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)

Surreal interlude

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

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

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

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:

Sinister musings

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?

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.

"So, what do you do?"

For those who have set out on a year-long lunch break (or indeed a lunch-break of any longer than about two days) this question is a minefield, cunningly disguised behind a plate of something rather nice, being proffered in your direction by someone who, and this is the master-stroke, is otherwise perfectly friendly and pleasant. In a previous recession I happened to be at a party in which nearly everyone I asked, replied in the past tense: "I was a (fill in incomprehensible job title in the finance industry here)". After three or four of these it became evident that it was much more fun to ask people if they were into Heavy Metal.

But supposing that, rather than being at a party, you find yourself catapulted into fame in the local paper, by some random misfortune like a gas explosion, or by coming first in the local fun-run or winning the lottery. How is the reporter going to describe you?

If you've just finished studies, this is dead easy: An (insert interesting topic here) graduate. Perhaps this is why gap-years are usually done at this time in life. At the other end of the scale, if you know you've finished with the wonderful world of work for good you are of course a retired (insert fascinating career choice here). However to pull off this stunt you need to look reassuringly old and wise: this is not a popular tactic with about 51% of the population. But what if you have just lost your job? Or supposing you left it because it was unbearable, unethical, or you just couldn’t face another day working for an enterprise whose management, in their wisdom, had seen fit to re-brand it “WIMP” because it made it sound more Client-Focussed? Will our newspaper reporter be happy with the answer: "I'm a Heavy Metal fan", or indeed with information about any other activity, no matter how fascinating or unusual? Well, no. The guy wants to know your profession, because the means by which you acquire money, for some reason, is supposed to reveal something deep and meaningful about the real you.

Of course in most cases this is a pile of tosh. The vast majority of jobs (really, apart from Doctors and Lawyers, who has a profession these days?) are far too boring to reveal anything at all about the type of people who do them. What's more, recent research has revealed that three quarters of working people in the UK are in occupations which are completely incompatible with their type of character.

This means our reporter might as well describe you using your star sign. This may or may not tell their readers more about you than the epithet "unemployed". But sadly, "unemployed" it will be.

Unless, of course, you have a Plan.

First, the party line (or the paper epithet) is "I gave up my boring/stressful/unethical/too-far-away job to go and do Y"

Central to the plan is a "Y".

And that is what The Year-Long Lunch Break is all about.