farmer he happened to know that cows, amazingly, never step on birds'-nests. Not even when they're on the ground.

I could have sat there all afternoon, but for two things: it was lunchtime, and I'd run out of cash. There was a gorgeous smell of bacon butties, so I asked about cards, or even cheques, but no go. So non-existent bacon butties it was, then (the only Kosher type: well, better that then Zen ice-cream I suppose), and we'd have to have lunch at home. Such is life.

One consolation was our haul from today's sortie: in addition to fresh air and sunshine, we'd picked up lots of pine-cones (we dry them, spray them gold and use them for Christmas decorations), and a golf-ball. I checked with fils and he reassured me that, yes, it had stopped moving before he picked it up...

Postal strike

2009-10-27T14:38:00.002Z

"My old boss lives round here somewhere...I wonder which is his house?" The street, part of a little knot of recently-built roads which collectively formed a dead-end, was new to me, and to Lunchista fille who had asked to come with me to pick up a package of leaflets from somebody's porch. We kept going round bends that led the wrong way, in roads which all seemed to have been named after Vikings. Well, whatever floats your boat I suppose. There was no-one to ask the way: it was a Tuesday morning and it was easy to see that the place, with its immaculate, open-plan gardens, was completely deserted.

"Listen..."

"What??"

"...nothing. Isn't it quiet?"

And it really was. The older, straight road that led to the one way into the little knot of roads, is itself a dead-end, and as if that wasn't enough we were low enough down to be shielded from the otherwise-ubiquitous noise from our city's ring road. In other words, nobody would break the silence by coming in here unless they were utterly lost, or had some connection to the families in the neat modern houses.

Eventually, right at the far end of the little knot, we located our leaflets under a porch. We noticed wind-chimes hanging there, but even they were silent. I picked up the bundle and we headed back.

It's funny what you notice when things are so quiet: not just sounds, but unusual sights too. Perhaps, like in the American joke about driving down a street looking for the right house-number and turning down the car radio so as not to miss it, we all have a bit of synaesthesia lurking in our brains.

"Hey look at that post-box" There was a banana-skin directly underneath it, but also a note that someone had stuck on near the slot. We went over to see what it said. Someone had posted a letter but forgotten to put a stamp on it: they must have gone back home, fetched a stamp, some cellophane, tape and a pencil and paper, and written the note that we could see, asking whoever collected the letters that day to stick on the missing stamp. As we stepped out into the straight road, we noticed the post-van coming down. We decided to wait and see what the reaction would be, so we carried on walking until he had driven round the corner and had time to stop at the post-box and get out. Then we turned round to kneb.

And he'd gone.

No van, no postie. He must have driven right past all of it. Then I thought, perhaps it's easier for him to turn the van at the end of the knot and then pick up the letters on his way out. So we picked a convenient low front garden wall next to a tree, just within line-of-sight, and we waited. And waited. And, have you ever noticed that, if you have no business waiting somewhere (a bus-stop would have come in handy, or even a dog), it just seems like ages? It's easier with two people than just one because you can always chatter as if you've just bumped into each other or have suddenly developed something urgent and complicated to say (in our case it could have been, for example, the crucial but convoluted logistics of practically any arrangement involving school). We were there for 15 minutes (we timed it).

We could have walked to the end of the knot and back in that time, probably twice, so where was our postie? We gave up and turned to go: we'd just have to put up with never knowing whether the mystery letter would have been delivered.

Then in the few minutes it took us to walk back up the straight road away from the little knot, several other vans drove past us and went in. A florist's. An electrician. Generic tradesman's white vans (several). A red van (not a postie). A fishmonger for heaven's sake: I hadn't seen one of those since I was Lunchista fille's age. All within the space of about five minutes. None re-emerged.

We wondered if someone had maliciously called them all to the same address. Had they all got it in for our postie? Was someone in the knot running a Red Diesel racket? Or had the entire far end of the knot, just after we'd left it with its silent wind-chimes, been devoured by a Black Hole?

Mean Time

2009-10-24T18:46:00.009+01:00

"I'm really looking forward to not having to get up early tomorrow morning!" said Lunchista fille over dinner last night. It's half-term week, so as well as no school, there's no football practice either. Suddenly an entire Saturday morning is open to us to do with as we see fit. Which is just as well, because "350" had decided to declare today a Day Of Action and our city's humble contribution to the worldwide array of stunts many and varied was to form a human chain, complete with Mexican Waves, around the Minster at the eminently civilised time of 11:30 in the morning.

We got there early and immediately bumped into our local eco-enthusiast par excellence (of course) who, knowing that Lunchista is something of a lapsed astrophysicist, mentioned a conversation he and his son had been having about how far it was possible to travel in a lifetime, assuming that you could, over a long enough distance, accelerate to about nine tenths the speed of light. Of course it would be a lot longer than an 80-light-year round trip given that, as your ship accelerates, the time would pass much more slowly for you on board than it would for your stay-at-home relatives, or indeed for any (stationary) aliens you might intend to visit.

The worst bit would be coming home to find everybody you care about passed away or aged beyond recognition. And, assuming Climate Change plays out as currently expected, in our case we'd find our city (presently only some 20 metres above sea-level) about 50 metres under the (all too real and not very Mexican) waves.

I wondered if the son in question had ever listened to the lyrics of '39 by Queen, written by fellow lapsed astrophysicist Brian May. And, walking round to find the event's organisers, I couldn't help wondering also if the Minster, which has been there for the best part of a millennium, would manage to stay around for a second one. At which point I bumped into the organiser of the Nature Reserve, who has been trying to assemble enough of us for a meeting to launch a new "outreach" programme. There are ten of us, and he's had to resort to putting all possible names, dates and times into a spreadsheet in the effort to solve the logistical conundrum involved in assembling us all. How little time everybody seems to have. Even the Year-Long Lunch Break is passing at a disturbingly rapid rate: now more than half gone.

Both mainstream and "skeptics" invoke Time repeatedly in their spiel: skeptics will say either that we still have plenty of it, or else that if you travel back through enough of it you'll see lots and lots of "Climate change" due to volcanoes, the sun, cosmic rays, you name it. And it never killed anyone, did it? On the other hand, listen to anyone serious talking about Climate Change for long enough (in my case about 2 minutes will do) and you rapidly develop a sense of "time running out".

All Lunchista can do is offer you an extra hour tomorrow morning before you have to get up. What can we do with this precious, and some would say illusory, extra time?

Light my fire

2009-10-21T15:48:00.013+01:00

People seem to bear a serious grudge against this time of year. They complain that "the clocks are going back" and then invariably start a campaign to stop the change to Greenwich Mean Time, as if that would somehow prevent winter, or by extension, old age or that tough deadline at work. Elaborate plots are spun to avoid the worst of the cold and the dark: many of these involve flying off long distances and spending unfeasably large amounts of money. Lunchista has never done this and wonders what it would be like: on returning to an airport submerged in the general dreich-ness of a Northern Temperate Maritime (translation: dark, cold and damp) winter, would I feel worse than if I'd stayed put and got used to it, or would I somehow feel "recharged" by the extra hours of sunlight?

Sadly, unless you happen to be Goldman Sachs, "winter sun" holidays create the sort of holes in the budget that aren't exactly enablers for year-long lunch-breaks. Lunchista would therefore offer an alternative strategy: do as we have done. Instead of running away from autumn, by chance we've done something that improves it: we got a woodburner in. Lighting up has become something of an autumn ritual: a landmark which, unlike Hallowe'en, the clocks going back or the leaves dropping off the trees, is warm and cheerful.

We did it when speculation surfaced about the Gulf Stream packing up. It turns out that reports of its death were somewhat exaggerated, but we're glad we took the plunge. There are two- to three-week stretches on either side of the heating season when a stove is about right but firing up the entire central heating system (and the bills that come with it) would be a little OTT.

We started to notice how many lumps of dead tree people left lying about. In fact a combination of landscaped workplaces, other people's gardens, council tree-felling, and DIY projects has meant that in the six years since we first lit up we have never had to pay for any wood. It generally starts to appear about this time of year, and we quietly ask if people mind, and if they don't, we load it up and bring it home, where it has to dry out for a few months. Then it gets sawed up and stacked in the garage.

So, since last week, every evening when the darkness closes in, instead of mourning it we have something to look forward to. It's funny how much of a difference it makes, being able to look into the flames. I mean, you couldn't tell ghost stories in front of a radiator, could you?

Car Booty

2009-10-19T15:37:00.008+01:00

The Party kitty was, well not quite empty, but perhaps feeling a little peckish. An election was, well not quite imminent, but in the offing. The Meeting was collectively wondering what to do about this undesireable state of affairs, when somebody mentioned a car boot sale.

Now as you can imagine this isn't something Lunchista could take on alone, lacking a boot, a car and indeed permission to move anything larger than a bike (with or without trailer) along the public highway. So I offered to be co-pilot to whoever took this on. And somebody (let's call him Will) rose to the challenge. It turned out that, lurking in Will's garage, was a load of stuff he wanted rid of. You know the kind of stuff that's absolutely indescribable until you look at it and try to enumerate it, and even then it can be a challenge. Old camera gear, board games, a bathroom cabinet, shoes, well-used sports kit, ugly ornaments. And that was before the call went out to everybody else to take a long look at their wardrobes, bookshelves, cupboards and (for the better-off) garages and perhaps even sheds (though we're not the kind of party to have many punters with stables and outbuildings...yet!).

More and more stuff arrived at Will's house. I never asked (out of a kind of British politeness I suppose) but I'm willing to bet he was beginning to regret taking this on. Then a promising weekend materialised: the local car-boot, held at a former airfield, turned out not to need bookings, and the weather chart just said

HIGH

so we went for it. In mufti, so as not to scare off people (the vast majority of the population, in fact) who vote for parties other than ours.

By the time we got there things were already in full swing, and we drove past rows and rows of colourfully-laden tables, following directions and gestures, to a spot under a tree in the far corner. We had driven through the entire "field of combat", and it was massive!

As soon as we got out of the car and openned the boot, a crowd gathered round and people jostled for position to see what we had on offer: some of our things got sold before we'd even unfolded our table's legs. I began to get a bit worried about the money tin, especially now it already seemed to have quite a lot of money in it. As the morning grew hotter (it was high summer, literally, and we were becoming thankful for that tree and its shade) the action continued, at a scarcely less frantic pace. I couldn't get over the number of people there, or indeed the variety of languages that chattered past us.

We hadn't bothered to label prices for anything and it turned out that was just as well: better to adapt your price to your punter, using as a guide their apparent affluence and/or enthusiasm. If they stopped to ask, they were interested. If they didn't, my sales pitch became "come over here out of the sun, we're the coolest pitch at the airfield today!" or if people hesitated: "just because we're in the shade, doesn't mean we're shady!".

We took turns to sit on the one deckchair we'd brought along (there hadn't been room in the car for another), and were glad to have had the prescience to have brought along something to drink, and sunhats.

By about 2 pm we realised that most of the bulky stuff had gone, the crowds were beginning to thin out and the heat was just ludicrous. The shade from our tree was long gone and I had resorted to using my umbrella as a sunshade, far-Eastern style. A particularly long lull gave us a chance to consult the money-tin. It contained an indecent sum of cash and we decided to beat a retreat.

In case you may be wondering why I'm writing about summer exploits (and not even this year's, at that) when in fact we're facing the back end of October, it is for two reasons. Firstly to reminisce about hot weather (which is always kinder to memories than it is to real people at the time), and secondly to "compare and contrast" with a more recent car boot session.

Just last week we were back at the booty: same personnel, same venue, same vehicle. But making a wild difference to our fortunes were the range of goods we had on offer (lots of glass ornaments this time, and no ancient camera kit or home-made jewellery), the ambient temperature (although it was still bright and sunny) and of course the times of credit crunchiness to which we are now exposed.

One or more of those factors made the difference between clearing nearly £100 last summer, and our more recent, but rather less impressive, net total of £25. Sadly, however, it doesn't look as if we're in line for a bail-out from the government.

The Beautiful Game

2009-10-12T16:49:00.004+01:00

How was I to know what would happen when I walked into the common-room at work for a much-deserved tea-break and a Wensleydale-and-honey sandwich? The lads all looked round

"It's Lunchista!!"...

and fell about laughing. "Well go on then", said someone, "ask her"

So someone asked. It transpired that, unbeknown to me, five-a-side had been happening every Wednesday after work on the astroturf next to the Department for nearly a year, but right now, towards the end of the summer holidays, at that time of year when most people in Academia are at conferences if they're not actually on holiday, they were unable to muster the full ten men. I never found out who it was who came up with the bright idea of "recruiting the next person who walks through that door" but the theory was, whoever could walk (and drink tea) could play football. So I was in.

I'd never played football in my life. The last time I'd played anything involving a team and a pitch, it was netball and everyone still thought the first female British Prime Minister would be Shirley Williams. I had to find something vaguely resembling kit to wear: I dug out my oldest leggins, a very baggy white tee-shirt and a pair of trainers I'd last used about three years previously. It didn't half feel odd walking out across the car-park to the pitches: the only thing I had to go on that reassured me it hadn't all been a bit of a joke was that I'd been put on the "footie forum" email list. We divided into teams roughly along research group lines, and I said I was probably better in defence: partly because that was my position in netball all those years previously, and partly because I had no idea how to shoot.

I discovered that although I was nearly twice as old as most of the rest of the players, there were one or two things I could actually do: I could always tell where people were going to pass or shoot (and often block them), and I could get the ball off people. This made for impressive bruises: some of them were so big and round you could see the shapes traced out by the seams on the ball. But it had one huge advantage over netball: it was a game that I could really get into and enjoy.

As autumn turned to winter I began to notice that however extreme the cold felt when I walked out after getting changed, by the time the game had got going, it wasn't really noticeable. Rain disappeared off the radar likewise. Our 5:30 sessions slipped into twilight and then floodlight. It became a matter of honour that you were still up for a game no matter how vile the weather: one winter afternoon at dusk when I could hear sleet rattling against our lab windows, the evening's team list came through with the heading "Men Of Steel" under which were the names of people who'd agreed to play (including Lunchista, which is what comes of not looking at the weather forecast), and "Southern 'andbags" under which were the names of those who'd yet to commit. A culture of writing "match reports" to the list afterwards (inspired by the likes of "Colemanballs") evolved, which meant that on the day following each match we could re-live those heroic moments as a break from wrestling with things like Mie Scattering and the haunted wing of Matrix Algebra.

It became a bit of an institution. I worked there for a further three years so everybody got used to the fact that I played football, and that it didn't seem to bother me that I got rained on, or tired, or bruised. When our grants expired and I had to leave, missing the football was my greatest regret.

Two years after that, someone came to Lunchista Fille's school, to ask who'd like to join the local junior girls' team. That was two years ago. The boot goes on...

Space Invaders

2009-10-01T11:54:00.004+01:00

"What d'you do if you see a space-man?"
"Dunno"
"Park in it-man!"

The quality of jokes circulating at Lunchista fille's school never ceases to amaze. But I quote this one because it describes, quite nicely, what a bunch of us got up to on International Car-Free Day: we invaded some space. In fact we happen to know that we invaded exactly 18 square metres of space.

Now that particular 18 square metres of space isn't much to look at. I must have walked past it dozens of times, and never really noticed it. And there'll be people who drive past it every day, who'll see it but on whose brains it will make no impression whatever, because their attention will be elsewhere. That probably includes a lot of people who have actually parked their cars on it at some time in the past. And that's why we had to go there quietly before the day's events and "case the joint". The area, the cost, the distance from the nearest place where we could store things, how early in the morning it would start to get busy, and so on. I volunteered to be the first to arrive, and my mobile number went on the press release. Then I looked at the weather forecast and shuddered.

And so, at 7 a.m., aided and abetted by my other half (who is very tolerant about all this) and his bike-trailer, we arrived on our bikes with two deckchairs, a huge potted palm and a banner. Incredibly I've never had to work a parking meter before: I was pleasantly surprised that it actually produced a ticket, rather than simply eat my last pound coins, smile at me and leave me stranded on the wrong side of the law without a witness. Some of the meters here even have solar panels on top.

At this point the big guns rolled in. Trike-trailers, drafted away from their usual task of picking up the recycling from our city's best narrow streets, had been loaded with turf the night before. Our resident eco-enthusiast had bought it the day before that, ensuring not only that the nearest DIY emporium actually had it in stock, but also that he knew someone to whom he could sell it on afterwards: total cost, zero.

So we laid down the turf. We put up a table and got out the deckchairs, next to not one but by now two huge potted palms, and a parasol brought along by some brave soul unfamiliar with the term "equinoxial gales". Mind you my banner was also struggling, but people (including the gentleman from the Press who turned up at 8:30) were still able to make out the blurb:

People Park, not Car Park

Car-Free Day Sept 22

The table was graced with a cloth, two self-service tea-urns with cups, milk, sugar, and plates full of Danish Pastries. There was also a basket of apples from the Orchard. The idea was to have a picnic breakfast, and to offer some to hungry commuters.

Now there are people out there who write fascinating research tracts in fields with names like "Psycho-geography", about phenomena such as "mental maps", "sense of place" and "connectivity", whose description of our activities would sound a bit odd at first blush, but bear with Lunchista as she leaves her home turf of energy and matter to foray into the ever-changing world of intangibles.

Apparently what we achieved was to turn a "non-place" into a "place". Oh all right, the first person to come up with the term "non-place" was called Marc, did it in French and spent far too much time indulging in existentialist contemplation of the meaninglessness of his modern life, probably while smoking too many Gauloises, and so didn't follow his idea through very well. So instead, how about an American chap called Eric talking in a straightforward, no-nonsense way about how he first came to notice that his home-town was becoming "nowhere", instead? Or even, how about Will Self?

For three hours or thereabouts, in fact until our ticket ran out, we chatted, drank tea, waved to passing drivers, offered our breakfasts, read articles and (in my case) were quietly thankful that the weather forecast had got it wrong, and the sun was shining. A jolly lass in a red dress and dreadlocks from the local radio turned up and Lunchista, as the person whose number had been given on the press release, was interviewed live on air. City councillors came along, including the former leader (on his bike as ever), and our favourite LibDem (because he's such a character) who took our leaflets out into the 5 lanes of raging traffic and handed them to passing commuters. We had turned a bit of space that nobody gave a second thought to, into something that was (apart from the incredible noise level from the traffic) really rather worth something.

Late morning took me into the city centre, where I could sample the delights of a street I'd never walked down before, because the pavements are narrower than I am and it had always been full of traffic. But the Council, as a bit of a dare, had closed it to traffic for the day (using a row of massive planters of flowers: it looked rather good). Suddenly you could walk down it, and look at the shop windows, at the same time. People had brought their wares out into the street. The buildings were visible, in that you could afford the time to look up at them: everything from mediaeval to art deco. It reminded me of Diagon Alley from Harry Potter: it really was another world.

The radio station rang again: heck, they couldn't get enough of us! I was back on the air, live from the studio, and by a delicious irony for "Drive", the afternoon commuters' show. No doubt some of the listeners will have thought Lunchista was a bit barking. But I wonder how many are, even now, beginning to plot their escape?

Where there's Muck there's Brass

2009-09-18T22:41:00.005+01:00

"Find out how your Water Works!" said the email. It was from our water company, and I had to think for a while before I remembered how on earth they had come across my email address.

It all started with the premiere of "The Age of Stupid" in our city: Lunchista was asked to make up the numbers for a press stunt on the river bank. In the event our local eco-enthusiast par excellence turned up on his bike with the usual trailer full of cadged wood bits for his stove and stole the show, so I needn't have bothered. Except that, watching his small daughter skipping stones into the river, and totally innocent of our activities, was a bloke called Dave. We got talking, it turned out he worked at the water company and I happened to be curious about where our used water goes, so I gave him my email address.

The email offered a choice of times, so I chose the quietest, mid-afternoon during the working week. They'd booked one of the corporate-type meeting rooms (complete with bar) at the race-course. Togged up for a bike-ride to a working site, Lunchista felt distinctly under-attired for such a posh venue. But it was either that or wading through pools of muck in my green velvet cocktail dress and tiara. No contest, really.

The opener was one of those bland and eminently forgettable corporate films, following a perfect and immaculate family as they go through their perfect and immaculate day using whatever it is that the company provides. I'm sure there are college courses in making those videos.

Then things got interesting. Stepping off the coach at the site you're hit by the smell: the drop-off point happens to coincide with the part of the site where the waste water arrives. Mostly it's from the city's loos, but when there are floods some of the water washed off the streets gets in here too. The main contributor to this hum, though, was the grille that separated out all the insoluble things that people, in their absent-mindedness, flush down the loo. These all end up in a skip, from which, our guide told us, someone's false teeth were once retrieved...and they carried on using them!

Next stop was a giant metal shed in which lurks an Anaerobic Digestor. The stuff putrifies and gives off Methane, which is caught, purified (for example there's some Sulphur in there that has to go), and then used in essentially a miniature gas-fired power station. The electricity from this powers most of the rest of the site, and the heat is piped off to be used in one of the other processes further down the line. The stuff is now "sludge", which is a lot less unpleasant than before, but still brown and murky. The bacteria that start to digest this seem to work like a "yeast plant", in which some is tapped off at the far end and re-used to start the process off at the input end.

By now I was either getting used to the smell, or in the grips of sinusitis again. Or else perhaps it really was the case that this bit of the site was just plain less smelly. After that it was time for a spot of aerobics (not for us, but for the sludge). This stage is polished off in the bit of a sewage works that everybody's seen, in which water-jets come out of long gantries that sweep slowly round a giant circular pool. We came up to the edge of the 50-yard wide pool, and the water coming away was clear. It smelled slightly "earthy", but that might just be because we're all used to a spot of Chlorine these days.

I got out my camera for what would have been a terrific shot of the circular pool reflecting our city's two famous landmarks (the Minster and the old Chocolate Factory) and the absolutely cloudless sky...but no photos were allowed on site, and they didn't sell postcards, so I'm afraid you'll have to make do with a picture of our tour-guide's file. Which is a pity, because they also have something of a wildlife reserve, next to where all the solid results of the enterprise are composted in long rows. There's an arrangement whereby local farmers can ring up and ask for deliveries of the end result, to use as fertiliser. With no heavy industry (not even chocolate manufacture) in the vicinity, this stuff remains refreshingly free of things like Cadmium, which were a problem in other places in the past. It also means we get to keep things like Phosphorus and Iodine, without which the whole of life on land would collapse, swiftly followed of course by Lunchista's house price.

I also noticed there were no flies on the site. And it was spotless. And all this for only 17 million quid, the sort of sum they find down the back of the sofa during a bank bail-out.

Small price to pay to stop the country going down the toilet.

Stars on Reasonably-Priced Guitars

2009-09-17T13:18:00.004+01:00

"I don't suppose you know this one?" We were having a barbecue (I can use this term now because the said event, having already been and gone, can no longer be spoiled by rain) and our neighbour strolled back in with his guitar, pulled up a chair and started playing...only my favourite, ever, piece of soft rock in the known universe! Of course knowing all the words I pretended to use my wine-glass as a mike and sang them...

Actually, Lunchista knows all the words to practically everything from three of the last four decades. Sometimes it even comes in useful. But when I was working I often thought, how nice it would be to be able to play stuff, too. Now I don't have to start off all on my own.

Many years ago, when Lunchista fils started school, he was offered the chance to learn one of several musical instruments. This can be a minefield. But Lunchista, by a happy coincidence, had some help, in the form of a book "The right instrument for your child". Having found out what kind of sound someone would like to make, or who they'd love to be able to play like, you don't necessarily also think "do they like the physical sensation of holding and operating this machine? Does it demand anything of them which they would find uniquely difficult? Do they like to play with a load of other people or are they more the solo, self-contained type?". Unless you're particularly perceptive, of course, or you've had a look at that book or something like it.

So guitars were in. We bought him this nice little machine for 20 quid. Lessons happened during the school day (I love the word "peripatetic"!), so no driving around on dark winter evenings or postponing dinner while trying to learn complicated notes on an empty stomach. At the end of the first day we found Lunchista fils sitting in pride of place at the after-school club, delightedly playing the first notes he'd learned. That was five years ago.

On packing in my job I suddenly found that I had time to sit and listen to him practice. The nice thing about guitars is you can just leave them standing around and pick them up whenever you have a few moments that you feel like filling in with a few notes. So we had two guitars permanently loitering with intent in the living-room. Then one of the tuning-keys on Lunchista fils' machine snapped. Not wanting to throw it out I took our plight to our local music and bits shop (who sell individual guitar strings: that's my kind of market). The chap went round the back and returned with a spare set of three keys for a machine-head. They were a different shape than ours, and I'd never taken a machine head to bits before, but what the heck.

I spread out all the bits on the kitchen table (having first wiped off all the jam from breakfast). I got out Chateau Lunchista's entire collection of screwdrivers, and a saucer (non-flying) to put all the bits in that would otherwise roll onto the floor...

And in fact, if you take everything off in order, remember what you've done and don't lose any small bits, it's actually quite easy to put on a new tuning key. Which meant that Lunchista fils had something of a unique machine to take to his Grade 2 a couple of weeks before he left his old school, and I had a load of guitar spare parts in the tool box with the screwdrivers.

One day during the summer holidays the phone rang and Lunchista fils happened to be the first to get to it. He listened for a moment and then his face lit up..."YES!!!" It was his teacher, who had taken the trouble to ring up to tell him he'd passed. And that the new school was on his peripatations.

Lunchista estimates that the total cost of all this musical activity, for both small Lunchistas (Lunchista fille plays keyboard), amounts to about a tenner a week. That's less, apparently, than an average woman of my age spends on hairdressers.

Don't cheek yer Elders

2009-09-02T17:27:00.007+01:00

As someone born towards the end of the school year, Lunchista got rather used to hearing this phrase in the playground, and always thought it might be put to better use elsewhere. So here it is, dusted off and re-purposed, as an offering to the readership of The Year-Long Lunch Break to add to your anti Swine Flu arsenel.

It all started three years ago, on the garage roof at our old house. Lunchista shinned up with a pair of loppers to take down some huge branches that were overshadowing our garden. On closer inspection (Lunchista's eyesight was never fantastic) the branches proved to be absolutely dripping with berries. Not wanting to waste them, we put them all in a bucket and then rang round the rels for ideas on how they might be used. Kudos to Lunchista's mum for knowing how to put them to good use. Here's what we did.

We sat outside with a bucket and pulled all the berries gently off the stalks. This is rather time-consuming, but if it's not done the result has a bitter taste which makes it useless for things like eating. It also happens to be the kind of job you can do while discussing the finer points of existentialism, listening to some nice home-made music (or joining in), or taking the occasional swig of wine. The advantage of working outside is obvious once you bear in mind that elderberries were used for dying clothes in days gone by. For the same reason it's a good idea to be wearing dark clothes (of course anyone discussing existentialism will already be in black, so no problems there), and not to be needed at some venue demanding clean-looking hands at any time in the near future.

Once this has all been done (except perhaps the conclusion of the existentialism argument, which can wait til another day), tip the berries into a pan, put in just enough water to cover them, then bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes or so. Then go and find an old muslin, or a pair of old tights (not fishnets!). I've found that the best way to set up the berries for straining through the cloth overnight is to spread the cloth across a sieve placed over a big bowl, pour the berries and juice in, then pick up the corners of the cloth to tie up to a sturdy fixing point.

The next day, just add some wine-mulling spices and sugar, then simmer the juice until it becomes a bit thicker like a syrup, then pour into a jar that can be sealed. We have found that it keeps in the fridge for years. We use it like Ribena (but with hot water) and it's a real pick-me-up to fight off the effects of colds and flu, especially with honey, or some port, brandy or whisky.

It's been pouring with rain since we picked our berries this year, so I have had to blag a picture for this post (thank you Felicity ThriftyLiving) instead of going out and taking my own. It has also been difficult to find many berries that haven't been eaten by birds as soon as they're ripe.

Plum job!

2009-09-02T16:18:00.005+01:00

Great news! Tescos have officially declared they no longer want to build a link-road through the Orchard. And can you blame them? Our Orchard now has Management, a Constitution, and its own pedestrian crossing.

More to the point, it's bursting at the seams with delicious fruit: plums are good-to-go and there are lots of windfall apples and pears lying around (though these are better for hand-to-hand combat than for actual eating at the moment). Four of us met up there for a fruit-picking session, armed with a small step-ladder and one of these:
I was only there for about 20 minutes and came away with 14 kg of fruit (to put this into perspective, that's about 1/4 of Lunchista's body weight). And this doesn't include the several bags full that made their way to the Sustainability Committee's stall at the local show, where they were given away to anyone within earshot, most of whom, on coming a little closer to see what was going on, said "Well I never knew that was there!" (or variations thereof).

This is just as well: Lunchista has it on good authority that there's a chance that, like Terminator, Tescos might be back...

The laundry lasses' working day

2009-08-10T14:01:00.009+01:00

"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

2009-08-10T12:56:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-06T16:38:00.009+01:00

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

2009-08-01T15:05:00.003+01:00

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).

The Bees' Knees

2009-07-31T13:32:00.011+01:00

Last night, at the Annual General Meeting of the wonderful Local Nature Reserve, we got to hear all about Bees. Bees are in: the very thought that they might all disappear has got everyone, well, buzzing.

It turns out that the centre of our nation's bee-research is just down the road from here, at the enigmatic FERA which, to avoid complication, was known as the CSL until, ooh, probably last month sometime. FERA run a set of hives for research, will pay to borrow other beekeepers' hives to collect information, keep a map of all beekeepers willing to register on it and run an Agony Aunt service for people whose bees appear to be in distress. They're the people to ring up if your bees develop anything notifiable, and what's more they allegedly have 5 tonnes of honey in buckets round the back that they don't quite know what to do with.

Life, it seems, is pretty damn tough if you're a bee. Spending all day collecting nectar that ends up being eaten by someone else, except when it's raining in which case you're probably spending all day wishing you were out-and-about in the fresh air but don't dare to because there are water-bombs the size of your torso hurtling down fit to flatten you. Summers with too many rainy days will result in either outright starvation, or in some blight that'll hit you while you're down.

The one that most people have heard of is Varroa, which is a type of mite. Except that on a bee it's a bit like being stuck with a 10 kilo leech all day (and still having to work). Incredibly, bees seem to be able to learn to clean up their hives to get rid of it. Then there's the delightfully-named "American Foul Brood", which is not a bunch of loudmouthed spoiled brats in baseball caps but some kind of bacterium, whose presence in the UK is declining because any hives in which it is found have to be destroyed. In case you think Lunchista is displaying a spot of Usophobia here, I'll add that there is also European Foul Brood.

What with all these blights on the loose, there appear to be no honey-bees left in the wild: in days of yore if you fancied a spot of beekeeping you simply put up frames in your garden and waited for a bunch to move in. Nowadays you have to troll off and buy them. Lunchista would find this very sad, but for an interesting thought.

As I went to thank the Sydney Morning Herald for the picture I used for this post, I read the article from which it was lifted. Bees, it would appear, are a bit more brainy than we have previously given them credit for. Most of the transmission of bee diseases is the result of careless handling by humans: infected imported Queens (not the sort that were singing earlier on) contaminated kit and the like. Given the choice of having, or not having, to give up a large proportion of their lunch, and having, or not having, the attendent risk of all the above-mentioned blights, any bees still remaining in the wild may simply be keeping a low profile.

You could call it the sting in the tail.

Time to move the Strawberry plants

2009-07-31T12:39:00.006+01:00

Been putting the strawberry runners into their own pots. I wonder what they get up to when nobody's looking...

The sound of salesmen

2009-07-22T11:32:00.006+01:00

Someone's banging on the front door of Chateau Lunchista, and I'm the only one at home. There is actually a bell in our house, but it doesn't serve the door. It's a small traditional brass thing painted with pictures of reindeer and sunsets, and was originally made to go on a troika, but now it's attached to the far end of a long piece of string extending from the small Lunchistas' attic "den" down to beside the kitchen door. It was thoughtfully rigged up after complaints that I was losing my voice calling people to come and eat: Mr Pavlov (and his dog) would feel right at home here.

So people have to slum it with knocking on our door. It's probably not DDA-compliant, but then neither is the M6.

Back at the door, it's usually one of two things: either the knock comes soon after the neighbouring little lads' football has sailed gracefully over our hedge and is waiting in our back garden to be retrieved, in which case I can just lean out of the window (the Year-Long Lunch Break comes to you from our spare bedroom, which faces the road) and give the go-ahead to retrieve it. Or it's someone propagating something I don't want, like make-up or the wrong sort of religion, in which case I can say "No thanks" without having to come downstairs.

I leaned out of the window and it wasn't make-up or religion this time. It wasn't even footballs. Incredibly it was someone selling something we actually wanted to buy: wall insulation at knock-down prices (oh-oh, Bad Metaphor Day!) subsidised by HMG. I noticed they'd all cleared off by the evening: had I kept my old job, we'd have missed out.

Now I have my suspicions about HMG's motives here. Home energy efficiency is being encouraged as one of the best ways to reduce the UK's Yeti-like collective Carbon footprint, whereas in fact you'd get a much better dent by taking a leaf out of the old Book and getting us all to go vegetarian (or at least beef-and-milk-free) for one day a week. Note for example the Act-on-CO2 Carbon calculator, brought to you by DEFRA who are supposed to be in charge of farming, has no component about food! On the other hand most homes are heated by gas, more and more of which is being imported from Russia. And UK Plc is having trouble dealing with the gas bill: there are only so many Premier League footie-clubs we can flogoff. So I have my suspicions that what HMG are really worried about is not so much that we turn into the next Sahara, or even that Yorkshire (and London) disappear under rising seas to become the next Atlantis, but that we turn into the next Ukraine (and that dispute, by the way, is still bubbling under).

But Lunchista isn't going to look a gift-horse in the mouth, so I signed up. We are not in an area subject to driving rain, nor are we within a mile of the coast (both of these mean your filled walls may not dry out properly), and the space in our walls is wide enough, just, to push rockwool in. I'm told the alternative is to pour in millions of little polystyrene balls which, if you ever had to have any other work done on the walls, would make for interesting scenery in your garden, as well as making it difficult to retrieve any footballs. I suppose if Global Warming really takes off, you could bag it all up and sell it to ski resorts as false snow.

ps. Kudos to anybody who can identify the origin of this post's title.

Shady rendez-vous

2009-07-20T13:36:00.011+01:00

It happened nearly ten years ago, but it's as topical this week as it was then.

What better start for a once-in-a-lifetime expedition like this, than the midnight train? And what better way, given that the end-points of this journey happen to be Glasgow and Basingstoke, to endow the intervening route with a bit of, well, class? Perhaps it's the comforting knowledge that you won't have to stand for all or part of your journey, or that someone will take the trouble to bring you breakfast. Or best of all that, having crossed London, you find yourself, at the height of the rush hour, in commuter trains which are completely empty. It's a bit like stepping into some strange looking-glass version of the UK in which everyone (and you can see them all, crowded onto the opposite platform at each station), works nights.

I wonder if everyone has the equivalent, in their own life, of the friend to whose house I walked from the station. She was one of those characters in whose company events, no matter how well-planned, always managed to take a surreal turn. The plan was to drive to a guest-house in the west country and get there at some reasonable time, like about eight pm. In the event we got there at about two in the morning, and it had nothing to do with the notorious traffic on the A38 either, and much more to do with the fact that her living-room floor was up, there was no gas and when I arrived she was halfway through laying a patio.

We decided, for the sake of our hosts, to pull up at the far side of the car-park, recline the seats and kip in the car with our coats and some blankets. The following day we thought we'd do a bit of bog-standard sightseeing, but it turned into something of a cream-tea-crawl.

And the day after that was 11th August, and we wanted to get to the beach early and get the best view. We didn't want to miss it and have to wait until 23rd September 2090 for the next one (wonderful to find out that the most detailed timetable you can get, is lovingly compiled by a chap called Fred!) So we were on the road by 4 am. We got flashed at by a speed camera, went round a completely deserted roundabout somewhere near Plymouth twice and then got stopped by the Polis. They shone a torch into the car and, on seeing we were female, middle-aged and sober, let us carry on after asking a couple of questions just for form's sake. I only found out later that our trusty ride had no MOT and moss growing on the dashboard.

We took our seats on the best promontary by six, had breakfast from a nearby kiosk at seven and were exchanging stories with other "tourists" about how far we'd travelled by eight. Thin, high cloud looked as if it might go away but the weather just wasn't quite warm enough to melt it. So we saw the entire eclipse as a play of shadows and sounds.

First the western horizon grew dark, as if there were a storm approaching but without the usual clouds. Then we could see the shadow coming in fast across the sea. As the shade grew deeper I began to notice that it seemed to come on in waves from the west, each wave bringing a darker shade. Sea birds were making the kind of sounds I usually associate with evening and the walk back from the beach after a long day building sandcastles. The last few waves brought utter twilight, but with a twist: the shadow isn't large, so the horizon all around us was still bright. Everything looked as if it were lit from underneath. The final wave seemed to bring with it a faint "wuppp!" sound, but I thought I was imagining it. There was a minute or so with no sound, no wind, no movement and no change. Then waves of paler grey came from the west, and after a short while I found myself thinking of morning walks down to the beaches I'd been to as a child, before I realised why: sea-birds sound different first thing in the morning, and that's what they all thought it was!

About an hour later I was wondering what was making me feel so queasy, before realising I was sitting in the August sun on a Devon beach, still wearing a woollen sweater. You forget about hot summer days after living in Glasgow for three years. From where we were sitting it was easy to get across, on the "sea tractor" at low tide, to Burgh Island, where the Agatha Christie novel "Evil under the sun" is set.

I managed to find souvenir tee-shirts in Tavistock for the children. it turned out that they'd had a good view of the partial eclipse: the staff of their nursery had thoughtfully loaded everybody into double buggies and wheeled them all out into Kelvingrove Park with their shades. They were delighted with their tee-shirts, looked at the cartoons of the sun and moon and said: "Ut's gooin' tae get darruk a wee but"!

Unlike Lunchista they may very well still be around to see the next eclipse on British soil.

Anyone who's in a bit more of a hurry to see one has until the day after tomorrow to get to, well, almost anywhere in Asia.

Isobars are back!

2009-07-16T20:32:00.005+01:00

Yesterday (15th July) was St Swithin's day. The original St Swithin lived in Winchester and by all accounts was a bit of an Outdoorsman. So he asked to be buried outdoors and, being an influential chap, had his request granted. At least initially. When, later on, his remains were moved to a posh indoor venue, there was a violent storm and it carried on being wet for most of the summer. And so was born the tradition, summed up in the little ditty:

St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.

It so happened that, here at least, the afternoon of St Swithin's day was quite wet. And lo and behold, so was this afternoon, so we wonder here at Chateau Lunchista if we're in for 40 wet afternoons. This would go against the Met Office forecast for the summer, which as you may remember from a previous post was talking about dry conditions interspersed with the odd downpour. So Lunchista has started following the TV weather forecasts to see if anyone's willing to pass comment about all this.

About two years ago the quality of information on the TV weather forecasts took a bit of a dive. In particular, Scotland all but disappeared off the edge of a newly-curved map, and the proper synoptic chart, with its isobars, was abandonned, perhaps because some focus group (or more accurately the most vociferous person therein) said they didn't understand it.

So imagine Lunchista's delight when, on the weather at the end of the evening news last night, not only were the isobars back, but they were complemented by a detailed explanation of where all the rain was coming from. The Jet Stream, which usually directs the sequence of lows to which we are treated in winter and then disappears North in the summer to leave us in an island of High pressure (and fine, calm weather with it), has decided to indulge in a summertime southern sortie over the UK.

Now I'm not sure how rapidly the Jet Stream changes its course, but supposing the answer is "not very" that might explain the St Swithin's Day ditty. It will be interesting to see, as the forty days go by, which forecast (wet from St Swithin's, or dry from the official long-range) will be the more accurate.

Meanwhile if it keeps on raining we can console ourselves that at least it will be good for one thing: St Swithin's rain is supposed to "christen the apples" and make for a good harvest.

Investment Strategies

2009-07-13T15:07:00.007+01:00

I used to have savings. They used to live in a building society in which, quietly and without drama, they did their stuff. Then the building society got eaten by a larger building society. Then the resulting combo turned into a bank (and handed Lunchista a few shares, which were promptly flogged off). Then that bank merged with another bank, and just this year, in a move that made headlines, the resulting bank-combo was bought out by a bank whose services Lunchista had been studiously avoiding using for years.

It all looked a bit like that video game in which you're a fish and you get bigger by eating smaller fish, while trying not to get eaten by a bigger fish in your turn. Good job I'd long since taken the money and run.

And now for something completely different. A few months ago the Yorkshire Post was offering free organic seeds. Talk about an Offer I Can't Refuse! The new front bed at Chateau Lunchista is now full of Purple Broccolli, Sunflowers and Beetroots. For once I must be doing something right, because they're all enormous. And, might I add, tax-free. The beetroots are called "Detroit". In an effort at Cold War reconciliation, we dug them up and made Borsch.

It's dead easy. Get four beetroots, chop off the roots and the leaves (leave a couple of inches of the stems), wash them, put in a big pan (about 2 litres or 3 pints) of water and bring to the boil. Now either simmer it for an hour, or get a box full of crumpled newspaper, carefully put the pan in, put more newspapers around it and close the flaps, leave it and go to work for the day (or sleep for the night). Return to find nicely-stewed soft beetroots in purple liquid. Lift the beetroots out, grate them back into the purple liquid, add salt and heat up again. Serve poured over diced cucumbers (and diced boiled eggs for a more substantial dish), with a spoonful of Smetana (or plain yogurt) on the top. You can eat it hot in the winter (and make it even more substantial by putting in any scraps of cooked meat you happen to have) or chilled in the summer.

Hell's Kitchen (and how to avoid it)

2009-07-09T15:18:00.007+01:00

I don't know if this happens to anyone else but hot weather kills my appetite stone dead. Then after eating next-to-nothing all day I wonder where all my energy has gone (well Duh!, as a passing American would say). If it's difficult to eat, it's even harder to cook, so what's been happening in the Lunchista kitchen of late, and more to the point where have all the lunch ideas gone? Some of us are getting quite hungry out here!

This is what we do in hot weather. In fact, in 2003 when it was ludicrously hot for a ridiculous length of time, we carried on like this for weeks. A family from the Continent were staying so there were eight of us altogether, which made for a great atmosphere.

We have an ancient wooden dining table (the sort that folds down so it hardly takes up any room when not in use) that we bought from somebody's garage for a tenner. We sanded it down and varnished it with "does exactly what it says on the tin", making it almost completely resistant to food stains, burns, and the English summer weather. If sanding isn't your bag, the alternative is a couple of yards of wipe-clean plastic to use as a tablecloth. Thus protected, the table stayed outside all summer, making every meal a delightful garden experience. Anything that fell off it onto the lawn neither broke nor needed sweeping up. Heaven.

We made salads. Not limp lettuce and quartered tomatoes with a bit of salad cream type salad: this is hard-core. First, for the meal's energy, salad spuds with parsley and chives from the garden, plus dill pickles and yoghurt. Then a dish for protein, bean salad (a cupful of blackeye beans tipped into the water in which you've just boiled your breakfast egg, and left there to soak, will only need cooking for 20 minutes or so before lunch), then add, well, anything: peppers, tomatoes, sweetcorn, nuts...

And one for colour: grated beetroot and feta cheese (half-and-half) with some walnuts.

We found lettuce tastes a lot less limp if it just has lemon juice on it. And Lunchista has discovered that strawberries go really well with Wensleydale.

Finally, glasses of wine, and a huge jug of lemonade (thank you, The Homely Year, because I didn't have the presence of mind to get a photo of ours...), or just water with lemon slices in it: Lunchista can't drink just wine in that heat. Some people keep boxes of sliced lemon in the freezer for emergencies.

It is a curious fact of life that people will have better apetites if presented with lots of different dishes and just left to get on with it while chatting, than if there's just one heavy course. Some of our lunches, with the addition of tea and cakes, lasted through until the early evening. By which time the weather had cooled down enough to get the barbeque out...

"Vicious plumbing, Hamish"

2009-07-07T20:34:00.013+01:00

I had no idea how this conversation had started. So I asked. “Well the tap made this sort of stuttering noise. And the toilet growled at me!”

At the height of the recent hot spell we were beginning to run out of water-butt water to use on the garden. So it was decided (by Lunchista) that it was about time to install the bathwater-diverter that had been bought ages ago, when I first heard this summer’s long-range forecast from the Met Office (to sum up: hot, and dry except for the odd flood). Installation wasn’t easy; it involved drilling into our house walls which are (apparently) made of “engineering brick” which is hard as nails. Lunchista is lucky to have an other half who is tolerant about all this (and did the drilling). Let’s just say that on a normal house, with normal walls and normal pipes (not the ones with some random diameter like ours, which had to be made up with duct tape), installing one of these things is a straightforward job, and we’re very happy with it. Here it is (before we put a bit of hose on the little output pipe at the top):

All those phosphates in soap that people complain about causing too much green stuff growing in the rivers (and the sea, come to that), are actually just fertiliser. And to cap it all, apparently there’s an international shortage of the stuff, and it’s starting to get expensive. So yes: unless you’re in the habit of bathing with bleach and washing your hair in Round-Up, cut out the middle-man and put wastewater straight on your garden. If it's wet enough anyway, just pull the other string and the bathwater will flow down the drain as before.

Flushed with success (groan!) I thought I’d investigate why the shower has been dripping for ages. Now there are two alternative feelings you can have if you embark on some project: either, “I think I can do this”, or “Oh NO!”. Lunchista’s feeling about anything involving mains water is most definitely the latter. Why, for example, is this post not called “Vicious Electrics”? After all, mains wiring can kill, whereas all mains plumbing can do is get you wet. Well yes, but the crucial difference is that if anything electrical comes to bits in your hands and you have to give up and call in the professionals (who won’t be available for days) you can bend the two wires apart, tape over the ends, put a sodding great warning notice on it, and then put the power back on and carry on as normal. In complete contrast, if a piece of pipe shears off while you’re trying to unscrew something, your house is without water for days. Or under it, one of the two.

As if that’s not enough, all plumbing, unlike wiring, is expressly designed so it can only be dismantled by someone who can muster just a little over the maximum amount of torque that Lunchista is able to apply to a wrench. This includes the stopcock (almost. It’s amazing what a bit of adrenaline will do). So here I am in the shower cubicle taking the tap head off and not getting wet. There’s a spindle underneath it, with a promising-looking brass nut on it. Perhaps if I undo this, there’ll be some obviously-visible fault like a rubber washer that’s worn out. I can run off to Barnitts, and voila! On the other hand (after failed attempt using the largest wrench in plumbing history), perhaps if I try and undo this, nothing will happen until I put all my body weight on it, at which point this entire elaborate-looking spindle will come away along with a foot length, with a hideously-torn end, of the pipe to which it’s connected. And a few tiles just for good measure.

I think the correct term in the business world is “Risk-Averse”.

So I put everything back together and turned the stopcock back on. An hour later the smaller Lunchistas arrived home from school and I sent them upstairs to wash their hands (the school's had a swine flu alert). Of course the air I’d let into the pipes caused the interesting noises mentioned above.

So perhaps it’s not just Lunchista, perhaps everybody finds plumbing scarier than electrics, and we might not be dealing with the rational part of the mind here. Is there something atavistically disturbing about water gushing out of walls, or disappearing down plugholes?

As Lunchista fils expounded over supper: “We’ve got vicious plumbing at school, too. I was washing my pen in the sink, but it went down the plughole. I went to tell the teacher but behind me, SLURP!! It was too late! I turned round and there was a Mrs-Thompson-shaped lump going down the pipe...”

Oh, and who is Hamish? Well he might be a plumber, or a Karate champion, take your pick!

The Orchard Squad

2009-07-06T08:59:00.005+01:00

I'd not been looking forward to yesterday's date with the Orchard: the prospect of wielding a mattock to uproot unwanted vegetation in 32 degree heat is a bit too TenKo for Lunchista's tastes!

As luck would have it, though, heavy rain on Friday had taken the edge off the heat, as well as promising to make the digging a bit easier. I arrived at eleven, and headed for the usual hole in the fence. The contrast in atmosphere, going from the road into the orchard, is striking: suddenly the air smells of flowers, trees and grass. On a day like this, just after a night of heavy showers, you can even sense both temperature and humidity changing as you walk the length of the site. Towards, in fact, a bunch of unfamiliar faces, who turn out to be Ecologists (what, I wonder, is the collective noun for Ecologists?).

They are busy explaining the importance of elderly trees, with their gnarled and leaky bark, for the local insect life. It turns out that trees, just like people, can have burst veins, and in fact you could see sap leaking out of some of them: stuff which would keep insects ticking over in the absence of their more usual fare of pollen and the like. The tree, meanwhile, can cheerfully go on producing fruit. Within minutes the team had produced a rare type of Longhorn Beetle, plus another rare beetle whose name, sadly, has slipped Lunchista's memory. A woodpecker could be heard in the trees: given that nobody in the Animal Kingdom is daft enough to waste energy looking for food that isn't there, I think we can safely assume that the bird in question had detected something in the bark and was on to a good lunch.

Talk then turned to what to do about all the stuff growing between the trees: there are still a lot of nettles and "the wrong kind of grass". It turns out, paradoxically, that the best thing to do with the spaces in between the trees is to pull minerals out of the soil, so that meadow-type things can grow there (it also turns out that the UK is short of this type of landscape: a lot of it was lost in the effort to keep ourselves fed, as a besieged island, during the war). Meanwhile the trees, with their deep roots, apparently remain untroubled by all this superficial activity, and in fact this is how orchards were managed in the past. The Ecologists even pointed out the usefulness, to someone like an insect who can't regulate their own temperature, of the temperature changes I had noticed earlier. For a given level of desired activity, you can simply move to the patch with the temperature that suits.

And so we need a Management Plan: one idea was to sow Barley between the trees for three years running, not so much to give us beer as well as cider (although that would be entertaining!) but to deliberately impoverish the top layer of soil, leaving the way clear for the meadow grasses.

And we can't hang about. It transpires that Tesco still has us in its sights...

Some like it hot

2009-07-01T13:18:00.006+01:00

Just for the record, here is Chateau Lunchista's weather station showing today's lunchtime temperature: 32 degrees Centigrade if you please! A second glance will reveal that the humidity, at 65%, is kind of tolerable, and that our weather station believes it might rain later. The bottom line shows the date (so you know I'm not fibbing), and the frame, as ever, advises a light snooze.

A third glance will reveal that Chateau Lunchista is not a modern house: the indoor temperature, in the face of this thermal onslaught, is a blissfully cool 23 degrees. Heat is soaking into the walls, ready to re-emerge after sunset and do something useful, like keep the damp off as the outdoor temperature goes down to the 'teens and the dew falls.

Talking about cool people reminds Lunchista that today's lucky recipients of that ticking timebomb that is the rotating EU Presidency (passed to the next player every 6 months) are the Swedes. Yes that wonderful country who brought us 3-point seatbelts (deliberately left un-patented so that everybody could enjoy them, saving millions of lives) and compulsory triple-glazing, saving millions in fuel bills. Incredibly, they have a president called Fred (well alright then, Prime Minister).

They are going to try and clean up the Banks and the Baltic (Sea, not Exchange), and for good measure they're going to get everyone else who matters in these things to agree to the same climate-change targets as the EU already has, while at the same time ensuring economic growth. Lunchista also has it on good authority that they are working on delivering "The Moon, with brass knobs on" by Christmas.

We can all take the mick, but every now and again there are times when you really need to aim high. Lunchista feels the urge to write to the Swedish Prime Minister and wish him luck.

Sinister musings

2009-06-26T14:05:00.010+01:00

Ah, Wimbledon...strawberries and cream (thank you, "The Life Of Luxury", ooh and a Pimms too, while you're at it, with a sprig of Borage), summer afternoons, "quiet, please", and more left-handers per square foot than anywhere else on earth.

The other day Lunchista found out, quite by accident, that the wonderful Anything Left-Handed, which disappeared off the face of London ages ago, is in fact alive and well and living in Cyperspace as part of the Left-Handers' Club. It was too rainy for the garden and there wasn't anything much happening locally at the time, so I browsed around. There were all the familiar tales, for example of the research that found there were fewer and fewer left-handers as you go up in age in the population, and concluded that we probably die young in horrible accidents involving badly-designed chainsaws, before the results were overturned by someone who pointed out that until about 1960 it was practically illegal to write left-handedly at school, meaning that all the elderly lefties were in fact cunningly disguised.

There is also the Theory of Continuity Of Lefties, which says that left to itself a population will settle with about 10% of us, with slightly fewer women than men in that 10%. I've always assumed this is because women have historically been under more "pressure to conform", but the more fashionable explanation apparently involves the effect of Testosterone. Which is probably a load of

(Thank you, NASA).

Anyway, the Left-Handers' Club are carrying out a survey in an effort to identify which jobs are more commonly chosen by us Lefties. President of the USA seems like a popular choice, but apparently left-handedness is something of a career-limiting move if you want to be Pope.

In fact there seem to be a disproportionate number of lefties who have risen to the top of their profession: I'm amazed to find, for example, that Bill Gates is one. I also remember noticing Colin Powell sign something important using his left hand.

Meanwhile down in the ranks there are certain results which you might kind of expect. Given that most of our ability to imagine 3-d shapes, and think laterally, resides in the right hemisphere of the brain (which works the left hand side of the body) you'd expect to find a lot of lefties doing things like architecture, scultpture, and so on. And sure enough, there they are. Widening the "creative" net a little, media posts are also quite well-populated with lefties. So are a lot of sports (except, I presume, things like hockey).

From the survey results, they put together a table correlating jobs which give an advantage (or the opposite) to left-handers, with jobs in which we are over (or under) represented. You'd expect, for example, not many of us to be involved in "Admin", because of the combination of right-handed kit and lack of opportunities for lateral thinking. But Students? And the cited reasons just look silly: yes computers usually have the mouse on the right, but that's only so that people like Lunchista can search for information on the web and take notes at the same time. All the rest of the kit would have been the same when I was a student, and I remember that quite a few of us were left-handed. And the further I studied, the more of us there seemed to be, until in the rarefied atmosphere of academic research (but curiously, not lecturing) we were really rather common.

But I was a student a quarter of a century ago and, well, things change. Student grants have turned into loans, and extra money has to be found for tuition fees, so that today's students are consuming a service rather than being invested-in by our country. Lunchista studied for the love of it (I mean, whoever heard of a career in Astronomy?) but today's pressures mean that that sort of attitude seems to have gone out of fashion. More students today than in my class want (or rather need, just to stay afloat) a quick, no-nonsense, assembly-line route into a good job. Universities, being also more commercially-driven than in the past, for the most part provide precisely this.

Could it be that this set-up and the attitudes within it are somehow putting off a creative, innovative and otherwise just plain interesting slice of the population from studying at Universities? And, if so, where are the missing left-handed students? What are they doing that's more interesting and enlightening than University?

Consultation Nation

2009-06-22T15:00:00.006+01:00

We come now to the next installment of the wonderful Sustainable Communities Act process and what the good burghers of hereabouts are doing about it. To refresh your memory: this is the new act under which suggestions are being asked, once a year, for changes in national law that would enable improvements to be made on a local scale, with the first lot being requested by 8th May. Do have a seat (this one's from a nearby private park!).

Anyway, back to the Act: people rose to the occasion with alacrity, with hundreds of ideas being sent in to the local council. It all happened so quickly that the person on whose desk they arrived hadn't had time to look through the brief, and on being asked to select the best 50 or so ideas, rejected them because "They're beyond our powers and would require national legislation..." Ooops!

After a quiet word-to-the-wise, it was all sorted and 48 ideas went through to the next stage. Which it has to be said our City Council carried off with quite some style. About 50 of us, some of whose organisations had sent ideas in, and some who sit on a long-standing panel (erm...bad metaphor day!) of semi-permanent consultees, were invited along to a beautiful old hall for an evening's brainstorming, munchies provided. We sat like wedding guests at several round tables, each of which had a bunch of the ideas that fell together into a theme (such as "Transport" or "Local taxes and economy"), and we read through the list of ideas and offered our thoughts, while someone from the Council "facilitated" (I'm trying to think of something like a Chair only less bossy) and took notes.

Some of the ideas were quite radical (for example letting the Council keep all the business rates and landfill tax), while some looked like out-and-out Spam (for example allowing only compressed-air-powered cars in the city centre, letting one firm who allegedly make the things set up a factory in our midst). Some of the ideas really appealed to Lunchista and I was, quite rightly, put on the spot and asked to explain why!

It transpires that the next step in the proceedings is for the most popular of the 48 ideas to go up on a website, where we can offer further comments. These in turn will be used by the Council to put together a 6500-word case for the best ones, to be sent to HMG Central.

Now a lot of people get all cynical about consultations, and with reason. Lunchista, however, is only cynical about some consultations. For example:

Like many other places, our city is in the throes of putting together something called a Local Development Framework. For several years leading up to this, it had been on the point of completing a Local Development Plan, but then "It Was Decided" (by HMG Central) that this wasn't complete enough, so Local Development Framework it was, then. This meant starting all over again, and a lot of people in our city council had to temporarily put aside the mundane business of running our libraries, old folks' homes, rubbish-collection and addressing the rather urgent question of how to avoid having us all disappear underwater. Then, just yesterday, a survey arrived at Chateau Lunchista on which the public could register our views. It was a classic. Here is the first question:

"Key Themes:
1. Building confident, creative and inclusive communities
2. A prosperous and thriving economy
3. An environmentally friendly city
4. Special historic and built environment
Question: Do you think these are appropriate?"

Now in all honesty how could you say "No" to those? And yet, when someone wants to build a massive out-of-town supermarket, for example, they could easily say (or more accurately write, ideally in a glossy brochure with lots of pictures, including that one of the child blowing dandelion-seeds) that they were addressing all four of these points.

Many of the subsequent questions asked if we want more of something. This was done by first saying "There will be x more of this", and then asking "Is x too high, too low or about right?" Why on earth does this remind Lunchista of that sketch ("Well, which result do you want, Minister?") from Yes, Prime Minister?

Right, enough of the cynical divertissement, and back to the nuts and bolts. Done properly, as our Council's Sustainable Communities Act excercise seems to be doing, a consultation will give a government proper information, which with a bit of luck can be turned into genuine knowledge.

But there's more. Anyone remember how absolutely confident Saddam Hussein appeared during the Iraq invasion, right up until practically the very day of his defeat? He was no actor: that confidence was genuine. It came from the simple fact that no-one ever wants to break bad news to a dictator: no-one could tell him that the current course of action wasn't working. It's the same in any aspect of life: a system which has no negative feedback, in the face of even the tiny, everyday changes that it should be able to correct for, is bound to go unstable in the end and fail. Even if the road is straight, driving without a steering wheel would be a dodgy proposition.

I would like to think that this is what well-designed consultations, held with honest motives, do in the long run. Tapping into our collective know-how means we can keep looking, and keep steering. And who says the road's straight anyway?

Compost Mentis

2009-06-11T16:53:00.009+01:00

All this talk of the humble loo-roll being elevated to the position of moral barometer of the nation (at this point my Editor is warning me of the dangers of being too verbose) reminds me of a recent, and very entertaining, lunchtime. But how I got there is a bit of a tale. Bear with me...

About this time of year two years ago, I was on a train North of here, which took me through grain farming country: to be more specific, bare fields in the spring (pedantic note: technically it is still spring until the longest day). There had been driving rain all night, but the wind had finally blown it all away and the sun was shining on the newly-ploughed fields. The rain may have gone but the wind had unfinished business. In field after field, I could see a sort of earthy spindrift blowing from the crests of each ploughed ridge, forming faint brown clouds which billowed away, presumably into the North Sea. No photographic equipment was available, so I'm afraid readers of this blog will just have to slum it with a picture of part of Chateau Lunchista's loo-roll-tube hoard (we use them for planting beans in).

Now I am no farmer, but I have a vicarious interest in other people's farms because their produce, by a long and tortuous route, eventually becomes my lunch. And so I began to wonder, is it possible to run out of soil? Which is how I ended up on the mailing list of The Rotters, who do what they can to promote things like composting.

An email came through asking if anyone could donate loo-roll tubes, so I took our hoard round to Rotter HQ. It transpired that they had arranged for a stall at a schools' science festival, and parts of the rota needed extra hands, so I took lunchtime on the opening day. Groups of 20 or so children came and sat at our tables, on which we had deployed all the kit: compost caddies (full), scissors, sellotape, newspaper, and loo-rolls.

We had exactly 20 minutes to explain what compost is, then on to how to cut, fold and tape up the loo-rolls into miniature plant-pots, help everybody do this (without mistakes), watch them fill the little pots up with compost, put a sunflower seed in each, show how they could be wrapped with newspaper so that they could be taken home without spilling compost everywhere (again without mistakes), before finally handing out information sheets about compost and the care of sunflowers, waving cheerio to everybody, tidying up and setting out the next lot of kit. You couldn't hang about.

I might as well mention the backdrop for all this worthy activity: we were in the cavernous main hall of the city's Railway Museum. Great for a bit of trainspotting, not so hot for being able to hear yourself think. Since Teacher was therefore out of earshot (but not out of sight) we could have a bit of a laugh. Swapping the scissors for the left-handers: "All the best people are left-handed: President Obama, Prince William, Napoleon..." Describing how to wrap up the little tubes became "Imagine you're wrapping up a bottle of gin for your granny for Christmas" (well it could have been worse: it could have been a Molotov), and of course someone, inevitably, asked about slugs. "Oooh yes, you get great big fat ones, you have to keep them off your sunflower" "How d'you do that, Miss?" "You go out at night after it's been raining, you find them and you squash them with a brick!" Lots of people asked if you got bugs of various sorts in compost: it could get quite graphic. Ever noticed you can get a lot of kudos from a ten-year-old for that kind of thing?

Apart from trying to out-gross me (and not succeeding!), the kids were actually quite well-behaved. They seemed to enjoy making their little sunflower Molotovs and were perhaps even relishing the prospect of nagging their parents about composting when they got home. There was no swearing or lobbing great fistfuls of compost into the delicate inner workings of the Flying Scotsman. Lunchista would make a terrible teacher though: I'm just incorrigible!

For whom the Bog Rolls

2009-06-08T11:58:00.004+01:00

Here is a bit of a thought-experiment for a Monday afternoon.

Lunchista could be said to be over-optimistic about human nature, but I think I can be reasonably sure that there are certain petty, unpleasant things that are just never done in this part of the world these days. Not only are they not done, but they are so patently stupid and pointless that they are not even thought about.

For example: I have never known of anyone urinating on a war memorial and, swine flu or no, nobody ostentatiously picks their nose in public. Only a die-hard sociopath would shout abuse across the street at someone who happens to be in a wheelchair. And the days are long gone when anyone would nick the loo-rolls from the loos in public buildings.

Might I add that it took me a full 20 minutes to think of these examples: you could say that they are almost unthinkable, in fact. There is a level of civilisation which we so take for granted, we would be shocked if we were to wake up one morning and find it gone.

But let us suppose that some intrepid journalist took it upon themselves to investigate what we were really like, and he or she happened to find that in spite of all protestations to the contrary, a loo-roll went missing in, say, Bradford (Whether or not it was an Inside Job, I leave to your imagination). Wouldn't that be a Story? Perhaps their Editor is on a "public morals" jag that particular week, and teams the piece up with a thundering editorial about the potential threat to society posed by the plague of loo-roll thefts in the North of England. People read about it and tut. Southerners indulge in a bit of schadenfreude because It Couldn't Happen Here. Politicians pick it up, thinking it must be a barometer of the public mood. They seize on it to divert attention from the Expenses Scandal and the Leadership Question.

The effect on the Great British Public would be to hear people that we despise telling us never, ever, to nick loo-rolls because it is immoral, plays into the hands of terrorists, threatens democracy, is bad for jobs, you name it. All of a sudden loo-roll theft has come from nowhere to being an Issue. Imagine the front page of The Guardian (famous for its typos):

Toile tIssue

And the editorial in The Sun:

The Sun Says: Bog Off

Of course by now celebrities are getting in on it, meaning that a whole load more rich people we despise (or envy) are telling us how evil the practice is. Business leaders, wanting to look honest and public-spirited, follow suit.

The Archbishop of York (who has the advantage of actually being honest and public-spirited) joins in, saying it is "Wicked" and "Despicable", which happen by an unfortunate coincidence to be terms of admiration in the Rapping and Skateboarding communities.

It gets to the point where nobody can choose to not comment about the issue: you either have to speak about it (against it, of course) or look suspicious. It also gets to the point where the Great British Public are sick of being lectured.

Finally a representative of the Association of Chief Police Officers, put on the spot by a TV interviewer, admits that if anyone were to actually nick a loo-roll, then due to under-funding of the police force their chances of being caught are practically zero.

And then one Thursday lunchtime you find yourself in a little cubicle where you absolutely know that nobody is watching. Sitting before you is a whole, untouched, crisp, white, loo-roll. Obviously you are not so poor that you need to steal a loo-roll, but it's the principle of the thing: it's your chance to tell hypocritical politicians, rip-off businesses and vacuous celebrities where to go. It's a victimless crime, you convince yourself. The thought would never have crossed your mind before, but because of all the publicity, it has become Temptation Beyond Endurance.

Back in the non-hypothetical world, Lunchista (and just to clarify, it was not a BNP rosette on Thursday) has been invited to a "The BNP don't represent us!" rally. Dear reader, should I go, or should I stay at home?

Election special

2009-06-05T14:02:00.008+01:00

Lunchista has always regarded Democracy as a very physical thing; something that happens between people, rather than as just an abstract sytem. For that reason I would no sooner vote in absentia (including by post, by proxy or electronically) than, for example, get married in absentia.

It probably all started with the tale, early in my voting life, of the many dead people in St Ives who voted (all for the same party) in 1992. Hard on their heels came the story of the elderly WWII veteran who, having walked from his care-home to a polling station with great difficulty but even greater determination, was dismayed to find that a proxy vote had been cast on his behalf, to a party (the same one with the dead voters, in fact) that he loathed.

Nope. Really, you have to be there. Seen To Be Done, and all that.

And so Lunchista has always made an effort to vote in person, and if my address moved faster than my vote it made for a lot of travelling. Brighton to Lancashire (for my first ever vote) is the distance record so far. On another voting trip (Berkshire to Portsmouth) I was served the delightful butty whose wrapper is shown at the top of this post, and which I kept (the wrapper not the entire butty) for posterity.

In a more-recent election the powers-that-be decided it would be a good idea if everyone voted by post. Everyone, that is, except Lunchista and a bunch of other die-hards for whom our Guildhall was opened specially on the day and the proper clerks and little cubicles deployed. The postal process degenerated into farce as envelopes were lost, names were transferred in error and half the women of Bradford were rumoured to have missed out altogether. But we die-hards, our votes were counted properly!

As a passionate supporter of one of the political parties, Lunchista takes part in much more of the election-related activities than just the voting. In one notorious case I blagged my way into a national election vote-count as a party scrutineer watching the tellers sort the ballot slips. I saved 51 votes for my party from going into the wrong tray. In a more recent, local, election, the count went on into the small hours as it was twice declared too close to call. Being June, it was already getting light when we emerged. It was quite surreal. As a scrutineer you get to see what people have written on the "spoiled" papers: "None of the above" is quite common, as are religious comments (of both the sacred and profane variety). I have also seen my own vote being counted: not everybody can recognise their own cross.

If you're not at a count in person, coming home just after close of polls to sit down with your fellow supporters (and some beer and snacks) to watch the results come in live is all part of the fun. There are a few constituencies who take it upon themselves to get their results declared first, giving their local tourist-board the chance of a bit of free publicity. Torbay came in first one time, another time Chris Mullin's constituency in the North East came in first, and he pointed out, in his victory interview, that he could, in theory at least, nip down to Westminster and take advantage of the 20 minutes or so for which he was the country's only MP to pass laws he'd always wanted but knew wouldn't otherwise get through. I would expect no less from the author of the tale "A Very British Coup"! And does anyone else remember the Junior Doctors' Party (in protest at their too-long working hours) "Struck Off And Die", with their peach-tin logo? In one particular count I could swear that there was a character (probably Loony Party, bless 'em) whose very long nom-de-guerre included the word "biscuit-barrel".

It goes without saying that Lunchista was "Up for Portillo".

It is common for party enthusiasts to wait at polling-stations and collect the voter numbers of the people coming in. In case you wonder why we do it, it means we can nip round to the addresses of people who've promised us their vote but not turned up: we can offer them a lift to the polling station. Although a little OTT, this is considered perfectly fair.

And so I spent yesterday (apart from the time it took to cast my own vote) sporting a rosette standing outside polling stations smiling and saying "hello" to people on their way in to vote. No counting-them-in was happening though: we can't send cars picking up stray voters all over Yorkshire! So it was really a bit like the Japanese practice of shops hiring nice-looking people to greet their customers (not sure about the "nice-looking" bit, mind!). It sometimes fell to me to explain the Euros' unfamiliar voting system (along with the fact that it gives our little party, for once, the chance of a seat).

The most memorable thing was the temperature: I'd seen a weather forecast earlier and there was wind coming straight down from the Arctic. Canadian coat and Russian thermals it was, then! The most annoying thing about the Euros, in contrast to the other types of election in which no other country is involved, is that because most of the Continent traditionally cast their vote on a Sunday, we have to hang about for three days before we get to find out what's happened. What with that and the arctic conditions, I suppose we must all suffer for our beliefs.

So I think the physical side of voting, and democracy, is crucial. Without these little reminders of what it's all about, and that affirm our sense of fairness, it would become completely meaningless. And if you think about it, voting and getting married could be said to have rather a lot in common. Both involve parties, for a start. Both have a public and a very private side. In both cases tradition has it that you are presented with (or present someone else with) an idea of how you'd like the future to pan out, and then a choice is made about whether to accept this or look for one that's more to your taste. Promises are made. If you find out later that you didn't like what was on offer, or it turns out to have been a pack of lies, you throw them out and have another go.

What would really add to all this would be, if the Boards of the world's largest companies, whose turnovers and influence are larger than those of many countries (democratic and otherwise), were to go through the same process. As a shareholder, Lunchista often has the chance to vote for or against their appointment, or their "benefits package". But these "votes" are just shots in the dark, because unlike, say, my City Councillors or my local MP, these shadows of people have no public life whatsoever.

City Speed Limit

2009-06-03T10:26:00.006+01:00

The title for this installment is shamelessly blagged from the first chapter of one of the Mr Tompkins books, in which the innocent and ordinary 1930s bank clerk of that name finds himself accidentally immersed in human-scale equivalents of the various things which Physics says are happening all around us (Electromagnetic waves, Relativity, Quantum effects...) but which nobody ever seems to quite understand.

The books were written by Giorgii ("George") Gamow, a Russian cosmologist whose sense of humour appeals to Lunchista. One of Gamow's first PhD students was Ralph Alpher, and between them they made the first attempt to describe how the Big Bang and ensuing cosmic action would give rise to the chemical elements (Hydrogen, Helium etc) appearing in the proportions in which we find them today. When the time came to publish their first results Gamow got in touch with his mate Hans Bethe, who happily pitched in with the work so that the three names on the paper really did sound like The Beginning.

Anyway, back to the book. In the chapter in question, Mr Tompkins wakes up in a city in which the legal speed limit and the speed of light are the same: both are 30 miles per hour. You would, in other words, need an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed limit, and as you tried and tried to do this you would just get heavier, rather than faster. This meant that passing bikes and cars appeared squashed in their direction of travel, buildings got thinner if you ran past them, your watch ended up slow when you got to where you were going and a well-travelled granddad could outlive his stay-at-home granddaughter.

Lunchista was reminded of all this fun and games while sitting in the Council Chambers yesterday. A campaign is afoot to give our city two speed limits: 30 for the main roads and 20 for the small residential ones. Similar set-ups have been up and running in Portsmouth, Newcastle, Hull and Oxford. Hull has been the first to announce results: deaths on the slow roads are down by 90%, although you could put some of this down to the city's slight fall in population.

You may ask, why bother? To answer that, we have to go right the way back to the stone age.

Before the invention of the wheel, Stone Age Man from time to time fell out of trees, got into fights or fell spectacularly on uneven ground chasing animals through the forests or across the plains while thinking too much about dinner. Stone Age Woman did all this in addition to occasionally having to fend off Stone Age Man. Dangerous though all this activity may have been, hardly any of it involved collisions at more than about 20 miles an hour. We are therefore naturally built to withstand this kind of encounter, and no more. To this day a very low fraction of people hit at 20 mph are killed, whereas nearly half of all people hit at our common city speed limit of 30 mph will come away from the encounter lifeless. Our brains have adapted to this too, causing us to want to remove ourselves from anywhere near the faster-moving objects, thus clearing the streets of pedestrians, cyclists and those all-too-rare people who like to just sit and watch the world go by, and whose very presence lowers crime rates.

Like any other location in the UK, our city has screeds of pages of Strategies whose declared intention is to make it a better place to live, work in and visit. There are Health Strategies (city and Primary-Care-Trust level), Transport Strategies (city and county level), Use-of-Space Strategies (ditto), Climate Change Strategies (ditto, plus national level), you name it, some committee somewhere has, with the best of intentions, put it into a Strategy (and possibly even a Vision). If they couldn't spare the time to do it themselves, chances are they have shelled out for consultants to do it for them.

At our Council meeting, a list of all the Strategies whose aims would be helped by a lower speed limit was read out. I lost count, but it was at least five.

Somebody else then reeled out a riposte, whose logic appeared tight but whose initial assumptions were as follows:

1. Cars are the priority, and people are subservient to them
2. Cars will go where and how they jolly well please, so there's little point in subjecting them to the rule of law (note the seat of consciousness has moved from people to cars)
3. Cars mean Growth, which must (and indeed can) go on forever

And he wasn't even Jeremy Clakson.

The head of the Council was totally impartial, listening to neither side's arguments before announcing the decision to not go ahead with the city-wide lower limit on small roads, but instead to carry on what is being done now: lower limits would be considered street-by-street. For some reason urban guerrilla warfare sprang to mind.

Whatever your personal opinion on the merits or otherwise of lower urban speed limits, you might wonder what exactly is the point of having civil servants and consultants write all those Strategies if a straightforward measure like this, which is obviously helpful to every single one of them, is nevertheless thrown out on account of the cost of a few road signs and a couple of keen polis.

I suppose it keeps them off the streets.

Cliffhanger

2009-06-02T12:42:00.008+01:00

Gorgeous, isn't it? (OK, if you suffer from vertigo, look away now...) Famille Lunchista's weekend entertainment included a walk along the cliffs at Bempton, armed with a pair of binoculars and a leaflet describing each flying object in helpful detail. Without which, of course, all the Gannets, Razorbills and Puffins would have remained Unidentified Flying Objects, at least to Lunchista, who is to birdwatching something like what Jordan is to Nuclear Physics.

Incredibly, you can get here without having to drive, which is just as well because otherwise this post may have degenerated into a rant against hypocrisy as Lunchista's eyes happened upon an advert in which an RSPB "happy customer" expressed his delight at (and I quote) "coming here to escape the exhaust fumes..." But let us give our man with the fresh air fetish the benefit of the doubt and assume that he cycled here across the North Sea, or at the very least took the train. Meanwhile I'm afraid that for once we brought our own exhaust fumes.

If you can't stand the heat, never mind getting out of the kitchen just come to the East Coast: quite often while the rest of the country is baking under a big fat summer Anticyclone, the East Coast spends much of the day shrouded in Haar, its own special mist, brought to you by the light East wind which has drifted in over the cold sea.

Back in town the following day, a community picnic had been organised on the linear park down by the river to promote (among other things) the idea of growing your own food. The weather was absolutely perfect for it. Best of all, the Met Office say we're in for more of the same as the summer goes on.

Have you ever noticed how much better food tastes when you eat it outdoors? And a cup of tea has its own distinctive smell when drunk in the open air, quite different from the same tea taken indoors. I wonder if someone has ever carried out proper research to try to find out exactly why.

Heart of Darkness

2009-05-28T16:38:00.006+01:00

A thought crossed my mind yesterday as I was wading through, and deleting, all the spam that arrives with monotonous regularity in the Lunchista email account. The emails' titles are displayed 20 to a page, and every now and then all 20 are spam! I'd find this astonishing, had I not read in New Scientist ages ago that 90% of all email messages sent, are spam. Yes, 90%!

And so, continuing our astronomical theme for a moment, it occured to me that this is almost exactly the same proportion as the amount, by mass, of Dark Matter in the known universe. Matter which cannot be seen, and whose exact composition is as yet unknown, but without whose additional mass galaxies would spiral to bits, and the universe itself would expand much more rapidly than is, apparently, the case. I have tried to draw it but failed dismally on account of not being able to see it, so an idea of its shape, pinched from the Virgo Consortium at the Max Planck Institut, is shown at the top of this post.

Is it possible that the similarity of these two proportion figures is no coincidence, and that the spam we see is in fact part of some all-pervasive burden of additional mass, and hence work, from which the entire universe suffers? Is it, like the 2.7 Kelvin background radiation discovered at Bell Labs (now sadly demised) in 1965 and initially mistaken for pigeon-muck on their receiver dish, some remnant from the Big Bang that we are dealing with? Could it be that 90% of the original "cosmic egg" was in fact composed of offshore pharmacies, purveyors of dodgy submarine watches and even dodgier university degrees, and promises of physical enhancement unmentionable on a family site, all enlivened by the odd Nigerian warlord's daughter wishing to reclaim her inheritance via your personal bank details?

If this is the case, what is to be done?

Inter-Planetary Lunchbreak

2009-05-27T14:30:00.004+01:00

You could say last Sunday was a family day out with a difference: Famille Lunchista got nearly as far as the planet Saturn, using only bicycles for transport and Lunch for fuel.

About ten years ago some Astronomical wit from our local Uni teamed up with the nearest School, and Sustrans (the people who convert old railway track sites into nice flat, car-free cyclepaths), to create a 10km-long scale model of the Solar System extending along one of said paths to the South of the city.

There is an 8-foot diameter Sun near the chocolate factory (now sadly demised: what is our country going to do for future supplies of fuel?), accompanied by minor planets on their own plinths with useful information such as how far you have travelled. Using the "actual size" scale, walking pace is about three times the speed of light, and cycling is about ten times. The more relativistically-minded may thus work out how many years younger you can become by walking or riding along the route and, given that faster-than-light travel means that you finish before you started, profit from the fact that you can actually get that report written by yesterday, and still have time for lunch.

There is an organic nursery round about where the Asteroid Belt should be, and somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn (near the Cassini Probe in the picture, in fact) live a Polish family who run a cafe during the summer (that's terrestrial, Northern Hemisphere, to avoid confusion). You can stop off for a nice cup of tea that's almost big enough to float one of the Gas Giants in (yes they'd float: they are less dense than water).

In the past we have been known to go all the way to Pluto and back, but this time we turned off just before Saturn, to get a look at a local wood famous for its bluebells and slightly surreal sculptures. We sat and had a picnic lunch next to a wooden dragon, who didn't seem to mind.

And by how much did all this entertainment set back the travel budget of Famille Lunchista? The coolest amount known: Absolute Zero!

The Eco-Slob School of Design

2009-05-21T13:09:00.010+01:00

The afternoon sun is glinting on freshly-fallen rain, Lunchista had a particularly successful slug-blitz a few nights ago (and none have been spotted since), and it's the last sliver before new moon. Perfect. So what better time to share with you Lunchista's delight on discovering that an awful lot of this seed-planting lark, together with the ensuing angst about whether they'll come up (and why they don't), is completely and utterly unnecessary?

Welcome to the wonderful world of Permaculture ("Permanent Agriculture"), a way of designing landscapes of all sizes (and by extension, anything else) in such a way that Nature does most of the work so you don't have to! I stumbled across the term quite some time ago, but it has to be said that since then the parts of Chateau Lunchista's garden given over to it are doing rather well.

Now Permaculture does assume that you have quite a lot of time on your hands, at least initially, because you are asked to walk around (or sit and watch) your landscape and notice what's going on. Where do some areas naturally start and finish (e.g. dry parts, shady parts, parts frequented by any local wildlife...), and within each of these, what kind of plant (or weed, if you haven't planted anything yet) does well, and what struggles, gives up the ghost or is completely absent?

It almost sounds like cheating, but really it's best to plant the kind of thing you know is going to do well, and forego the kind of plant that's going to struggle. We started off with herbs, planting them near the door so there are the nice scents as you come out, oh and so you don't have to pick your way across a soggy lawn in the rain just to get some thyme for the spag bol. Those nice scents scare off various pests, so you can borrow herb plants and put them next to things that would otherwise suffer: all the little roses in our garden have chives as companions, to keep off the greenfly. There are a lot of "things that grow like weeds" which are actually useful: mint, strawbs, hazel, lemon-balm...

There are tactics such as thinking "upwards" if there's not much room in your landscape, or mimicking the seven height layers of a forest (Canopy, trees, shrubs, herbacious, ground-cover, roots, and climbers as shown in the illustration nicked from Spiralseeds: thanks guys!) if there is. So the Lunchista garden now has trees and shrubs. For the dosh-conscious, I might add that the phrase "mature garden" looks good on estate-agents' blurb.

The real hard-core like to take things which would otherwise be rubbish and turn them into something useful: they earth-up spuds in neat towers of abandoned tyres, make paths out of old bricks and assemble cold-frames out of disused windows. The softer option is to just make sure all the waste that a garden makes goes back in as something useful: we have a compost dalek, out of which something vaguely approximating soil comes every spring and autumn. The ash from the woodburner can also be spread about as fertiliser, but apparently coal-ash is a no-no because of heavy metal which can harm your plants. Something called "Jack-by-the-hedge" has seeded itself in our garden, and I'm just letting it carry on because it's edible and, as the name implies, will grow next to hedges: a place where everything else struggles.

Getting back to the seed question, why bother digging up expired annuals and replanting every year, when you could find something perennial which would give you almost as much yield? Recently that very question turned up in a rather thought-provoking BBC programme about the future of farming. One of the interesting factoids that transpired was that you could get almost as good a yield (calories and protein per acre, for example) from nut trees with assorted things growing around them as you can with grain. And none of that messing about with ploughing, spray-on weed-killer, fertiliser and the like. Alternatively you can be like Bruce the "lazy Aussie Farmer" and make more cash, even with less yield, by simply not bothering with a lot of the "input costs".

But Permaculture fans don't want to limit their design principles to gardens and farming: there's also housing, transport, healthcare, learning... And there isn't necessarily a size limit to the area involved, as long as you adapt optimally to each different part, letting nature do as much of the work as possible. So you could, in theory, have a village, with all its surrounding farmland, designed "permaculturally". Or a county, even a whole country.

Leafletised!

2009-05-20T16:42:00.008+01:00

How did all that lot get there? Well, in the run-up to an election (and a possible 'flu pandemic) these particular individuals were delivered by Royal Mail as part of a Freepost agreement, but quite a lot of other agitprop arrives at Chateau Lunchista by the hands of total amateurs, who deliver it as volunteers.

In our city the Council can provide you, if you ring up and ask, with special stickers with a recycling logo on and the legend "No Junk Mail Please: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle" or somesuch, to stick on your letter-box and ward off the worst offenders, such as plastic envelopes containing CDs with information about expensive hearing aids (it has happened).

Let's just say that in complete contrast, the type of missive delivered by Lunchista (newsletters from our Councillors, information about recycling, Warm Front and the like) is rather more public-spirited, occasionally even useful, and at the very least anyone who doesn't like it it can lob it on the compost, in the recycling or on the woodburner.

If you want a nice quiet morning or afternoon getting to know your immediate neigbourhood while clocking up a spot of excercise, then "leafletising" (as one of the smaller Lunchistas calls it) takes some beating. It's far cheaper than getting a dog, and there's no muck to clean up afterwards. It is also a totally shameless excuse for a quick kneb at people's gardens.

It's a slightly strange sensation walking around in the middle of a weekday: I'm used to there being far more people about. Apparently of the 60 million Brits, only about 30 million actually work in a job. Knock off an additional 10 million or so who are at school, and there should still be a good third of the population around somewhere. It's a fine day (difficult to deliver leaflets if it's raining: they get soggy and won't go through the brushes in people's letter-boxes), there are front gardens, the nearby shops are open, it's peacetime, so where is everybody?

I wonder, is sitting in your front garden reading or watching the world go by, something of a lost art? Because the only person I have ever seen doing this in a street near us, was at least a generation older than me. Every morning at 7 am (yes, really!) he would walk out of the old folks' home on the corner with his cushion and sit on the wall: well, perch on it really, because a high hedge overgrew the wall, meaning that no-one from the old folks' home could watch the world go by from the comfort of their lawn. I always used to say hello. You wonder what people did in their past: perhaps he once took part in a daring escape from a PoW camp. Perhaps he was a spy (or perhaps he still is).

So, here's Lunchista, bag over shoulder, setting off for the usual round of about 300 houses. There's a certain ettiquette: after all you are the ambassador for whatever it is that the leaflets are promoting. Gates have to be opened and closed (not climbed over); walls between neigbouring gardens should be walked around, not jumped over; dogs should be talked to, even the ones that scare you witless. And above all, because so few people are in, the leaflets should completely disappear into people's doors, instead of poking out all day saying "hey Mr Burglar, nobody's home here!". This happened once at Chateau Lunchista: I was near the door at the time, so the baseball-cap who'd delivered the leaflet got an impromptu lecture about crime prevention. It was only fair: the leaflet in question was, of course, about Crime Prevention.

Your turn!

2009-05-18T12:23:00.003+01:00

Picture the scene: Burns' Night (that's 25th January if you're not in the know about such things), massive "supper", the type that kicks off with the dramatic entrance of The Haggis, complete with bagpipes and ode praising its life-sustaining qualities, followed by its distribution to all present, and by some of us at least eating rather a lot of it. Just before you start to scream, might I add that there is such a thing as a vegetarian Haggis, they're delicious, and somebody had thoughtfully made sure that they were available on this particular night.

Now Burns' Night tends to follow a certain loosely-agreed "order of battle" which, after the main speeches about Poetry, Life, the Universe and Everything, the "Toast to the Lasses" and the ever-witty "Lasses' Riposte", can involve the rest of the evening's entertainment being put in the hands of the guests. Lunchista had a bit of a reputation for banter among this particular crowd, which was cheerfully invoked by the MC before I was invited to come up and get the evening's show off to a good start. No prior warning. For about a hundred people. Including the family.

Well what would you do, if this happened to you?

It wasn't until days later (it turned out to be an extremely good evening!) that it crossed my mind that the things that people have learned off by heart are in a way a resource, just like food or fuel. If you have them, you can provide for other people. A lot of us haven't bothered with this for centuries though, first because we could always look up poems in books, and later because we had the choice of switching music on, rather than having to go through all the hassle of playing it ourselves. It is also sadly true that commiting things like poems to memory, or learning to play musical instruments, both take up rather a lot of time: time which is in short supply when we are all frantically alternating between earning as much money as we can, and spending it in such a way as to impress the largest possible number of people.

But occasionally large amounts of sort-of-spare time get dumped on us without warning, for instance if we are lain off work, or go off the edge of the piste and break something. Many moons ago Lunchista got involved in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas(!) and it turned out that the chap who, for five years running, sang all the classic "patter" numbers (like "The Nightmare Song" and "Modern Major-General") only had to brush up lightly on his words, because he had used his time on an isolation ward during a Malaria scare several years previously to practise them to the point of perfection.

Even if you're not unlucky enough to be suspected of harbouring malaria, you might still be unlucky enough to have to commute, in which case some of the time might be salvageable for memorising poetry or sketches. The 60-minute train journey of my London to Brighton commute, it turns out, was used by some enterprising soul a few years after I left as a venue for her French conversation class.

Meanwhile the smaller Lunchistas, after all this, have been inspired to memorise a couple of items of choice: one of them can now sing all of The Galaxy Song, and the other is working on an anthology of terrible puns: perhaps this runs in the family!

Before I finish I might point out that here in the British Isles, it's us English who are the real slackers in the spontaneous home-made entertainment department. In Ireland, so I'm reliably informed, it's not unusual to come across an evening in a pub where all the "turns" are done by just anybody who feels like joining in. Scotland, as already mentioned, has Burns' Night and various other occasions, and I might add that my Burns' Night experience as described here took place in Wales. Yes, Wales, home of the Eisteddfod, and possibly even of Rugby songs.

Anyway, in the time it took me to get to the front of that room I remembered that there was a poem I had learned by heart decades ago, because it was funny and I happened to like it. So Silly Old Baboon (thank you Spike Milligan) kicked off the evening's entertainment, raising quite a few laughs into the bargain.

How to afford a year-long lunch break: 2

2009-05-13T16:37:00.009+01:00

Perhaps I should have called this post "Dives I Have Known", because it's really a matter of cheap rented gaffs, how I found them, and how I got by living in them. One of my luckier finds was very much like this house (thank you Ned Hoskins of Artists' Open Houses) although it was not, sadly, full of artists.

On landing a new job, which is of course many miles away from your previous job, a Brit has 2 choices: stay where you are and commute, or up sticks and move. There is also the ghastly third choice of weekend commuting, but Lunchista has tried this and found that short of actually dying it's the quickest way ever to lose touch with your friends and, indeed, most of your life. I have also watched other people do it and end up divorced, or worse still stuck in a jam on the M25 at 4:30 on a Monday morning.

Of those three choices, by far the best for an unattached, and un-roadworthy, Lunchista was to move. In the days before Google Earth, and assuming the place is so new to you that you don't yet know anybody who lives there, the first step was to go to the new city, get an AtoZ and a local paper at the station, take a taxi to somewhere vaguely near the workplace (not forgetting to chat to the taxi driver for interesting local information), find a seat, get out a pen, then find a phone-box and start calling (and walking). If it was raining I just got wet. The important thing is to avoid agencies, because these people are paid extra to get you into somewhere expensive, and waste a lot of time talking about places which are totally unsuitable. "It's a beautiful village" "I'm sure it is, but it's 15 miles from where I want to live, and I don't drive...".

The list of priorities was as follows:

1. If I can't walk there, forget it
2. Cheapness
3. Brightness
4. Hot water
5. Non-immaculate decor

And that was it. The hot water needn't mean heating, it's surprising how quickly you get used to life without it. The non-immaculate decor might need some explanation. It so happened that while I was still a student, I noticed a definite correlation between a Landlord (or Landlady)'s laid-back attitude to appearences, and a happy crowd of tenants. Also, decor is only superficial and anything that was too rough even for Lunchista could easily be sorted ("Do you mind if I paint that wall? It looks a bit sad..."). I also developed a preference for older, terraced houses.

Let's just say that the places I found using this algorithm were not for the faint-hearted. There was the landlord whose brother was rumoured to be a gun-runner for the Contras in Nicaragua. The council found out that we had no fire escape so we all had to move out that week. My protestations that I lived in the basement flat, and anyway it was far too damp to ever catch fire, fell on deaf ears. There was the attic flat that was my utter favourite, until the ceiling fell in one night (while I was away. Why was I elsewhere? Because two nights previously I'd had this terrible nightmare about the ceiling falling in...)

Some people made a lot of noise: the couple who argued on the stairs at 2 am when I had to get up at 5 were the worst. But music-type noise could be dealt with: here is my method, and it really does work.

Walk into the room where the music is being played, ostensibly to borrow, return, ask, something unrelated to the music. Just take in the atmosphere. Notice where people are sitting and what they're doing. Ask anything (except, at least initially, if they're into Heavy Metal), just generally chat for a while, then make your excuses and slope off. Next time whoever it is is playing music, you have a ready-made mental image of what they're doing. It's nothing drastic, or scary, or unknown. The music's just music, the back of your brain no longer regards it as a threat and you can get on with your Physics, reading, or sleeping.

Things would sometimes go wrong, though, at my "end of the Market". There was one Landlord who went bankrupt, left the country and then the whole street came up for sale. Another had a nervous breakdown (nothing to do with me, honest...). One of my Chinese friends had an elderly landlord whom he used to look after a bit. One morning he brought this old chap his usual morning tea and found he'd passed away in the night.

But cheap rented gaffs had their consolations. Chief of these was the concept of the shared kitchen. Because with the shared kitchen came new friends, local information and new dishes to try: in those days everyone had at least one dish they could cook, so the more people you shared with, the more you learned. I consider myself lucky to have done all my kitchen-sharing before the hegemony of the dreaded Microwave.

Here was my contribution to the fray: classic student-style Spag-Bol (feeds four at one sitting, or one student each night of the working week). Gently fry 2 chopped onions and 2 finely-chopped cloves of garlic, then tip in 1 pound of mince and fry til it has changed colour (it doesn't have to be completely done yet). Meanwhile in a separate pan, put in 2 tins of the ever-useful Italian tomatoes, some sticks of celery (finely-chopped), a few mushrooms (ditto), herbs like thyme and a bayleaf if available, and a spoonful of Bovril or Marmite. Lift the meat and onions out of their liquid and add to the tomato mixture. Heat these up until just shy of boiling, then turn down and simmer for at least 1/2 an hour. For added panache, pour in any wine that nobody wants to drink (anything up to a large glassful, and check first that no-one has dropped anything in it). For the pasta I have found that about 75g as measured when dry, per person works.

Of course another consolation of cheap rented gaffs was their sheer cheapness, which enabled the saving of money towards a project of choice (going on a course, visiting China, waiting for a recession so you could buy a house, or even being able to follow your favourite footie-team...) The people of the 1980s always said "rent is Dead Money", but if it didn't amount to much, did that really matter? And anyway, can someone remind me what exactly the first four letters of the word "Mortgage" mean?

In praise of Older Stuff

2009-05-12T15:06:00.012+01:00

Here is a younger member of famille Lunchista who knows a good bureau (and a perfectly-dimensioned little place in which to pretend to have a kip) when she sees one. In fact a lot of our furniture, though not as venerable as this piece, are cast-offs, or heirlooms, depending on your point of view, from other parts of famille Lunchista and beyond. The desk at which Lunchista is typing these musings was a cast-off from our former next-door neigbours when they were re-arranging their older son's room. The chair on which I am sitting and (until it died on me, about 5 years after its expected lifespan I grant you) the computer on which I wrote, were cast-offs from the local University, who have periodic refurbishments to keep up with the expectations of today's high-maintenance students (though to be fair, yesterday's low-maintenance students had grants and didn't have to pay tuition fees).

We are not so much "people who buy their own furniture" (as Alan Clark once famously sneered about Michael Heseltine) as people who cadge it, or pick it up secondhand for a song and then choose a fine day to wheel it out into the yard, scrub it down and restore it to its former glory (or indeed to something else altogether).

Why do we do this? Well, because it makes for cheaper, higher-quality, more interesting furniture. Let me explain:

The "cheaper" part is kind of obvious. Unless you're going for a genuine Chippendale (I mean the furniture not the gentlemen in ties and cuffs), or a Ming dynasty vase or the like, older stuff simply costs less. The "higher-quality" bit needs a bit more explanation: bear with me while I conjure up an image of a bath-tub.
Thank you, Charlene Winter Olson, I hope you don't mind if I borrow it.

Imagine a tape-measure placed along the floor from left to right under the bath, with time on it, in years, instead of length in cm. The probability that anything you buy, from a car to a table, will develop a fault or give up on you in a particular year, follows a shape just like the profile of the height of that bathtub as you (or your pet spider: every bathroom has one) move along the tape measure underneath it. The flat bottom of the bath stretches along all the years when your purchase does well: your table is stable or your car doesn't break down. The gentle upward slope on the right represents more and more faults happening as your purchase gets really old and knackered.

But what everybody forgets, is that steep slope on the left. Brand new stuff is more vulnerable to everything from catastrophic design faults to bad manufacture, including something as simple as the shine wearing off. Older stuff has begun to "stand the test of time": if it's still shiny (for example), or sturdy, it is far more likely to remain so. The "Bathtub Reliability Curve" is a well-known story in engineering circles.

Add to that the unsavoury practice of built-in obsolescence that's been popular since the 1960s and you can see why older stuff is a better bet: it was simply built to last. Lunchista happens also to think that a lot of it even looks more stylish. But there's more.

Old stuff gives a place an extra dimension: the dimension of time.

Some people seem to go out of their way to avoid this, but you have to wonder, why? In China, where I've seen for myself that people generally have a massive preference for the new over the old, it's understandable. In a lot of cases the past would have been very painful (how does partial occupation, two wars and two famines in living memory sound?), and something about which people would probably rather not be reminded by their present everyday stuff. But here in the UK?

Sometimes if I walk into a place and everything's new, my first thought is: how very, erm, temporary. Where were these people 18 months ago? Is there something in their past that they'd rather forget, or even hide? If it's a business, will they just disappear? This actually happened once, after I really had thought that of a new workplace. We ended up with 90 minutes to clear our desks!

It all goes to show, without time, really, we are nothing.

Donkey who?

2009-05-10T16:26:00.006+01:00

Lunchista has been tilting at windmills. Obviously the first thing you need to do in this case is to find a nearby windmill at which to tilt. I happened upon one while perusing a website about general local goings-on, and lo and behold it has a "Friends of" (well, Preservation Society actually) who are busy restoring it to its former glory, including the ability to mill grain. Lunchista paid them a visit today.

It's interesting to look back on the history of this kind of endeavour: a timeline forming part of the display showed two previous attempts at raising a restoration effort, both of which had come to very little. These happened in the 1950s and the 1980s. Lunchista can't remember the 1950s, but from what I can gather people weren't really into older things at the time: wanting to forget stuff like two world wars, they were more into new culture and technology at the Festival of Britain (1951), a brand new Queen (1953), and energy that would be "too cheap to meter" (ongoing, still metered). In the 1980s I guess most people would either have demolished it to make way for a supermarket car-park, or bunged a mobile phone mast on the top. Now, however, it seems we're a bit more clued-up.

The present effort started in 2001 and initially proceeded at glacial pace (I have just been reminded that this remark is unfair to Glaciers, some of whom move quite fast these days). It took til 2005 to raise their first £10,000. Then, though, things began to take off. It's that "everybody loves a winner" thing I suppose. A lottery grant (ironically funded entirely by people who weren't winners) is paying for the restoration, and a lot of the mechanism is already in place. The sails are in kit form in somebody's garage, and they (now hopefully "we") are starting to put them together next week.
Here is the result being aimed for (except it is now painted white, instead of being covered in black tar like a ship). And guess what? Unlike the case with a lot of other wind-powered enterprises, nobody is going to complain that "It doesn't look nice"!

How to afford a year-long lunch break: 1

2009-05-07T11:30:00.006+01:00

Yes, it's caviar on toast, it's delicious and it's packed with vitamins, minerals and other goodies the medical profession hasn't discovered yet. And Lunchista had it for lunch the other day.

Lunchista has never been fabulously rich. I am not an exiled Russian aristocrat, an Indian metal magnate, or one of those women who spends her adult live, as they say, "perfecting her housekeeping skills. Every time she gets divorced, she keeps the house". It's just that a twist of fate has, over the years, saved me tens of thousands of pounds.

Lunchista's first driving lesson took us along the length of Brighton Promenade, the same place in fact where the annual Veteran Car Run (London to Brighton, first weekend in November, great fun to watch) draws its finish line. I enjoyed that first lesson, and what better place to start off your motoring life?

But I never really took to it, and so have never owned a car. Perhaps if I'd fancied a career in farming, forestry or wind-turbine repair, or if I played the double-bass or had to go round in a wheelchair, that would have been a problem. But I didn't, and it isn't. So let's see what happens when you don't own a car.

First, you can appreciate the sheer wittiness of all those adverts for car insurance without the thought "oh heck mine's due for renewal soon..." lurking at the back of your mind. You are no longer terrified by the sight of road-cones. Or polis with radar-guns, or yellow boxes on poles, or sudden flashes. Or strange rattling sounds that cost you 800 quid. Or the Pub.

You can shrug off the worst car crime figures and you never, ever, have to spend ages finding a place to park (which is especially galling if you're in your own street at the time). You can get rid of that concrete eyesore between your house and the street, and have a garden instead (or you can cheat and have a lawn, but invisibly reinforced with something like these natty little squares so that your guests have somewhere to park. In fact you can do that even if you have a car).

But of course people still have to get to work. Does anybody out there still enjoy this, though? Is your daily commute a delightful taste of the open road and the Great British Countryside, or is most of it spent in "traffic"? If you have to drive around as part of your work, hasn't Head Office heard of pool cars? And, if your workplace isn't on any decent public transport routes, have you ever reflected that this is probably because Head Office wanted somewhere cheap, but has effectively dumped the extra expense on you, because you have to fund your own piece of the British transport infrastructure in order to get there?

Don't you deserve better?

Meanwhile, how about the weekend? Or holidays? Hiring a car for those kind of trips opens up the possibility of enjoying the luxury of your favourite pose-on-wheels without the daily expense of keeping it in the style to which it is accustomed, or the nightly fear of having somebody drive off in it. It's also cheaper, unless you still need wheels during the week as well or you need a Maserati every weekend of the year because, for example, you are working on impressing an exiled Russian aristocrat.

Which brings us to the small matter of money. The AA generally have the interests of motorists at heart, so I am sure they have done their homework thoroughly. Here's their detailed breakdown (I must give up on those puns...), showing costs ranging from £1,965 to £9,753 a year for having a car just standing there doing nothing.

That's one expensive piece of garden furniture!

Fess-up time: we run a car here at Chateau Lunchista, but it's just the one and nobody commutes in it. Its most common type of outing is for the various sporty activities of the younger Lunchistas: ironically these seem to be the hardest sort of trips to shift to other types of transport.

Support your local

2009-05-06T12:44:00.008+01:00

What is the most-abused word in the English language? I mean, this year, because fashions in word-abuse come and go. Anyone remember "Aspirations" (from the 1970s)? "Care" (from the 1980s, once used notoriously by the PM to describe her attitude to the National Health Service)? More recent victims have included "Empower", and there is at least one word which has been abused so badly it has effectively died and had to be replaced. "Sympathy" (which literally means "the same feeling") is now no longer strong enough for those who wish to profess their fellow feeling. These days it has to be "Empathy" (which also literally means "the same feeling"), thank you, and nothing less.

But all that is just the warm-up act to the most-abused word of this decade. That word, in case you've just come back from an extended holiday on another planet, is "Sustainable" (and its relatives). Appropriately enough, it looks like remaining so for quite some time. It all started in 1987 with a nice clear definition by the then Norwegian PM Gro Harlem Bruntland:

"Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"

and it's been downhill ever since, a recent landmark (well all right then, low-tide-mark) being Lunchista's home city's adoption of a "sustainable growth strategy for retail" or somesuch, which presumably means they'll carry on building shops forever.

But (and this is a big But) one abiding characteristic of abused words is that, from time to time, they turn up in places where their use is entirely justified. An example of this happened in Lunchista's front room yesterday.

Our Parish Council has created a Sustainability Working Group, whose job it is to advise the said Council on all matters to do with Sustainability, which Lunchista interprets as "the black art of how to use things (including abstract things like Goodwill and aesthetics) without using them up". Lunchista was invited on board. Meetings rotate around various venues, so Lunchista offered the front room.

One of our first jobs is to look at how the Parish Council's own places can be made more sustainable. Lunchista's suggestion to start with simple energy audits led to the interesting revelation that for some of these places the bill-payers, and even the owners, were not known. Going from my previous experience of this type of work, this is not unusual. You nearly always find that energy efficiency isn't a physics problem, it's a chain-of-command problem. Except chains of command are So Last Century and we now have "Partnership working" instead, which gives everybody the opportunity to advance their career by blaming someone else. Meanwhile it transpires that our most important building has just had a total refit, so the most Sustainable thing to do with it now, in all probability, would be to leave it alone.

Next, and a bit more interesting, is to look round our parish and find all the people and places which are already quietly getting on with being sustainable, and see if any of them needs any help. While doing that you often come across places which provided local needs in times gone by but are now derelict and could, with a bit of TLC and the right Insurance, be brought back into use. Like the old Orchard, for example. Or old manor gardens, woods that could be coppiced, water-mills, tythe-barns, you get the idea. All of these classic pieces of infrastructure could carry on being useful indefinitely, without the need to constantly source petrol/plastic/electricity or take away rubbish (other than things you could just bung on the stove or the compost).

However the liveliest bit of all, at least in this particular meeting, was talk of what we'd like HMG to do to help all this stuff happen. Welcome to the shiny new Sustainable Communities Act, which came about after some nifty campaigning, and enables anyone whose Council has signed up, to put in ideas for national laws which can come in on the side of people who are working on a local scale to do the sort of thing that our Sustainability Working Group is trying to do.

The deadline for the first round of ideas is 8th May (VE Day no less).

For those who can't come up with ideas on an empty stomach, I offer scones, made and brought home from school by the same younger member of our family who brought you Vegetarianism and Football.

Put the oven on gas mark 7. Rub 50 g of butter into 200 g of self-raising flour. Add in 50 g of either sugar or grated cheese. Then gradually stir in 120 g of milk, until you have a smooth dough. Roll it out onto a floured board and put circular pieces onto a greased tray. Bake for 15 minutes.

The scones were not very sustainable, in that they didn't stay around for long.

May Day holiday: a history

2009-05-04T20:21:00.007+01:00

It is a fact of life, when one is on a year-long lunch break, that May-Day bank holiday is just another day. However all over Europe, and in China, it's a time when, historically, the hard-working Masses get to step off the treadmill for a day and celebrate the end of the Heating Season (for those, that is, who can afford heating). The UK was dragged kicking and screaming into this tradition by the (then) EEC, in 1978. Lunchista was, while still at school, an eyewitness to some of the kicking and screaming. I invite you to share in the drama of How May-Day Holiday Was Won, at least in our part of the country.

Picture the late 1970's: the Winter of Discontent, rubbish piled up all over Liverpool, kipper ties, boarding schools, the IRA, "Life on Mars" if you can't remember the real thing, you get the idea. Lunchista's school (the very same, but about a year before, the notorious "fellwalking" incident): was a rather old-fashioned establishment and had either just finished celebrating its 250th anniversary, or else fallen through a time-warp. The buildings had a Hogwartesque touch. The headmaster loved Cricket and Shakespeare, and you might sit there and think "so what", but for the time he had once famously launched into fiery oratory, one Speech Day, about how one racist taunt overheard at Lords had (and I quote) "turned an idyllic English summer afternoon into a Vision Of Hell".

But even that sense of justice didn't mean that he'd allow his school to indulge in Workers' Holiday. So we all turned up as usual, and had a totally usual day, until just after lunch when the bell rang, and didn't stop. Someone had telephoned the school with a bomb scare and we all had to go home. Buses were summoned early, and Lunchista's class had to freeze all the way home in games kit.

No-one ever officially found out who did it. But let's just say that The Brightest Lad In The School had been taught a cracking Irish accent by our brilliant English teacher the previous year, so that he could play McCann in the school production of The Birthday Party. And I might add that, although many countries featured in our intake of about 350 people, at the time neither part of the Emerald Isle was one of them.

Let's face it, given the circumstances things could have got ugly. But we were spared panicking staff, "Life on Mars"-style policing and Bomb Disposal detonating people's bags, desks and suspicious-looking objects in the Physics lab at random. So Lunchista raises a glass to all those whose cool professionalism allowed me to enjoy my first ever May-Day holiday.

Bean-Counters

2009-05-01T17:45:00.008+01:00

A younger member of famille Lunchista announced one afternoon, on arriving home from football, that she was going to go vegetarian. Nothing to do with me, Sarge, all I ever did was mention, just the once and ages ago, that I'd had a go at being vegetarian in my misspent youth, gone anaemic and given it up. The ensuing silence was deafening. Twice as much cooking! Having to find something new and at least vaguely interesting for two lots of people not just one! And all this with both of us working and one of us not even getting home til 7 pm (yes, it wasn't even as if I did most of the cooking). If I'd been one of those portly old blokes who goes to a club I'd have said "preposterous!" (in a particularly silly posh accent). But Lunchista is not an old bloke and couldn't afford a club even if we sold the house and banked the proceeds. And so evolved The Plan.

I pointed out that we could get almost as good a result, on the less-meat-eating front, if we all went vegetarian for one day a week. I also happen to think it's healthier for a growing lass to do low-meat than no-meat, at least to start with, and it's better for morale if we're all sitting down to share the same food. Sunday seemed like a good choice of day, because it was the only day of our week which afforded any spare time to pick up the pieces if anything should go wrong. So Sunday it was then, with The Cranks' Recipe book and a trip to the local Wholefood emporium for supplies and inspiration. It was there that I was reminded of the taste, variety and sheer protein-infested-ness of beans (and picked up The Suma Recipe book for nowt). Beans...they keep for ages in ordinary cupboards (and look fab). They go with absolutely everything. Their only two drawbacks as far as I can tell are that you have to remember to get them out in advance to soak them (hours or overnight) and you can't barbecue them.

Fess-up time: that was 18 months ago and we haven't managed to stick religiously to vegetarian every Sunday. But we have collected a useful repetoire of veggie recipes, and during that time a new middle-Eastern shop has opened its doors near the Uni. I wandered in just the other day and was greeted with shelf upon shelf of phenomenally cheap 5 lb packets of all sorts of beans, each type of which has a different recipe on. And as if that's not enough, the guys who run the shop have drawn up a load of recipes of their own, from their various countries of origin, and printed these out on pages which they helpfully offer to anyone who, like me, they jalouse is in need of veggie inspiration. They are also incorrigible flirts, especially with the more, erm, "traditionally-built" ladies who come into the shop: watching them in action from the safety of behind the far shelves is great fun!

On the back of a giant pack of black-eye beans we found the following simple recipe for 4 people:
Soak 200g of the beans for at least 5 hours (you will now have just over 400g, or about 1lb, of beans). Cook until soft, then strain and put aside. Put on one mugful of rice to boil then simmer. Finely chop an onion and fry it til transparent, add 1/2 tsp turmeric, 1/2 tsp chilli powder and a tin of the ever-useful Italian plum tomatoes. Stir for a few minutes, add the beans and cook for a few more minutes, then serve.

It tasted great. Not only that but it's cheap as chips and all the ingredients can be pulled straight from your in-case-of-Swine-Flu emergency store.

Life's a swine

2009-04-30T21:41:00.009+01:00

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

2009-04-29T15:10:00.008+01:00

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

2009-04-28T11:14:00.008+01:00

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...

2009-04-27T10:38:00.007+01:00

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

2009-04-25T17:10:00.007+01:00

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

2009-04-23T21:30:00.011+01:00

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?