A spot of Perestroika

Over the years, in the intervals (both long and short) between bouts of paid work, I have developed a taste for basic D.I.Y. Since this often involves re-arranging things it has, in Chateau Lunchista, acquired the nick-name "Perestroika" (literally "Restructuring", in Russian).

It started with cheap rented flats: I would rescue and restore pieces of old furniture. Two "Directors' Chairs" (discovered in an overgrown garden) which I re-strung in the early 1980s are still being used here at Chateau Lunchista to this day. I sanded and repainted an ancient chest of drawers one summer day as a break from writing up stuff about electromagnetic scattering. In some flats I'd offer to redecorate. The delight:expenditure ratio of brightening up a room was beyond belief.

It got easier with practice: a friend who decided to follow the 1980s fashion of property development bribed me to paint all the woodwork in his latest acquisition. The weirdest episode of this kind must have been the Valentine's Day I spent shovelling rubble out of a 1st-storey window.

All of which meant that when the first Chateau Lunchista was acquired, after the real hardcore stuff (they had to take the floor away because it had dry rot, and then we decided that since we were in Glasgow we'd better have some heating installed too) none of the decorating had to be paid for. Or the extra electrical connections. Or hoisting the chandelier. We found that the best colours to paint with were ones that made it look as if the sun was shining into the room, even if it was dull outside. Then I bought reams and reams of Damask for a song at Dalston market and made them into curtains (using material with a striped pattern makes this much easier).

We've also had the experience of moving into a house which was, well, sad. Nothing was dramatically wrong with it, it just needed a change of atmosphere.

Sanding the floorboards really brings some light into a room. Then it was a matter of getting rid of four rooms' worth of dull wallpaper: I bought a steamer, and spent days with steam and loud Heavy Metal while everybody else was away. Even wallpapering is far easier than it used to be in days gone by: no-one makes wallpaper that tears or deforms anymore, and there are step-by-step illustrated leaflets floating around in most D.I.Y. emporia these days.

All of which meant that, on starting out on the year-long lunch break, I was able to finish off a lot of annoying odds and ends in the present Chateau Lunchista. There was a cupboard in Lunchista fils' bedroom where some kind of plumbing massacre had taken place, leaving holes in the wall and floor, and piles of old plaster. It's amazing the size of hole you can use pollyfilla on, and the transformation wrought with a tin of white paint. Someone had left the shelf brackets in, so I was even able to make slatted shelves by sawing up planks from an old pallet and painting them white.

Finally there was the hole in the kitchen floor. Breakfast bars are the height of fashion these days but that left nowhere in the kitchen where we could eat dinner, at least not all at the same time. So we got it removed by a professional, and underneath it we discovered the hole in the floor. The only reason I felt able to take it on was that our next-door neighbour put me up to it. Ah the joys of a positive attitude! That and a full collection of tools for that and all possible other D.I.Y. jobs.

It took me two days to chisel away blobs of concrete to make the hole the right shape to lay tiles in. Little shards of it riccochet round the room, so I had to don safety goggles. Then we discovered the tiles were a few millimetres too big, and had to get some smaller ones. You have to 'comb' the cement out until it's completely straight: this took me so long that the stuff was nearly dry by the time I'd got it right. Then the tiles just sat there looking odd until the following day when I could finally put the grouting in between them. I got it smeared all over the place to start with, until I found out that there are special tools for doing this. Oh well you live and learn.

The point of recounting all this is to say that at the start of any one of these jobs Lunchista had nothing to lose. Had anything gone wrong, or simply turned out beyond what either Lunchista or her other half could do, it could either be abandonned (in the case of the old furniture) or we could just pay someone to do it. As it is, we've saved a lot of money, we have the satisfaction of looking at our own work, and we've learned something.

Iceland under pressure

This winter, the back-end of last winter (with that cold spell in February) and the winter of 1962-3 all have something in common. Apart, that is, from their obvious coolness. They all involve the absence of the usual "Low" over or near Iceland.

Here it is (thank you, South Downs Hang-Gliding!) in its natural habitat:
Wind, like the mythical Haggis in that joke about it always having to run round mountains clockwise because its left legs are longer than its right, blows clockwise around the Highs and anticlockwise around the Lows: in other words, that Iceland Low brings in lukewarm damp weather from the Atlantic. But now all that's gone, and in its absence we get to share in the sort of winter they have in mainland Europe: land cools down more than sea does. Wind that blows off this cool land comes up against the damp air over the sea, but instead of rain we get snow.

Meanwhile, somehow or other the good people of Iceland have to muddle along without their usual Low. Or indeed without their once-highly-successful banks. Banks whose returns were so high that HMG insisted any local Council not using them as a repository for their spare cash was in need of investigating, capping and probably The Lash to boot.

The banks' collapse seems to have caused the instantaneous disappearence of some 3 thousand million pounds, and of course that begs the question, who should pay? Depositors who thought they'd get "something for nothing"? HMG, who forced local authorities to use the banks because the numbers looked good? Us, the voters, who insisted on local councils offering "Value for Money"? The Icelandic government, who forgot to regulate their banks? Or the average Sigurd or Rúna who, indirectly and very temporarily, enjoyed the profits and must now vote on whether or not they want to give up something like £10,000 each?

I can see where the idea came from for that superstition about not being caught pulling a silly face when the wind changes direction.

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.

Investment Strategies

I used to have savings. They used to live in a building society in which, quietly and without drama, they did their stuff. Then the building society got eaten by a larger building society. Then the resulting combo turned into a bank (and handed Lunchista a few shares, which were promptly flogged off). Then that bank merged with another bank, and just this year, in a move that made headlines, the resulting bank-combo was bought out by a bank whose services Lunchista had been studiously avoiding using for years.

It all looked a bit like that video game in which you're a fish and you get bigger by eating smaller fish, while trying not to get eaten by a bigger fish in your turn. Good job I'd long since taken the money and run.

And now for something completely different. A few months ago the Yorkshire Post was offering free organic seeds. Talk about an Offer I Can't Refuse! The new front bed at Chateau Lunchista is now full of Purple Broccolli, Sunflowers and Beetroots. For once I must be doing something right, because they're all enormous. And, might I add, tax-free. The beetroots are called "Detroit". In an effort at Cold War reconciliation, we dug them up and made Borsch.

It's dead easy. Get four beetroots, chop off the roots and the leaves (leave a couple of inches of the stems), wash them, put in a big pan (about 2 litres or 3 pints) of water and bring to the boil. Now either simmer it for an hour, or get a box full of crumpled newspaper, carefully put the pan in, put more newspapers around it and close the flaps, leave it and go to work for the day (or sleep for the night). Return to find nicely-stewed soft beetroots in purple liquid. Lift the beetroots out, grate them back into the purple liquid, add salt and heat up again. Serve poured over diced cucumbers (and diced boiled eggs for a more substantial dish), with a spoonful of Smetana (or plain yogurt) on the top. You can eat it hot in the winter (and make it even more substantial by putting in any scraps of cooked meat you happen to have) or chilled in the summer.

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?

How to afford a year-long lunch break: 1

Yes, it's caviar on toast, it's delicious and it's packed with vitamins, minerals and other goodies the medical profession hasn't discovered yet. And Lunchista had it for lunch the other day.

Lunchista has never been fabulously rich. I am not an exiled Russian aristocrat, an Indian metal magnate, or one of those women who spends her adult live, as they say, "perfecting her housekeeping skills. Every time she gets divorced, she keeps the house". It's just that a twist of fate has, over the years, saved me tens of thousands of pounds.

Lunchista's first driving lesson took us along the length of Brighton Promenade, the same place in fact where the annual Veteran Car Run (London to Brighton, first weekend in November, great fun to watch) draws its finish line. I enjoyed that first lesson, and what better place to start off your motoring life?

But I never really took to it, and so have never owned a car. Perhaps if I'd fancied a career in farming, forestry or wind-turbine repair, or if I played the double-bass or had to go round in a wheelchair, that would have been a problem. But I didn't, and it isn't. So let's see what happens when you don't own a car.

First, you can appreciate the sheer wittiness of all those adverts for car insurance without the thought "oh heck mine's due for renewal soon..." lurking at the back of your mind. You are no longer terrified by the sight of road-cones. Or polis with radar-guns, or yellow boxes on poles, or sudden flashes. Or strange rattling sounds that cost you 800 quid. Or the Pub.

You can shrug off the worst car crime figures and you never, ever, have to spend ages finding a place to park (which is especially galling if you're in your own street at the time). You can get rid of that concrete eyesore between your house and the street, and have a garden instead (or you can cheat and have a lawn, but invisibly reinforced with something like these natty little squares so that your guests have somewhere to park. In fact you can do that even if you have a car).

But of course people still have to get to work. Does anybody out there still enjoy this, though? Is your daily commute a delightful taste of the open road and the Great British Countryside, or is most of it spent in "traffic"? If you have to drive around as part of your work, hasn't Head Office heard of pool cars? And, if your workplace isn't on any decent public transport routes, have you ever reflected that this is probably because Head Office wanted somewhere cheap, but has effectively dumped the extra expense on you, because you have to fund your own piece of the British transport infrastructure in order to get there?

Don't you deserve better?

Meanwhile, how about the weekend? Or holidays? Hiring a car for those kind of trips opens up the possibility of enjoying the luxury of your favourite pose-on-wheels without the daily expense of keeping it in the style to which it is accustomed, or the nightly fear of having somebody drive off in it. It's also cheaper, unless you still need wheels during the week as well or you need a Maserati every weekend of the year because, for example, you are working on impressing an exiled Russian aristocrat.

Which brings us to the small matter of money. The AA generally have the interests of motorists at heart, so I am sure they have done their homework thoroughly. Here's their detailed breakdown (I must give up on those puns...), showing costs ranging from £1,965 to £9,753 a year for having a car just standing there doing nothing.

That's one expensive piece of garden furniture!

Fess-up time: we run a car here at Chateau Lunchista, but it's just the one and nobody commutes in it. Its most common type of outing is for the various sporty activities of the younger Lunchistas: ironically these seem to be the hardest sort of trips to shift to other types of transport.

The "Sporting Chance" school of gardening

In this shot is something which Lunchista hopes really will turn out pear-shaped: the more botanically-inclined viewer may be able to identify pear-blossom which has just set. But it very nearly didn't happen.

Sometimes the things you buy for the garden with the best of intentions, just drop all their leaves and sit there looking to all intents and purposes as dead as the proverbial Parrot. Or, having justfiiably looked dead all winter, they fail to come out in the spring. This has happened quite a lot in the Lunchista garden, usually to things that were expensive to buy, such as:

A lemon tree
A climbing peach
A grapevine
Some miniature roses
Countless seeds, berries and nuts that go into pots just for the heck of it.

One of the first victims was the pear-tree. We'd planted seven fruit-trees during our first winter here, and in the March they all showed buds. Then blossom in April, and leaves in May. All, that is, except the pear-tree, in spite of the fact that it had received the same TLC as all the others. Lunchista couldn't bear to dig up a tree, so we left it there, its bare branches giving us two fingers every time we looked in the garden. Until June, when it suddenly decided that having no leaves was a bit of a career limiting move, and as they say in the USA, "got with the program".

The lemon was a bit more dramatic: it suddenly decided to drop a full set of perfectly good leaves in the middle of summer, and remained leaf-less for the rest of the year. Then when we fed it some lemon-food the following spring, it put out new leaves. In the autumn. By then it had cobwebs on, giving its dead-ness that extra Gothic touch.

Apparently plants can go into shock. They "play dead" because they're too dry. Or too wet. Or lack some mineral or (more probably) sunshine. The same thing happened to the other plants in our Rogues' Gallery above (all except the peach, which after six months we decided was genuinely dead: its branches were completely dry. You can't win them all.).

And so evolved the Sporting Chance School of Gardening. I'd always thought it was a bit barking and wondered why I did it, but now I've discovered something of a justification, from the world of high finance of all places.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was one of the very few traders to emerge from the 1987 crash with a positive result. A large part of what enabled him to do this came from his understanding of the patterns of highly improbable events, in particular the difference in the statistics behind ordinary physical things, such as for example the heights of pear-trees (which typically have a Gaussian distribution), and human-made ones, such as gains from inventions taking off, or losses from markets crashing or wars breaking out. These typically follow something more way-out, like the wealth-distribution curve found by Wilfredo Pareto, in which it is possible for one individual's contribution to tip up the entire table.

After describing all this in eloquent detail in The Black Swan, Taleb then poses the question, on behalf of the reader, "So what do I do now?" Part of the answer is to go to parties: you never know who might be there and end up putting you onto a "positive Black Swan", that might really take off. Another part of the answer deals with the more pedestrian parts of life.

The Strategy is to split your resources (time, wealth, space in your garden...) 85:15, in fact very much like Mr Pareto's 80:20. Put the 85 into something (apparently) rock-solid, or at least boringly conservative. Then take the remaining 15 and put it into something which, though it's very probably going to just sit there doing nothing, might just take off and land you a good result. Something, in fact, like an apparently-dead pear tree.

The real art is to line up the two sets of assets in such a way that any improbable event causing the loss of the 85% will also result in that remaining 15% coming good in spectacular fashion: for example an entire row of pear-trees. Lunchista assumes this is why this type of investment is known as a Hedge Fund.

Riding out a previous Recession

Some people thrive on recessions. No I don't mean in the sense that their business only comes about when other people are suffering (pawnbrokers, undertakers, drug companies, etc) I mean something a bit more subtle. During a recession, to put it perhaps a bit too bluntly, people stop posing and start thinking.

Who here remembers the 1980s boom? Yuppies barking into mobile phones the size of bricks, flashy cars doing stupid things, people talking about their house price and nothing else, and Walkmans introducing us to the delightful concept of not really being able to talk to anybody anyway. People went about with bank accounts instead of brains. They watched Dallas. Good grief it was boring. Lunchista's job paid less, per month, than the typical monthly rise in sale price of the humblest studio flat. So I did the logical thing: I packed it in, and went off with my savings (the ones that couldn't buy a fraction of a flat) to study something interesting. I emerged from my studies to find a recession in full swing.

All of a sudden everything was cheap. I shared a house with two Chinese lads, it cost less than half what I was paying for a similar place with posher decor during the boom. The place had no heating, next-to-no carpets, and a clothesline on the landing. The decor in my room was just plain white walls with carefully-handwritten nuggets of cryptic wisdom such as:

"Never trust a man in a trenchcoat. Never drive a car when you're dead"

and:

"It's memory that I'm stealing, but your moment when you dream"

It was near an entire street full of curry-houses, the Chinese shop and the Market. The landlord even paid our poll tax for us. In short, it was perfect. We threw parties. Not the sort where you present perfect dishes on perfect tables and talk as politely as you can (backed by your perfect decor) about house-prices and the perils of too much immigration. I mean the sort of parties that spontaneously materialise when you've been helping someone with a spot of decorating/proof-reading/physics, and either beer and curry materialise at theirs, or you ask if they'd like to bring a few bottles round to yours later on and you'll knock up a massive stir-fry.

Because it was in that house that Lunchista learned the black art of stir-fry. And how to clean up afterwards.

Now, any real aficionados will have noticed the "deliberate mistake" in the illustration for this post: Lunchista's present cooker is electric and not gas. But the cooker in our old house was gas-fired and it went like a rocket. And we had a purpose-built rice-cooker, which I am going to assume is absent from your kitchen arsenel, dear reader, but do at least run out and buy a good old-fashioned, indestructible Wok. Smear a bit of sunflower oil over the inside surface and set it on a ring til it just begins to smoke, then take it off. Perfect.

For rice, use one large mug per 4 people who are eating: rinse it in hot water, then put in a pan with 2 mugs cold water for every 4 people. Cover then bring it to the boil, then turn it right down and simmer very slowly while the real fun starts.

Slice up very finely 3-4 oz meat (pork, chicken or turkey are best) per person and put it in a dish where you can cover it with ShaoHsing wine (the stuff in the bottle with the red label. Warning: do not attempt to drink this wine, when raw it tastes disgusting! In fact an unwanted guest helped himself to some once and I like to think that was its own punishment. Better to get someone to pour you a glass of Red, or a beer). If the Chinese shop is closed and you can't get your ShaoHsing, you can slum it with cheap sherry instead. Then pour on lots of soy sauce: dark "mushroom" soy is best. If you're the type who likes to plan ahead, you can do the meat bit the day before and leave it to marinade overnight.

For vegetables, you can use any of: chinese leaves, any veggies from the Chinese shop, broccoli, carrots, bamboo-shoots, water-chestnuts... best to include some things with dark or strong colours. Chop them up finely, also chop up some mushrooms, ginger and spring-onions. The total weight of veggies per person should be 8-9 oz.

Light the gas as hot as it will go. Put the empty wok on it (you might have to get someone to turn off the fire alarm at this point). After a few seconds it should be good and hot. Put in a small amount of sunflower oil and swirl it round. Lift the meat from its marinade and put it in to fry: start stirring after a few seconds. If it flames briefly, don't panic: this means it's good and hot! When all the meat surfaces are fried, lift it out but leave the oil in: it will have some fat from the meat, which will prevent it from getting hot enough to do the veggies, so pour it away safely (these days I carry it out into the garden).

Find the marinade, stir in a teaspoon or so of cornflour.

Pour fresh oil into the wok, heat it up, and add all veggies except the mushrooms and onions. Add a sprinkling of sugar. Again, fry as hot as you can. Add the mushrooms, and when they look done, stir in the marinade. As it boils it will thicken and change colour: add some water if it gets too thick. Make sure it boils.

Put the fried meat back in, add the spring-onions last.

Pour a little water over the rice. It should be slightly sticky, so it can be picked up with chopsticks. Turn the fire-alarm back on. Chow-time!

Now, all this fun and games can make a real mess of a rented kitchen, especially for us because there wasn't anything as fancy as a cooker-hood. So the lads brought in Soda Crystals (not to be confused with the more mild-mannered Bicarbonate of Soda), which they used for cleaning at the Chinese restaurant where they worked.

Looking back, I think the thing that really lit up life at the time was culture, in all its forms. None of it cost any money, which was just as well because the Lunchista income (from a bit of Physics in a professional capacity, for two hours a week) just covered the rent, and I qualified for no benefits. I got involved in singing opera, and I learned a bit of Chinese (and ended up with a Shanghai accent, which I'm told is the equivalent of sounding like a Scouser). For once I had time to read classics (picked up second-hand) like Tess and The Woman In White. We all became avid followers of England's fortunes in the 1990 World Cup and discussed endlessly what made a good match/team/country. Someone found me an ancient bike which I did up. I still have it, and it still goes.

"My, how you've grown!"

We've all been there. Some of us longer ago than others.

You're visiting, or being visited by, an older relative, and you're standing there thinking that you'd far rather be playing football or climbing trees, and they utter those awful words "My, how you've grown!". Now how on earth are you supposed to answer a greeting like that? You could try the logical approach ("Yes it's because I eat lots of spaghetti, and it's long and thin..."), the contrary riposte ("No I haven't"), or the sociable rejoinder ("Yes, so have you"). You could even branch out into surrealism ("No, I'm standing on your head"). Growing just happens: it's not even interesting. Saying "My, you're breathing!" would sound no less daft to a ten-year-old. Although it might arouse the suspicions of his parents.

We grow, then we grow up. The English language has this amazingly economical way of saying not only that we have finished doing something, but also that we have exhausted all further possibilities of doing it. We eat, and when there's no more we've eaten up. When the stuff is all used, and there's no more to be had, it's used up. The only other language Lunchista knows of which shares this turn of phrase is Chinese: the little suffix "Le" at the end of a sentence tells us that whatever is going on in that sentence has now been completed. Sometimes "Le" also implies that whatever has been done, has been done to the point of perfection. So, we grow, and provided we stay healthy and have enough of the right type of food (spaghetti or otherwise), we reach the best of all possible heights and then we stop. We are then grown-up.

We are lucky that this is all done automatically. What would we do if it took some effort, or some choice, to switch "growing" off? Ten-year-olds grow at the rate of about 5 cm a year: imagine the chaos if that carried on throughout life. A typical retiree, at about 4 metres tall, would be nearly as high as a house.

Most people, given the choice, would like to be "slightly taller than average". So in the end, a choice about whether to stop growing or not would result in maximum possible growth: very few people want to be shorter than average.

Does the phrase "maximum possible growth" sound familiar? Isn't it what most governments, given the choice, would like their country's economies (their GDP) to do? But in a mature economy like ours, where everybody could easily have enough of all they need if the distribution were ever so slightly tweaked, do we really need more "growth"? How about two things to ponder over lunch:

First, think of all the goods and services we use: there's a physical limit to how much of all of them we can cram into our lives. We can only eat so much food, inhabit and fully appreciate so big a house, drive so many miles, take up so many sports, drink so much beer and read so many books: after that the enjoyment palls or we simply run out of time, health or natural resources.

Second, pick any easily-measureable number that represents quality of life: life expectancy, infant survival, people's perceived happiness, you name it, and plot it against income: all this can be done as a lunchtime's entertainment using Gapminder, who already have all the numbers. Of course you get a rising curve on your plot: it is better not to be poor. But, at a level of income just shy of the UK average, the curve flattens out. The very rich do not live any longer, or feel any happier, than the average Brit. We should delight in that curve. It tells us that the present halt in economic growth need not prevent us from having a good quality of life. It also tells us that economic growth is best left to the people in countries who really need it.

There's only one problem. Every time any money is created, so is a corresponding amount of debt. This debt incurrs interest. So unless we are all producing goods faster than this debt grows, there will always be more debt than the total wherewithal available to pay it off. Someone, somewhere, will always go bust. It could be you.

It is not a pleasant thought: we either put up with an economy that grows, providing us all with more of anything than we can ever sanely use, or put up with one that doesn't, launching us all into a game of musical chairs (or Russian Roulette, depending on your frame of mind) with the bailiffs.

So until we change the way that money is created, the economy can never be allowed to be grown-up.

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.