Skip to my Lou

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.

The laundry lasses' working day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sound of salesmen

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.

How to afford a year-long lunch break: 2

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?