They think it's all over...

There comes a time when a blog must live up to its title. Ladies and gentlemen, in the case of the Year-long lunch break, that time is 19th March 2010. A look back through Lunchista's musings will reveal an entire year of activities, thoughts, people and other curiosities. It also leaves me with the strange thought that as I write this post, the small spherical object on which I sit is hurtling through roughly the same bit of space as it was when I transmitted the first post, immortalising my boss, his exasperation, and an unknown committee at my former workplace. If I accidentally dropped anything there, now's the time to have a quick look for it.

So, what was the plan? "What do you do?". Well, there were never mighty empires to be built (too expensive, too unfriendly). The plan was to live in a place, rather than fall into the trap of using it as a dormitory. To find, learn about, and take part in, the many and various things that attempt to make local and national life better, and to do all that without much need of anything elaborate, like money.

As for the vexed question itself, well Lunchista did make the papers once during the Year-long lunch break, and the radio too, and for these purposes has been described as a "Sustainability Activist". I have also been the inevitable "Unemployed" (at the jobcentre) and "Housewife" (for our new insurance) as well as "Energy spokesperson" (for our Party), "Trustee" (for the Orchard and the Nature Reserve), "Consultee" (various campaigns) and of course "Urban Guerrilla" (gardener, that is).

I remain all those things, but for now anyone who has shared the Year-long lunch break will just have to imagine what happens next. Or better still, take a year-long lunch break of your own. You know it makes sense.

The lost hour

Allow me to recount one of the strangest commuting days that Lunchista has ever had. It happened round about this time of year, which is why I'm reminded of it now, as the trees start to revive.

It started out normally enough, with a bus journey so routine that I have forgotten that bit altogether. But that was just to lull the unsuspecting Lunchista into a false sense of security. The first of my two trains, being late, was more crowded than usual: so much so that it was standing room only at the ends of the carriages, and not a hope of walking through into the warm, quiet bit where the passengers (remember them?) were supposed to be. Not if I wanted to get to the doors in time to get out at my stop, anyway.

Things started to go wrong just before the doors opened: I heard a bit of a kerfuffle behind me and felt a hand groping down my back. A young, smartly-dressed lass had collapsed and lay mumbling on the floor. Somebody who could spare more time than I could on the way to work called for help as soon as the doors opened. Another commuter nearby went to help the fallen girl. I only hope they knew what to do: I had ten seconds to sprint over the footbridge to my next train, or be made to feel terrible about being half an hour late in. Curiously enough, if I'd actually had any work to do when I got there, it wouldn't have been so bad, and I wouldn't have felt so guilty. Isn't that strange? As it was of course I felt terrible anyway: there were so many other people who looked as if they were doing something to help, but how will I ever know if they actually were?

There followed a working day so unremarkable that it slipped out of my consciousness as soon as I left the building to go home. My walk to the station, a third of a mile uphill and another third down, had to be brisk for two reasons: first, if I timed it just right I got straight on a train without having to wait half an hour, and second, there had been a murder nearby. I was always glad to get to the top of the route so I could see where I was going. That day I saw something else: a teenage couple were walking along chatting, when the lass suddenly, and without comment, threw up. Both continued on their way as if nothing had happened. And they hadn't even been drinking.

The way downhill is quite steep, lined with a staircase of classic blackened millstone houses: anyone parking there has to have a good handbreak. A white van pulled in just as someone was crossing the road. As I walked by it was obvious that the van hadn't hit him, but even so he just toppled over onto the tarmac. You don't forget the sound of a head hitting the road. I had to get there first in case anybody tried something daft, like moving him, or trying to drive round him and failing. People came out into the street, including a lady who said she was a nurse and knew what to do. Someone rang for an ambulance.

After all that I began to wonder, why today? What was it about this particular Monday that had done this to so many otherwise healthy-looking young people?

Those light evenings that everybody looks forward to in the spring, have a price. Some people will sail through the twice-yearly disruption to their daily rhythm. Some, like Lunchista, are a bit more sensitive but will at least try to make sure that they get enough sleep. Many will not realise that an hour of sleep has been taken from them as "the clocks go forward". I wonder how many accidents are caused by these discontinuities in time? Or how many people know that the idea was originally dreamed up by a golf enthusiast who wanted to give the Working Classes an extra hour of daylight in the summer in which to, well, work?

Vikings!

Every year at about this time our city gets invaded by Vikings. Some of them are local, others come all the way from Norway, Denmark and suchlike places to join in the fun. They race their long-boats down the river, hoist huge sail-like banners painted with sagas in the square and set up stalls demonstrating bits of Viking workaday life in the shopping centre.

It can get quite surreal in the streets: like anybody else, seasonal Vikings need a break from life's stage from time to time, so you also see them, still in their huge woollen robes with metal helmets, leather wrist-straps and sacking gaiters, talking on mobile phones or getting cash out from a hole-in-the-wall.

It's noticeable how well-adapted the simplest of things can be: the Vikings looked much warmer in their woollen and fur kit than the shoppers in their skimpy little nylon coats. We sampled Viking bread (heavy and tasty), cheese (a bit like a solid version of condensed milk), and soup (savoury and filling). You could also have a go at grinding flour: the result, still with its full quota of protein and vitamins, obviously made for better bread than its modern equivalent. Lunchista fille was asked if she could make good cheese: apparently this was a crucial life skill for any Viking lass on the pull.

There was a slave auction in the guildhall. The Viking legal system (yes there was one!) recognised two types of slaves: captured slaves and debt slaves. Vikings facing the dark-age equivalent of not being able to use the hole-in-the-wall could work for their creditors for a set time or, if there was no work needing doing, they could be sold off to pay off the debt and go and work their time for someone else. A debt slave had various rights, including the right to finish their time unharmed and not pregnant (pregnancy by your boss counted as a type of harm).

This gave them more rights than many of their decendents until about, ooh, the 1920s.

Last blast of winter

Imagine for a moment that Lunchista had the patience to record the temperature in various places within a big triangle over most of central England, every day since about 1659. Luckily, since delegating is almost as difficult as time travel, I don't have to pull off such a feat, because it has already been done. The Central England Temperature Series is the longest-running set of weather data in the world. Here, courtesy of the Met Office, is a graph of the results, averaged for every day of the year.

Notice anything odd about next week? Such as, it has the lowest average temperatures of the whole year?

I'll get my coat.

Flippin' pancakes!

Incredibly there exists such a word as "Eatertainment". It was coined by the Advertising community to express the idea that in order to get "today's high-maintenance kids" to eat their food, there needed to be some entertainment value in it for them. Given the kind of guff that's been advertised as "food" for children over the years, Lunchista can only assume that "eatertainment" is necessary to distract children from the feeling in their guts that what it being proffered isn't, strictly speaking, food in the original and genuine sense of the word.

In 1930s America, in the depths of the last depression, some of the first and most interesting Nutrition findings were made. One series of experiments, for example, verified that a slimming diet in an otherwise healthy and sane person would inevitably lead to a slower metabolism and an unbeatable obsession with food. In a different set of experiments, toddlers in an orphanage were given exactly what they wanted to eat. An array of different foods, ranging from the sweet through the savoury all the way to quite strong stuff like cod-liver oil, was put before each child, and they were given any help they needed to eat whatever pleased them. Some of the rickety children chose the cod-liver oil, over and over again, until they recovered. Everybody's health improved over the course of the experiment. There were at the time no adverts in orphanages, and affordable television hadn't been invented yet.

But there is a time for Eatertainment: that time is Pancake Day!

Melt an ounce of butter slowly, and stir in 4 ounces of flour to make a smooth paste. Then, bit by bit, stir in two whisked eggs, followed by 10 ounces of milk. It should end up as a smooth liquid that will coat the back of a spoon. Now the fun starts...

Melt enough butter to just cover the bottom of a frying pan, then pour in enough of the batter mixture to just cover that, swirling it around until it covers the full circle. After a minute or so on the heat, it should start to peel away from the sides. A little later and you can test to see if it's free from the pan: if not, slide a spatula underneath to free it. Then, well, have a look at the footage at the top of this post (or its mirror-image if you are right-handed). Fry for another couple of minutes on the other side, and serve it to the first person who's got to the table!

There is a Russian proverb, "The first pancake never works out". So even if it doesn't look that promising, have another go: things can only get better! The mixture described here will do between 6 and 8 pancakes.

Worst of days, best of days

For the last couple of years at work, I remember reading that the Monday of the third week of January is, officially, the day of the year when most people feel at their worst (kudos to Bryony, who had to resign from the Sustainability Committee last month in order to start her new job today!). It's a combo of dark mornings, paying for Christmas, cold weather, failing at (or having to put up with) new-year resolutions...and that's probably what lies behind all those holiday adverts you get on tv this time of year. Why content yourself with bills in just January when you can book 2 weeks in the sun and have bills til October?

But Lunchista has, as ever, stumbled upon a cheap and cheerful alternative: today is also International Optimism day. Apparently it is celebrated, not by buying, or even making, presents but by doing stuff. Their first four suggestions are:

-Write a list of simple things that make you happy, and share it
-Write down 3 things you're grateful for
-Call someone you haven't spoken to for ages
-Say hello to someone you see everyday, but never speak to

Well most of the things I write about in The Year-Long Lunch Break make me happy. And I'm grateful I didn't have to get up before dawn this morning...and finally, I don't think there's anyone I see every day (including during my commuting days) that I don't say hello to.

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!

Leonids

At this time of year the Earth and all who sail in her are apparently passing through the tail of a shattered comet. Any detritus near enough to us gets pulled towards the planet and burns its way through the atmosphere, offering us as it does so the Leonid Meteor Shower.

And no it's not named after the old Soviet bloke with the eyebrows ("Thy name is immortal, thy deeds are unknown"), but after the constellation of Leo, where the shower appears to come from. So all you need to do is, find Leo. As luck would have it, Lunchista fille has a map: we bought it at Techniquest, the science exhibition in Cardiff (well worth a visit if you want some entertainment for anyone between the ages of 4 and 12). Here it is.

Leo spends some of its time near the sun, but that's in August so needn't bother us here in November. But it also spends a lot of its time below the horizon, including, when looked at from anywhere in Europe, the entire evening. This means the best time to see it, and the accompanying meteor show, is the wee small hours of the morning. The Planisphere in the shot is set up to show what you can see in the sky at 4 a.m. (GMT) tomorrow morning. Note the flash, which has obscured some of the "sky", is about where the sun would be at this time of year, making our shot even more realistic.

Leo's head looks a bit like a back-to-front question mark, and zooming in to our map shows Leo's head is in the Southeast, about halfway up from the horizon (the edge of the "window") to the zenith (the point where the straight and the curved red lines in the window cross). The dotted white line passes through all the signs of the zodiac and shows how the sun moves around it in a year: each dot is a day. The points of the compass look the wrong way round because you are holding the map over your head.

So the plan here at Chateau Lunchista is for all interested parties to get out of bed ludicrously early and either go up to the attic (from where, the two small Lunchistas assure me, stars can be seen) or failing that, to set out into the playing-field with our jim-jams covered in several extra layers.

It's funny to think that there's always a cloud of meteor debris lurking at this one particular spot that we pass through every November. Given that as we go around the sun, the sun itself is circling the middle of the galaxy, the debris must be following us around. It would always "see" us at the same time of year. Which brings Lunchista to an odd thought: supposing there were an alien spaceship parked about a month further along our orbit. Every time we passed by, we'd be celebrating Christmas. The aliens on board would form the impression that humans in this part of the world spent all the time in over-elaborate, too-brightly-lit places, either eating too much or getting into debt buying things nobody needs.

And of course they'd be completely wrong. Wouldn't they?

Value Engineering 2: Hallowe'en

Sometime last week it occurred to Lunchista that Hallowe'en was going to fall on a Saturday. Great, I thought, the smaller Lunchistas are going to have a whole day to put together costumes for Trick-or-Treating.

Or perhaps not.

On the Friday evening Lunchista fille came back from football practice and announced that there was going to be a match the following morning, half-term notwithstanding. It also transpired that everybody (everybody small, that is) wanted to go to Underwater Hockey, which has now become a semi-regular feature of our Saturday afternoons.

So at ten in the morning we arrived at the local footie-pitch and I spent the next ninety minutes cheering on the Lunchista fille squad and drinking large amounts of tea while talking about other people's holidays (there seems to be some kind of friendly rivalry about who can go the furthest: well we've been to Pluto so there). The weather was perfect: no wind, hazy sun, cool enough to play but mild enough to stand still and watch. To crown it all, it was a home win.

Meanwhile the men of the household had done the weekly food run, and as an extra bonus had found by experiment that this is possible by bike. Lunch was swifter than usual because there was "dead-easy chicken soup" already made. This gave us just enough time to hook up the bike trailer, load up the "implements of destruction" and head off to a convenient dead tree.

We'd never noticed this particular dead tree until it blew down in a gale, right across the cycle-path that leads to The Planets. Mr Lunchista had had to cycle into somebody's field to get round it. Next time he passed by, it was (and I quote) "chopped into handy bite-sized chunks" which, bit by bit, and with smiles from the odd passer-by as we go, have been making their way to our garage and then onto the woodburner. It's absolutely-dry Beech, too, one of the best for burning.

We sawed and loaded up about 30 kilos of it (works out as about a week's worth if it's not too cold), before heading back, just in time to load up the cozzies and towels, and the weekend Yorkshire Post for my edification and delight: Underwater Hockey isn't exactly a spectator sport. And so I've no idea how the game went, except everybody seemed happy with their performance, and not too exhausted to...

...make a pumpkin-lantern and put the finishing touches to that Vampire and Grim-Reaper ensemble (witches are apparently So Last Year). The Grim Reaper went out before dinner with the other assorted death-heads, whereas the Vampire was doing the after-dinner shift with her equally pale-and-interesting companion. After all you really don't want hungry vampires roaming the streets: the effect on the economy would be catastrophic.

The whole day had worked out so well: maximum entertainment, minimum hassle, no wasted time and practically no cost.

But it all relies on so much: food in the shops, petrol in the car, water to spare for the pool (though I'm reliably informed that Underwater Hockey's big in Australia). And nobody cold or desperate enough to fight us over that dead tree.

At about this time last year, two major banks came within hours of failing: failure which would have brought the usually smooth-running, and value-engineered-to-perfection, system that supplies us with all the basics, juddering to a halt.

If that, or anything like it, happens again, and we're not as lucky, are we ready for the Nightmare Scenario Value Engineering 2 - Hallowe'en ?


Dead-easy chicken soup (not for the squeamish): take the carcass, bones and all, from yesterday's roast and put in a pan, then cover with water, add a bit of salt, bring to the boil, turn down and simmer for as long as you like. The longer it's done for, the more gelatin comes out of the bones, which means that when the soup cools again it kind of "sets" and you can spread it on toast. It's also full of minerals that everybody is short of. When the soup's luke-warm, spread sheets of newspaper next to it, lift out the bones and any gristle, and wrap them in the newspaper (if your dusties are on strike this can actually go on the woodburner!). If you don't need the calories then you can take the fat off the top once the soup's completely cold. It will keep in the fridge for ages, and practically any vegetables, especially winter ones, will go well in it.

Mean Time

"I'm really looking forward to not having to get up early tomorrow morning!" said Lunchista fille over dinner last night. It's half-term week, so as well as no school, there's no football practice either. Suddenly an entire Saturday morning is open to us to do with as we see fit. Which is just as well, because "350" had decided to declare today a Day Of Action and our city's humble contribution to the worldwide array of stunts many and varied was to form a human chain, complete with Mexican Waves, around the Minster at the eminently civilised time of 11:30 in the morning.

We got there early and immediately bumped into our local eco-enthusiast par excellence (of course) who, knowing that Lunchista is something of a lapsed astrophysicist, mentioned a conversation he and his son had been having about how far it was possible to travel in a lifetime, assuming that you could, over a long enough distance, accelerate to about nine tenths the speed of light. Of course it would be a lot longer than an 80-light-year round trip given that, as your ship accelerates, the time would pass much more slowly for you on board than it would for your stay-at-home relatives, or indeed for any (stationary) aliens you might intend to visit.

The worst bit would be coming home to find everybody you care about passed away or aged beyond recognition. And, assuming Climate Change plays out as currently expected, in our case we'd find our city (presently only some 20 metres above sea-level) about 50 metres under the (all too real and not very Mexican) waves.

I wondered if the son in question had ever listened to the lyrics of '39 by Queen, written by fellow lapsed astrophysicist Brian May. And, walking round to find the event's organisers, I couldn't help wondering also if the Minster, which has been there for the best part of a millennium, would manage to stay around for a second one. At which point I bumped into the organiser of the Nature Reserve, who has been trying to assemble enough of us for a meeting to launch a new "outreach" programme. There are ten of us, and he's had to resort to putting all possible names, dates and times into a spreadsheet in the effort to solve the logistical conundrum involved in assembling us all. How little time everybody seems to have. Even the Year-Long Lunch Break is passing at a disturbingly rapid rate: now more than half gone.

Both mainstream and "skeptics" invoke Time repeatedly in their spiel: skeptics will say either that we still have plenty of it, or else that if you travel back through enough of it you'll see lots and lots of "Climate change" due to volcanoes, the sun, cosmic rays, you name it. And it never killed anyone, did it? On the other hand, listen to anyone serious talking about Climate Change for long enough (in my case about 2 minutes will do) and you rapidly develop a sense of "time running out".

All Lunchista can do is offer you an extra hour tomorrow morning before you have to get up. What can we do with this precious, and some would say illusory, extra time?

Light my fire

People seem to bear a serious grudge against this time of year. They complain that "the clocks are going back" and then invariably start a campaign to stop the change to Greenwich Mean Time, as if that would somehow prevent winter, or by extension, old age or that tough deadline at work. Elaborate plots are spun to avoid the worst of the cold and the dark: many of these involve flying off long distances and spending unfeasably large amounts of money. Lunchista has never done this and wonders what it would be like: on returning to an airport submerged in the general dreich-ness of a Northern Temperate Maritime (translation: dark, cold and damp) winter, would I feel worse than if I'd stayed put and got used to it, or would I somehow feel "recharged" by the extra hours of sunlight?

Sadly, unless you happen to be Goldman Sachs, "winter sun" holidays create the sort of holes in the budget that aren't exactly enablers for year-long lunch-breaks. Lunchista would therefore offer an alternative strategy: do as we have done. Instead of running away from autumn, by chance we've done something that improves it: we got a woodburner in. Lighting up has become something of an autumn ritual: a landmark which, unlike Hallowe'en, the clocks going back or the leaves dropping off the trees, is warm and cheerful.

We did it when speculation surfaced about the Gulf Stream packing up. It turns out that reports of its death were somewhat exaggerated, but we're glad we took the plunge. There are two- to three-week stretches on either side of the heating season when a stove is about right but firing up the entire central heating system (and the bills that come with it) would be a little OTT.

We started to notice how many lumps of dead tree people left lying about. In fact a combination of landscaped workplaces, other people's gardens, council tree-felling, and DIY projects has meant that in the six years since we first lit up we have never had to pay for any wood. It generally starts to appear about this time of year, and we quietly ask if people mind, and if they don't, we load it up and bring it home, where it has to dry out for a few months. Then it gets sawed up and stacked in the garage.

So, since last week, every evening when the darkness closes in, instead of mourning it we have something to look forward to. It's funny how much of a difference it makes, being able to look into the flames. I mean, you couldn't tell ghost stories in front of a radiator, could you?

Interlude

Here's a little something I've put together for people who are too busy to sit and watch their sunflowers come out. I hope it brightens up somebody's Monday!

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.

In praise of Older Stuff

Here is a younger member of famille Lunchista who knows a good bureau (and a perfectly-dimensioned little place in which to pretend to have a kip) when she sees one. In fact a lot of our furniture, though not as venerable as this piece, are cast-offs, or heirlooms, depending on your point of view, from other parts of famille Lunchista and beyond. The desk at which Lunchista is typing these musings was a cast-off from our former next-door neigbours when they were re-arranging their older son's room. The chair on which I am sitting and (until it died on me, about 5 years after its expected lifespan I grant you) the computer on which I wrote, were cast-offs from the local University, who have periodic refurbishments to keep up with the expectations of today's high-maintenance students (though to be fair, yesterday's low-maintenance students had grants and didn't have to pay tuition fees).

We are not so much "people who buy their own furniture" (as Alan Clark once famously sneered about Michael Heseltine) as people who cadge it, or pick it up secondhand for a song and then choose a fine day to wheel it out into the yard, scrub it down and restore it to its former glory (or indeed to something else altogether).

Why do we do this? Well, because it makes for cheaper, higher-quality, more interesting furniture. Let me explain:

The "cheaper" part is kind of obvious. Unless you're going for a genuine Chippendale (I mean the furniture not the gentlemen in ties and cuffs), or a Ming dynasty vase or the like, older stuff simply costs less. The "higher-quality" bit needs a bit more explanation: bear with me while I conjure up an image of a bath-tub.
Thank you, Charlene Winter Olson, I hope you don't mind if I borrow it.

Imagine a tape-measure placed along the floor from left to right under the bath, with time on it, in years, instead of length in cm. The probability that anything you buy, from a car to a table, will develop a fault or give up on you in a particular year, follows a shape just like the profile of the height of that bathtub as you (or your pet spider: every bathroom has one) move along the tape measure underneath it. The flat bottom of the bath stretches along all the years when your purchase does well: your table is stable or your car doesn't break down. The gentle upward slope on the right represents more and more faults happening as your purchase gets really old and knackered.

But what everybody forgets, is that steep slope on the left. Brand new stuff is more vulnerable to everything from catastrophic design faults to bad manufacture, including something as simple as the shine wearing off. Older stuff has begun to "stand the test of time": if it's still shiny (for example), or sturdy, it is far more likely to remain so. The "Bathtub Reliability Curve" is a well-known story in engineering circles.

Add to that the unsavoury practice of built-in obsolescence that's been popular since the 1960s and you can see why older stuff is a better bet: it was simply built to last. Lunchista happens also to think that a lot of it even looks more stylish. But there's more.

Old stuff gives a place an extra dimension: the dimension of time.

Some people seem to go out of their way to avoid this, but you have to wonder, why? In China, where I've seen for myself that people generally have a massive preference for the new over the old, it's understandable. In a lot of cases the past would have been very painful (how does partial occupation, two wars and two famines in living memory sound?), and something about which people would probably rather not be reminded by their present everyday stuff. But here in the UK?

Sometimes if I walk into a place and everything's new, my first thought is: how very, erm, temporary. Where were these people 18 months ago? Is there something in their past that they'd rather forget, or even hide? If it's a business, will they just disappear? This actually happened once, after I really had thought that of a new workplace. We ended up with 90 minutes to clear our desks!

It all goes to show, without time, really, we are nothing.