Haggis, neeps and tatties

We see here the ingredients (well, the non-alcoholic ones at any rate) for Burns Supper here at Chateau Lunchista. The more eagle-eyed will have spotted the "V" mark on our haggis, it's a vegetarian piece made out of nuts, pulses and veggie oils. Very savoury, very healthy and (I'm reliably informed) goes well with the old Water-of-Life. It's one of the easiest meals there is to get ready, too: the haggis goes in that steamer (yes the one I bought for 20p at the car-booty, plus the lid I found in a leftover box at The Waste street-market in Dalston) for an hour or so, the spuds are boiled and mashed, as are the neeps. Simple.

Which is just as well because out of the blue there came a TV programme I really wanted to watch: mad* Geography professor Nick Middleton is investigating why we're having such a cold winter, and how to survive it. In the process he travels to Scotland and lets himself get exposed to hypothermia, and buried in the snow. It is of course against such eventualities that the original haggis was designed to protect the intrepid drover, crofter or infrastructure maintenance engineer.

It happens that Lunchista's first ever taste of Burns' Night took place in an unknown pub somewhere in a deeply-wooded area of the Home Counties, twenty years ago today. I was on a train coming back from a meeting in London to my cheap-and-cheerful flat on the coast, when our journey came to a complete halt. A tree had been blown down across our route by what turned out to be the UK's worst storm of the 20th century. The train then trundled backwards to a station we had just left, and the lights went out: they must have had to cut the power to the third rail for the sake of any maintenance crew. Our guard stepped off to make a call down the line. He then came along through each darkened carriage and explained that, given that the nearest suitable heavy-lifting gear was in Cardiff, this was going to be a long wait. Cue surreal twist:

"...but I'm told there's a pub a hundred yards down that road who are offering free tasters of Haggis and Whisky because it's Burns' Night. You won't miss the train, because when the engineers arrive I'll come along too". Beat that for service! He was as good as his word, and two hours later made sure we all found our way back to the train. Suitably warmed and fed, we proceeded on our way.

And what was this meeting that had caused Lunchista's part in all the drama? A meeting for Meteorologists, of course!


*editor's note: "mad", uttered by Lunchista, is a term of respect.

Has "Top Gear" really been going that long?

Yes, and The Year-Long Lunch Break has the proof, in the form of a rare sighting of what, some say, is The Stig's Ice-Age ancestor.

All we know is, that toboggan handled like a dream...

Postal strike

"My old boss lives round here somewhere...I wonder which is his house?" The street, part of a little knot of recently-built roads which collectively formed a dead-end, was new to me, and to Lunchista fille who had asked to come with me to pick up a package of leaflets from somebody's porch. We kept going round bends that led the wrong way, in roads which all seemed to have been named after Vikings. Well, whatever floats your boat I suppose. There was no-one to ask the way: it was a Tuesday morning and it was easy to see that the place, with its immaculate, open-plan gardens, was completely deserted.

"Listen..."

"What??"

"...nothing. Isn't it quiet?"

And it really was. The older, straight road that led to the one way into the little knot of roads, is itself a dead-end, and as if that wasn't enough we were low enough down to be shielded from the otherwise-ubiquitous noise from our city's ring road. In other words, nobody would break the silence by coming in here unless they were utterly lost, or had some connection to the families in the neat modern houses.

Eventually, right at the far end of the little knot, we located our leaflets under a porch. We noticed wind-chimes hanging there, but even they were silent. I picked up the bundle and we headed back.

It's funny what you notice when things are so quiet: not just sounds, but unusual sights too. Perhaps, like in the American joke about driving down a street looking for the right house-number and turning down the car radio so as not to miss it, we all have a bit of synaesthesia lurking in our brains.

"Hey look at that post-box" There was a banana-skin directly underneath it, but also a note that someone had stuck on near the slot. We went over to see what it said. Someone had posted a letter but forgotten to put a stamp on it: they must have gone back home, fetched a stamp, some cellophane, tape and a pencil and paper, and written the note that we could see, asking whoever collected the letters that day to stick on the missing stamp. As we stepped out into the straight road, we noticed the post-van coming down. We decided to wait and see what the reaction would be, so we carried on walking until he had driven round the corner and had time to stop at the post-box and get out. Then we turned round to kneb.

And he'd gone.

No van, no postie. He must have driven right past all of it. Then I thought, perhaps it's easier for him to turn the van at the end of the knot and then pick up the letters on his way out. So we picked a convenient low front garden wall next to a tree, just within line-of-sight, and we waited. And waited. And, have you ever noticed that, if you have no business waiting somewhere (a bus-stop would have come in handy, or even a dog), it just seems like ages? It's easier with two people than just one because you can always chatter as if you've just bumped into each other or have suddenly developed something urgent and complicated to say (in our case it could have been, for example, the crucial but convoluted logistics of practically any arrangement involving school). We were there for 15 minutes (we timed it).

We could have walked to the end of the knot and back in that time, probably twice, so where was our postie? We gave up and turned to go: we'd just have to put up with never knowing whether the mystery letter would have been delivered.

Then in the few minutes it took us to walk back up the straight road away from the little knot, several other vans drove past us and went in. A florist's. An electrician. Generic tradesman's white vans (several). A red van (not a postie). A fishmonger for heaven's sake: I hadn't seen one of those since I was Lunchista fille's age. All within the space of about five minutes. None re-emerged.

We wondered if someone had maliciously called them all to the same address. Had they all got it in for our postie? Was someone in the knot running a Red Diesel racket? Or had the entire far end of the knot, just after we'd left it with its silent wind-chimes, been devoured by a Black Hole?

Space Invaders

"What d'you do if you see a space-man?"
"Dunno"
"Park in it-man!"

The quality of jokes circulating at Lunchista fille's school never ceases to amaze. But I quote this one because it describes, quite nicely, what a bunch of us got up to on International Car-Free Day: we invaded some space. In fact we happen to know that we invaded exactly 18 square metres of space.

Now that particular 18 square metres of space isn't much to look at. I must have walked past it dozens of times, and never really noticed it. And there'll be people who drive past it every day, who'll see it but on whose brains it will make no impression whatever, because their attention will be elsewhere. That probably includes a lot of people who have actually parked their cars on it at some time in the past. And that's why we had to go there quietly before the day's events and "case the joint". The area, the cost, the distance from the nearest place where we could store things, how early in the morning it would start to get busy, and so on. I volunteered to be the first to arrive, and my mobile number went on the press release. Then I looked at the weather forecast and shuddered.

And so, at 7 a.m., aided and abetted by my other half (who is very tolerant about all this) and his bike-trailer, we arrived on our bikes with two deckchairs, a huge potted palm and a banner. Incredibly I've never had to work a parking meter before: I was pleasantly surprised that it actually produced a ticket, rather than simply eat my last pound coins, smile at me and leave me stranded on the wrong side of the law without a witness. Some of the meters here even have solar panels on top.

At this point the big guns rolled in. Trike-trailers, drafted away from their usual task of picking up the recycling from our city's best narrow streets, had been loaded with turf the night before. Our resident eco-enthusiast had bought it the day before that, ensuring not only that the nearest DIY emporium actually had it in stock, but also that he knew someone to whom he could sell it on afterwards: total cost, zero.

So we laid down the turf. We put up a table and got out the deckchairs, next to not one but by now two huge potted palms, and a parasol brought along by some brave soul unfamiliar with the term "equinoxial gales". Mind you my banner was also struggling, but people (including the gentleman from the Press who turned up at 8:30) were still able to make out the blurb:

People Park, not Car Park

Car-Free Day Sept 22

The table was graced with a cloth, two self-service tea-urns with cups, milk, sugar, and plates full of Danish Pastries. There was also a basket of apples from the Orchard. The idea was to have a picnic breakfast, and to offer some to hungry commuters.

Now there are people out there who write fascinating research tracts in fields with names like "Psycho-geography", about phenomena such as "mental maps", "sense of place" and "connectivity", whose description of our activities would sound a bit odd at first blush, but bear with Lunchista as she leaves her home turf of energy and matter to foray into the ever-changing world of intangibles.

Apparently what we achieved was to turn a "non-place" into a "place". Oh all right, the first person to come up with the term "non-place" was called Marc, did it in French and spent far too much time indulging in existentialist contemplation of the meaninglessness of his modern life, probably while smoking too many Gauloises, and so didn't follow his idea through very well. So instead, how about an American chap called Eric talking in a straightforward, no-nonsense way about how he first came to notice that his home-town was becoming "nowhere", instead? Or even, how about Will Self?

For three hours or thereabouts, in fact until our ticket ran out, we chatted, drank tea, waved to passing drivers, offered our breakfasts, read articles and (in my case) were quietly thankful that the weather forecast had got it wrong, and the sun was shining. A jolly lass in a red dress and dreadlocks from the local radio turned up and Lunchista, as the person whose number had been given on the press release, was interviewed live on air. City councillors came along, including the former leader (on his bike as ever), and our favourite LibDem (because he's such a character) who took our leaflets out into the 5 lanes of raging traffic and handed them to passing commuters. We had turned a bit of space that nobody gave a second thought to, into something that was (apart from the incredible noise level from the traffic) really rather worth something.

Late morning took me into the city centre, where I could sample the delights of a street I'd never walked down before, because the pavements are narrower than I am and it had always been full of traffic. But the Council, as a bit of a dare, had closed it to traffic for the day (using a row of massive planters of flowers: it looked rather good). Suddenly you could walk down it, and look at the shop windows, at the same time. People had brought their wares out into the street. The buildings were visible, in that you could afford the time to look up at them: everything from mediaeval to art deco. It reminded me of Diagon Alley from Harry Potter: it really was another world.

The radio station rang again: heck, they couldn't get enough of us! I was back on the air, live from the studio, and by a delicious irony for "Drive", the afternoon commuters' show. No doubt some of the listeners will have thought Lunchista was a bit barking. But I wonder how many are, even now, beginning to plot their escape?

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...

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.

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.