School's out!

This good old-fashioned, unreconstructed, take-no-prisoners winter is still with us, much to the delight of all at Chateau Lunchista. The smaller Lunchistas returned to school on Monday (4th) and were looking forward to finding as many ways as posible of getting round that boring, litigation-culture-inspired rule that forbids the throwing of snowballs in the playground. Towards the end of the morning I settled down to start scribbling, and not long afterwards the 'phone rang. It was Lunchista fille, informing us that school had given up for the day because the heating wasn't working, and she'd gone home with a friend, presumably for a pleasant afternoon building snowmen, chatting and drawing cartoons.

A few minutes later Lunchista fils piled in and announced with obvious glee "Peak Oil has reached our school!" Apparently the tank was empty, the next delivery of the vital substance being either badly procrastinated or stuck in the snow somewhere. During Science, they'd had to light the Bunsen burners to keep warm. No oil delivery was due until the day after tomorrow, he said, so could we go sledging tomorrow?..

And so an exciting afternoon was spent by the lads in the street investigating the structural properties of snow necessary for building the largest snowman, the ballistics of snowballs, and the coefficient of friction of ice (and how to minimise it). They also confirmed the finding that a body loses 25 (yes, twenty-five) times more heat through wet clothes than dry ones. The following day we took the sledge to a particularly good ice-run down by the river, and built a snowman striker (complete with football) to take a shot at the goal on the playing field in which someone had thoughtfully constructed a snow-goalie.

Today we'd been advised to listen to the local radio to find out whether or not the school would be open. I haven't listened to the radio for years, though we do at least still have a working radio in the house. I'd forgotten how bad commercial radio could be: the guy kept saying "...and school closures, coming up shortly..." then there'd be adverts, sporting fixture lists, trailers for interviews coming later with celebs I've only just heard of, traffic news (protracted by the huge number of road and airport closures because of the snow), followed by a piece of music I'd always profoundly disliked but which, having been shot at me first thing in the morning, remained embedded in my head for hours.

Finally we gave up and looked on the school's web-page. School was up and running. So off went the small Lunchistas, in their wellies in something like six inches of snow.

Now that I can sit and think, the obvious question that occurs is: what on earth is an urban school doing messing about with oil, when gas is available, cheaper and (for those who care about such things) emits less in the way of greenhouse gases? It's also more reliable: one thing I discovered from my foray into radio news this morning was that if Transco fail to deliver, those households left gas-less are entitled to £300 a day compensation.

And it wasn't a one-off: the smaller Lunchistas' previous school also suffered an empty oil-tank one New Year, with a use of oil over the holidays that bordered on the suspicious. Nothing was ever proven, though: no-one at the school had the slightest idea how much energy the place really used. I wonder if there's a posse who go round schools with a lock-picker and a length of hose while everybody else is busy stuffing the turkey? If so, I wonder why I've never heard a case of these people being caught?

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...

Midwinter

I'd forgotten how much I love it when it snows. All of a sudden it all goes quiet. All the mundane stuff in your typical streetscape disappears and gets replaced by works of art. There's a kind of odd glow, even before you open the curtains, because the reflected light is coming from a different angle than usual. And it's blue instead of grey.

It started yesterday afternoon, and carried on through the evening. The Sustainability Committee were treated to mulled wine, roast chestnuts and mince pies. We lit the stove. Sadly though, Lunchista fils let it go out, even after an explanation about how the privilege of lighting it leads to the responsibility for keeping it going. And I thought I was good at delegating...

It turns out that of the six of us on the Committee, two other than Chateau Lunchista have got woodburning stoves. Which made Lunchista glad that she had put "Treeplanting" on the agenda for our meeting. It transpires that the City Council are willing and able to supply trees at next-to-no cost. Now all we have to do is find some land whose owner doesn't mind the arrival of something as pleasing and useful as trees (especially when immortalised by Ansel Adams) You'd think that wasn't too difficult. Wouldn't you?

For mulled wine, pour two bottles of cheap red wine, the cheaper and redder the better, into a large (non-Aluminium) pan and put on a low heat. Add about half as much again of water, an orange studded with cloves, six tablespoons of sugar or honey and a few tablespoons of liquer. Slice up two more oranges and two lemons and add them in. Ready after 20 minutes on a low heat. Make sure it doesn't boil, or you start to lose the alcohol.

Rabbit, rabbit...

I found out last month that there exists a professional local rabbit-shooter, who's out and about protecting people's veg. and even goes to the allotments near the Orchard every now and then. Then he sells the rabbits (thank you Heart of England Raptors for the picture).

Lunchista is now on his list of buyers: free-range (and probably fully Organic) rabbit casserole for 4 for a measly two quid! Bon apétit!

Worth the candle

It's getting towards the shortest day, that time of year when in this part of the world there exists such a thing as "Four o'clock in the evening". There have been some pretty long days, though, for the heads at the COP (where COP apparently doesn't stand for COP-enhagen, or even a football stand in Liverpool (recent viewer poll question: "Marmite or Custard?"), but is actually short for "Conference of the Parties". Earlier on in the week, candle-lit vigils had been organised around the world, to give all the heads there a bit of a boost.

Because Lunchista has it on good authority that all the poor guys want is to be confident in the knowledge that, if they come up with some drastic agreement which means we no longer have the right to get up before dawn and drive 90 minutes to a pointless and overheated (or over-air-conned, or both) job each day, we're not going to vote them out of office. Or burn them out, depending on your country's constitution. And so Lunchista grabbed some of our emergency supply of candles, and a pretty painted jar to put them in, and headed off to take part.

That jar has a bit of a story.

Way back in 2003 Lunchista, along with rather a lot of other people, just couldn't see any point in going to war in Iraq. Better government? Not usually to be found while you're being bombed. Terrorism? All the terrorists were elsewhere at the time. Oil? Already got ours, under the North Sea. Jobs? The forces already have a useful line in peacekeeping and disaster relief. And that's before you start on the "moral" thing. Even Colin Powell, a military man from the crew-cut to the boots, didn't rate the idea, on the grounds that there wasn't an "exit strategy". Sensible chap.

So as part of an international wave of protests one Sunday, I organised our own small effort under a tree at a nearby roundabout. We put out only a hundred or so flyers, made a banner (the sheet and gaffer-tape method), stood at the spot and waited...and were joined by dozens of people! Not to mention a phone-call from the local press, who gave us a couple of column-inches. And a Sunday evening, when most people below retirement age are heading from where they like to be, back to where their work makes them live, isn't exactly quiet on the roads: lots of people saw our message.

As we were packing up after our appointed hour I noticed that someone had left their home-made night-light in the tree. I let it stay there for a few days in case they wanted to return and claim it, but they didn't, so I did.

Back to this weeek, and here we are at 5:30 pm on Saturday in a shop-lined city centre square, lighting our candles. As luck would have it, that time in our city centre was "not optimal" for silent vigils, or indeed silent anything. Someone, in this case the City Council in a filthy great truck, has to clean up after a whole week of the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy. Why they had to do this by reversing around the entire square (as opposed to going forwards and sparing us 20 minutes of safety warnings) is anybody's guess. Perhaps it was a two-fingered gesture to a past government election campaign. I can only hope that our MP, who was good enough to join us and read out the first part of our "Declaration", wasn't offended.

Is it all worth it? Well it might be time to think of Battenburg cake, or even Mr Pareto with his 20% of the effort leading to 80% of the result. The cost to Lunchista of taking part in all this was one candle (you could be more energy-efficient, but who would take a "CFL-lit vigil" seriously? And anyway, I was glad for some of that energy-lost-as-heat on my hands). The odds of success are unknown, but the possible reward is, well, about the size of a small planet.

Skip to my Lou

Lunchista has been back to the scene of the building-work, though to be honest it looked more like the scene of the crime. The object of the game was to make it look like somewhere that someone would like to live in, or at the very least go to work on as a "project" and then live in.

I'd never hired a skip before: it wasn't easy trying to imagine "Three cubic metres" over the phone, or working out whether the huge pieces of blockboard from the old floor (which were 200 miles away at the time) would be longer than "seventeen hundred millimetres". In the end I went for a bog-standard size skip like the one in the picture (thank you Snowmanradio), complete with drop-down ramp which, might I add, is an absolute must unless you happen to be a 20-stone Olympic fridge-thrower.

I arrived on a Friday morning and set to work on the garden. It might, I thought, look better if it wasn't strewn with junk, so out it all came. Now Lunchista, in 20 years as a "student and young professional" in the 1980s and 90s, moved house about 15 times. And each time, I took all my things with me. But this bit of basic housekeeping, judging by the state of the garden, seems to have gone right out of fashion. I unearthed no fewer than six wooden chairs, all beyond use through having been left to the mercies of the Great British Climate. Then two clothes-drying racks, a zed-bed, a wheeled table, a beer-barrel, several track-suits and, incredibly, an unopened ten-litre tin of sunflower oil. You could do a couple of hundred miles on that. Later on I spotted a tee-shirt, in the first-floor gutter of all places. Luckily the same people had considerately left a gardening-fork, two shovels and a stiff broom. There was even a brand-new pair of working boots in the dry part of the shed.

The fence had blown down, which meant I could see that next door had a compost dalek. Other than that, their garden was in an even worse state than this one. A very elderly lady answered the door and said she'd never used it but I could help myself. I thanked her and removed some of the junk from her garden too.

The skip arrived at mid-day, which meant starting the real work. It had rained every day since the building work had finished, doubling the weight of the blockboard and old carpet, and making most of it too heavy to lift, so each piece had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the skip. I found myself wondering whether this was really an optimal use of time for someone with a bad back and a Ph.D. Then it was 3 pm and the realisation dawned that not only had I not had any lunch, but the light would start to go in 90 minutes, so I might as well carry on to the bitter end.

At which point my life was saved by an all-day breakfast at the local Greasy Spoon, followed by a hot shower.

The following day was a bit easier: all that was left to do was tidy up the living bits of the garden, get rid of the dead bits of fence, sweep the muck off the path and patio and unblock the drains. Declared before lunch.

I wondered what all this activity would actually be worth compared with, for example, a typical day's work in an office. That house will eventually be sold: the speed with which this happens, and the eventual price, both depend on the buyers' enthusiasm. This may (or may not) be helped by being able to see all the way to the pretty patio at the end of the garden, or indeed to the foot of the front wall.

The odd thing is that, because of the way house prices in the UK these days so totally dwarf the wages for ordinary work, any effect Lunchista's two days of labour may have will be measured in thousands, rather than hundreds, of pounds.

This month's Job Vacancy

Cleaners Required

Key responsibilities will include working closely with residents, cleaning and maintaining their homes and motivating other staff members. Recruits will gain a valued understanding of the cleaning industry.

(from a genuine job advert)