Army Catering

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.

Value Engineering

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...

Dhal and displacement

There is something delightfully subversive about coming home for lunch in the middle of a working day. For a start it implies that home and work are not too far apart, either physically or mentally. It also tacitly assumes that you actually have such a thing as a lunch-break at work (and indeed a home worth going to), and are not expected to carry on regardless like some sort of automaton who lives in a box. Finally it can make for cheaper, better food.

What is this "physically or mentally" business? Well obviously it's better to be able to get home in a short stroll (or possibly a quiet few minutes on a bike) than it is to have to fight through traffic and then on your return for the afternoon play Russian Roulette for a parking space. The "mental" bit is that I have noticed in several places I have worked that some people actually like to put as big a distance as possible between their work and non-work lives. This would be understandable if their work involved dealing with the darker side of human nature (prison service, social worker, polis), but the people involved here were engineers. What, I wondered without quite being able to find the words, do they find about their job that is so repulsive?

Right, that's enough existentialism on an empty stomach.

Here is a slightly impressionistic picture of the dhal we had for lunch, made by simmering 250g (1/2 lb) of dry orange lentils and tipping into the nearly-done brew one finely-chopped onion and one very-finely-chopped clove of garlic, both fried gently til transparent, and a pinch of chilli powder. The green frilly stuff is corriander, which we chop up and sprinkle on the dhal. This lunch offers energy, protein and vitamins for two hungry people at a cost of about £1. Less still if you have had the foresight to plant up some corriander a few weeks previously.

It also makes sure that if your boss is a vampire he (or she) leaves you unmolested for the afternoon.

Out to Lunch

It all started with DogEatDoggo (some names have been changed to protect the Guilty). Someone, more probably some committee, high up in the adminisphere of our innovative, people-focussed enterprise had thought that using it would make us all more efficient. So DogEatDoggo it was, because everybody else was using it, and in spite of the fact that none of us wanted it.

Let’s just say that, for one reason or another, it started to fail in its appointed task of making us more efficient. Invoices weren’t being sent out. Bids weren’t being put in. Engineers with 40 years’ experience, who could repair entire power stations just by looking at the plans and making one phone-call, found themselves helpless in front of tick-boxes that wouldn’t tick. My “Computer Says No” poster no longer made people smile.

A colleague joked that he’d left a previous job just to avoid it. And promptly put in for early retirement. I was already working my notice and so could afford to view all this with blissful detachment, which probably didn’t do much for my popularity there. At three in the afternoon one day my boss, having struggled all day until then to accomplish something which would have been the essence of simplicity under the old system, marched out of the office announcing “I’m off for lunch. See you next January; I’m off for a year-long lunch break!”