Double Vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This month's Job Vacancy

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)

Continuity announcement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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