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?

Car Booty

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.

Plum job!

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...

Consultation Nation

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?

For whom the Bog Rolls

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

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

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 lunch. 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.

Leafletised!

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.