Where there's Muck there's Brass

"Find out how your Water Works!" said the email. It was from our water company, and I had to think for a while before I remembered how on earth they had come across my email address.

It all started with the premiere of "The Age of Stupid" in our city: Lunchista was asked to make up the numbers for a press stunt on the river bank. In the event our local eco-enthusiast par excellence turned up on his bike with the usual trailer full of cadged wood bits for his stove and stole the show, so I needn't have bothered. Except that, watching his small daughter skipping stones into the river, and totally innocent of our activities, was a bloke called Dave. We got talking, it turned out he worked at the water company and I happened to be curious about where our used water goes, so I gave him my email address.

The email offered a choice of times, so I chose the quietest, mid-afternoon during the working week. They'd booked one of the corporate-type meeting rooms (complete with bar) at the race-course. Togged up for a bike-ride to a working site, Lunchista felt distinctly under-attired for such a posh venue. But it was either that or wading through pools of muck in my green velvet cocktail dress and tiara. No contest, really.

The opener was one of those bland and eminently forgettable corporate films, following a perfect and immaculate family as they go through their perfect and immaculate day using whatever it is that the company provides. I'm sure there are college courses in making those videos.

Then things got interesting. Stepping off the coach at the site you're hit by the smell: the drop-off point happens to coincide with the part of the site where the waste water arrives. Mostly it's from the city's loos, but when there are floods some of the water washed off the streets gets in here too. The main contributor to this hum, though, was the grille that separated out all the insoluble things that people, in their absent-mindedness, flush down the loo. These all end up in a skip, from which, our guide told us, someone's false teeth were once retrieved...and they carried on using them!

Next stop was a giant metal shed in which lurks an Anaerobic Digestor. The stuff putrifies and gives off Methane, which is caught, purified (for example there's some Sulphur in there that has to go), and then used in essentially a miniature gas-fired power station. The electricity from this powers most of the rest of the site, and the heat is piped off to be used in one of the other processes further down the line. The stuff is now "sludge", which is a lot less unpleasant than before, but still brown and murky. The bacteria that start to digest this seem to work like a "yeast plant", in which some is tapped off at the far end and re-used to start the process off at the input end.

By now I was either getting used to the smell, or in the grips of sinusitis again. Or else perhaps it really was the case that this bit of the site was just plain less smelly. After that it was time for a spot of aerobics (not for us, but for the sludge). This stage is polished off in the bit of a sewage works that everybody's seen, in which water-jets come out of long gantries that sweep slowly round a giant circular pool. We came up to the edge of the 50-yard wide pool, and the water coming away was clear. It smelled slightly "earthy", but that might just be because we're all used to a spot of Chlorine these days.

I got out my camera for what would have been a terrific shot of the circular pool reflecting our city's two famous landmarks (the Minster and the old Chocolate Factory) and the absolutely cloudless sky...but no photos were allowed on site, and they didn't sell postcards, so I'm afraid you'll have to make do with a picture of our tour-guide's file. Which is a pity, because they also have something of a wildlife reserve, next to where all the solid results of the enterprise are composted in long rows. There's an arrangement whereby local farmers can ring up and ask for deliveries of the end result, to use as fertiliser. With no heavy industry (not even chocolate manufacture) in the vicinity, this stuff remains refreshingly free of things like Cadmium, which were a problem in other places in the past. It also means we get to keep things like Phosphorus and Iodine, without which the whole of life on land would collapse, swiftly followed of course by Lunchista's house price.

I also noticed there were no flies on the site. And it was spotless. And all this for only 17 million quid, the sort of sum they find down the back of the sofa during a bank bail-out.

Small price to pay to stop the country going down the toilet.

Stars on Reasonably-Priced Guitars

"I don't suppose you know this one?" We were having a barbecue (I can use this term now because the said event, having already been and gone, can no longer be spoiled by rain) and our neighbour strolled back in with his guitar, pulled up a chair and started playing...only my favourite, ever, piece of soft rock in the known universe! Of course knowing all the words I pretended to use my wine-glass as a mike and sang them...

Actually, Lunchista knows all the words to practically everything from three of the last four decades. Sometimes it even comes in useful. But when I was working I often thought, how nice it would be to be able to play stuff, too. Now I don't have to start off all on my own.

Many years ago, when Lunchista fils started school, he was offered the chance to learn one of several musical instruments. This can be a minefield. But Lunchista, by a happy coincidence, had some help, in the form of a book "The right instrument for your child". Having found out what kind of sound someone would like to make, or who they'd love to be able to play like, you don't necessarily also think "do they like the physical sensation of holding and operating this machine? Does it demand anything of them which they would find uniquely difficult? Do they like to play with a load of other people or are they more the solo, self-contained type?". Unless you're particularly perceptive, of course, or you've had a look at that book or something like it.

So guitars were in. We bought him this nice little machine for 20 quid. Lessons happened during the school day (I love the word "peripatetic"!), so no driving around on dark winter evenings or postponing dinner while trying to learn complicated notes on an empty stomach. At the end of the first day we found Lunchista fils sitting in pride of place at the after-school club, delightedly playing the first notes he'd learned. That was five years ago.

On packing in my job I suddenly found that I had time to sit and listen to him practice. The nice thing about guitars is you can just leave them standing around and pick them up whenever you have a few moments that you feel like filling in with a few notes. So we had two guitars permanently loitering with intent in the living-room. Then one of the tuning-keys on Lunchista fils' machine snapped. Not wanting to throw it out I took our plight to our local music and bits shop (who sell individual guitar strings: that's my kind of market). The chap went round the back and returned with a spare set of three keys for a machine-head. They were a different shape than ours, and I'd never taken a machine head to bits before, but what the heck.

I spread out all the bits on the kitchen table (having first wiped off all the jam from breakfast). I got out Chateau Lunchista's entire collection of screwdrivers, and a saucer (non-flying) to put all the bits in that would otherwise roll onto the floor...

And in fact, if you take everything off in order, remember what you've done and don't lose any small bits, it's actually quite easy to put on a new tuning key. Which meant that Lunchista fils had something of a unique machine to take to his Grade 2 a couple of weeks before he left his old school, and I had a load of guitar spare parts in the tool box with the screwdrivers.

One day during the summer holidays the phone rang and Lunchista fils happened to be the first to get to it. He listened for a moment and then his face lit up..."YES!!!" It was his teacher, who had taken the trouble to ring up to tell him he'd passed. And that the new school was on his peripatations.

Lunchista estimates that the total cost of all this musical activity, for both small Lunchistas (Lunchista fille plays keyboard), amounts to about a tenner a week. That's less, apparently, than an average woman of my age spends on hairdressers.

Don't cheek yer Elders

As someone born towards the end of the school year, Lunchista got rather used to hearing this phrase in the playground, and always thought it might be put to better use elsewhere. So here it is, dusted off and re-purposed, as an offering to the readership of The Year-Long Lunch Break to add to your anti Swine Flu arsenel.

It all started three years ago, on the garage roof at our old house. Lunchista shinned up with a pair of loppers to take down some huge branches that were overshadowing our garden. On closer inspection (Lunchista's eyesight was never fantastic) the branches proved to be absolutely dripping with berries. Not wanting to waste them, we put them all in a bucket and then rang round the rels for ideas on how they might be used. Kudos to Lunchista's mum for knowing how to put them to good use. Here's what we did.

We sat outside with a bucket and pulled all the berries gently off the stalks. This is rather time-consuming, but if it's not done the result has a bitter taste which makes it useless for things like eating. It also happens to be the kind of job you can do while discussing the finer points of existentialism, listening to some nice home-made music (or joining in), or taking the occasional swig of wine. The advantage of working outside is obvious once you bear in mind that elderberries were used for dying clothes in days gone by. For the same reason it's a good idea to be wearing dark clothes (of course anyone discussing existentialism will already be in black, so no problems there), and not to be needed at some venue demanding clean-looking hands at any time in the near future.

Once this has all been done (except perhaps the conclusion of the existentialism argument, which can wait til another day), tip the berries into a pan, put in just enough water to cover them, then bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes or so. Then go and find an old muslin, or a pair of old tights (not fishnets!). I've found that the best way to set up the berries for straining through the cloth overnight is to spread the cloth across a sieve placed over a big bowl, pour the berries and juice in, then pick up the corners of the cloth to tie up to a sturdy fixing point.

The next day, just add some wine-mulling spices and sugar, then simmer the juice until it becomes a bit thicker like a syrup, then pour into a jar that can be sealed. We have found that it keeps in the fridge for years. We use it like Ribena (but with hot water) and it's a real pick-me-up to fight off the effects of colds and flu, especially with honey, or some port, brandy or whisky.

It's been pouring with rain since we picked our berries this year, so I have had to blag a picture for this post (thank you Felicity ThriftyLiving) instead of going out and taking my own. It has also been difficult to find many berries that haven't been eaten by birds as soon as they're ripe.

Plum job!

Great news! Tescos have officially declared they no longer want to build a link-road through the Orchard. And can you blame them? Our Orchard now has Management, a Constitution, and its own pedestrian crossing.

More to the point, it's bursting at the seams with delicious fruit: plums are good-to-go and there are lots of windfall apples and pears lying around (though these are better for hand-to-hand combat than for actual eating at the moment). Four of us met up there for a fruit-picking session, armed with a small step-ladder and one of these:
I was only there for about 20 minutes and came away with 14 kg of fruit (to put this into perspective, that's about 1/4 of Lunchista's body weight). And this doesn't include the several bags full that made their way to the Sustainability Committee's stall at the local show, where they were given away to anyone within earshot, most of whom, on coming a little closer to see what was going on, said "Well I never knew that was there!" (or variations thereof).

This is just as well: Lunchista has it on good authority that there's a chance that, like Terminator, Tescos might be back...

The laundry lasses' working day

"Places with chairs you're not allowed to sit on" said Lunchista fille in disdain as the idea was floated, in the delightful sunshine of Saturday morning, to cycle ten miles to Beningborough Hall. As a description of Lunchista's own feelings, a generation ago, trailing round stately homes with her parents because it was too rainy to go to the beach/park/funfair, it was a genius one-liner.

But it wasn't raining, Beningborough Hall has a playground in its grounds (complete with picnic tables), there's plenty of other space to run around in (including a HaHa you can jump, fall or be pushed off), and there's an art exhibition where you can make your own portrait and have it emailed home for a laugh. To top it all, if Lunchista fille deigned to join us it meant that I would be riding my wonderful ancient bike, which is a bit of a museum piece in its own right and would probably feel right at home there.

Moreover, these days stately homes have an interesting new slant that wasn't there in the 60's: for anyone of a self-sufficiency bent, they're becoming something of an object lesson, and a good-looking object at that.

The gardens, for example, are once again providing fruit and veggies for people to eat on-site, and as if that's not enough the National Trust is begining to set aside some of its land for allotments. Expertise is being sought about reviving the growing of Mediterranean and even tropical fruit by taking advantage of sunshine or waste heat trapped in walls: one place we've visited in Cornwall had pipes taking heat from the kitchen through to its garden walls (for growing lemons) and greenhouse (pineapples!), and a team of plumbers was being assembled to get them up and running again. There are pantries and ice-houses instead of fridges and freezers. How cool is that? The only downside of all this is it can bring on a serious case of Garden Envy.

But Lunchista might not have been the gardener. I might, as John Rawls said, have been anybody, including one of the laundry lasses, who worked in the room in the picture at the top of this post. Sitting on top of a formidable mangle was a timetable of their working day, starting with arriving at 4 a.m. to light the boiler, having walked in from a nearby village. Their boss arrived a little later to check that the things they had left to soak were, well, soaked. There followed at least two bouts of washing (possers, washboards, brushes, you get the idea) and two of rinsing for everything, between each of which it all had to be put through the mangle. The schedule ended with the clothes being hung out to dry at mid-day (outdoors if fine, on the indoor pulley in the picture if wet). At least their working day wasn't much longer than Lunchista's. It also took advantage of the cooler part of the day for the hardest part of the work, and I noticed the place faced South, with huge sash-windows, for plenty of light and air. But there's no denying it was a thankless slog.

Now a lot of people, including Lunchista in the past, would say that it is the presence of Electricity in our daily lives that frees us from all this. It is, after all, "the silent servant" which does the hard physical slog so that we don't have to. But we are more than electrified Victorians. For example, we no longer expect our morals to be called into question if we should turn up for a day's work in straight-cut, lightweight and practically-coloured clothes rather than the multi-layered, white, wedding-dress-like apparel of the lasses in the photograph.

Which means that if, for some reason, electricity should desert us in the future, then rather than having to go back to washday Victorian style we could use hand-powered washing machines like these, or even one of these, which looks like much more fun:

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!

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...