Heart of Darkness

A thought crossed my mind yesterday as I was wading through, and deleting, all the spam that arrives with monotonous regularity in the Lunchista email account. The emails' titles are displayed 20 to a page, and every now and then all 20 are spam! I'd find this astonishing, had I not read in New Scientist ages ago that 90% of all email messages sent, are spam. Yes, 90%!

And so, continuing our astronomical theme for a moment, it occured to me that this is almost exactly the same proportion as the amount, by mass, of Dark Matter in the known universe. Matter which cannot be seen, and whose exact composition is as yet unknown, but without whose additional mass galaxies would spiral to bits, and the universe itself would expand much more rapidly than is, apparently, the case. I have tried to draw it but failed dismally on account of not being able to see it, so an idea of its shape, pinched from the Virgo Consortium at the Max Planck Institut, is shown at the top of this post.

Is it possible that the similarity of these two proportion figures is no coincidence, and that the spam we see is in fact part of some all-pervasive burden of additional mass, and hence work, from which the entire universe suffers? Is it, like the 2.7 Kelvin background radiation discovered at Bell Labs (now sadly demised) in 1965 and initially mistaken for pigeon-muck on their receiver dish, some remnant from the Big Bang that we are dealing with? Could it be that 90% of the original "cosmic egg" was in fact composed of offshore pharmacies, purveyors of dodgy submarine watches and even dodgier university degrees, and promises of physical enhancement unmentionable on a family site, all enlivened by the odd Nigerian warlord's daughter wishing to reclaim her inheritance via your personal bank details?

If this is the case, what is to be done?

Inter-Planetary Lunchbreak

You could say last Sunday was a family day out with a difference: Famille Lunchista got nearly as far as the planet Saturn, using only bicycles for transport and Lunch for fuel.

About ten years ago some Astronomical wit from our local Uni teamed up with the nearest School, and Sustrans (the people who convert old railway track sites into nice flat, car-free cyclepaths), to create a 10km-long scale model of the Solar System extending along one of said paths to the South of the city.

There is an 8-foot diameter Sun near the chocolate factory (now sadly demised: what is our country going to do for future supplies of fuel?), accompanied by minor planets on their own plinths with useful information such as how far you have travelled. Using the "actual size" scale, walking pace is about three times the speed of light, and cycling is about ten times. The more relativistically-minded may thus work out how many years younger you can become by walking or riding along the route and, given that faster-than-light travel means that you finish before you started, profit from the fact that you can actually get that report written by yesterday, and still have time for lunch.

There is an organic nursery round about where the Asteroid Belt should be, and somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn (near the Cassini Probe in the picture, in fact) live a Polish family who run a cafe during the summer (that's terrestrial, Northern Hemisphere, to avoid confusion). You can stop off for a nice cup of tea that's almost big enough to float one of the Gas Giants in (yes they'd float: they are less dense than water).

In the past we have been known to go all the way to Pluto and back, but this time we turned off just before Saturn, to get a look at a local wood famous for its bluebells and slightly surreal sculptures. We sat and had a picnic lunch next to a wooden dragon, who didn't seem to mind.

And by how much did all this entertainment set back the travel budget of Famille Lunchista? The coolest amount known: Absolute Zero!

The Eco-Slob School of Design

The afternoon sun is glinting on freshly-fallen rain, Lunchista had a particularly successful slug-blitz a few nights ago (and none have been spotted since), and it's the last sliver before new moon. Perfect. So what better time to share with you Lunchista's delight on discovering that an awful lot of this seed-planting lark, together with the ensuing angst about whether they'll come up (and why they don't), is completely and utterly unnecessary?

Welcome to the wonderful world of Permaculture ("Permanent Agriculture"), a way of designing landscapes of all sizes (and by extension, anything else) in such a way that Nature does most of the work so you don't have to! I stumbled across the term quite some time ago, but it has to be said that since then the parts of Chateau Lunchista's garden given over to it are doing rather well.

Now Permaculture does assume that you have quite a lot of time on your hands, at least initially, because you are asked to walk around (or sit and watch) your landscape and notice what's going on. Where do some areas naturally start and finish (e.g. dry parts, shady parts, parts frequented by any local wildlife...), and within each of these, what kind of plant (or weed, if you haven't planted anything yet) does well, and what struggles, gives up the ghost or is completely absent?

It almost sounds like cheating, but really it's best to plant the kind of thing you know is going to do well, and forego the kind of plant that's going to struggle. We started off with herbs, planting them near the door so there are the nice scents as you come out, oh and so you don't have to pick your way across a soggy lawn in the rain just to get some thyme for the spag bol. Those nice scents scare off various pests, so you can borrow herb plants and put them next to things that would otherwise suffer: all the little roses in our garden have chives as companions, to keep off the greenfly. There are a lot of "things that grow like weeds" which are actually useful: mint, strawbs, hazel, lemon-balm...

There are tactics such as thinking "upwards" if there's not much room in your landscape, or mimicking the seven height layers of a forest (Canopy, trees, shrubs, herbacious, ground-cover, roots, and climbers as shown in the illustration nicked from Spiralseeds: thanks guys!) if there is. So the Lunchista garden now has trees and shrubs. For the dosh-conscious, I might add that the phrase "mature garden" looks good on estate-agents' blurb.

The real hard-core like to take things which would otherwise be rubbish and turn them into something useful: they earth-up spuds in neat towers of abandoned tyres, make paths out of old bricks and assemble cold-frames out of disused windows. The softer option is to just make sure all the waste that a garden makes goes back in as something useful: we have a compost dalek, out of which something vaguely approximating soil comes every spring and autumn. The ash from the woodburner can also be spread about as fertiliser, but apparently coal-ash is a no-no because of heavy metal which can harm your plants. Something called "Jack-by-the-hedge" has seeded itself in our garden, and I'm just letting it carry on because it's edible and, as the name implies, will grow next to hedges: a place where everything else struggles.

Getting back to the seed question, why bother digging up expired annuals and replanting every year, when you could find something perennial which would give you almost as much yield? Recently that very question turned up in a rather thought-provoking BBC programme about the future of farming. One of the interesting factoids that transpired was that you could get almost as good a yield (calories and protein per acre, for example) from nut trees with assorted things growing around them as you can with grain. And none of that messing about with ploughing, spray-on weed-killer, fertiliser and the like. Alternatively you can be like Bruce the "lazy Aussie Farmer" and make more cash, even with less yield, by simply not bothering with a lot of the "input costs".

But Permaculture fans don't want to limit their design principles to gardens and farming: there's also housing, transport, healthcare, learning... And there isn't necessarily a size limit to the area involved, as long as you adapt optimally to each different part, letting nature do as much of the work as possible. So you could, in theory, have a village, with all its surrounding farmland, designed "permaculturally". Or a county, even a whole country.

Leafletised!

How did all that lot get there? Well, in the run-up to an election (and a possible 'flu pandemic) these particular individuals were delivered by Royal Mail as part of a Freepost agreement, but quite a lot of other agitprop arrives at Chateau Lunchista by the hands of total amateurs, who deliver it as volunteers.

In our city the Council can provide you, if you ring up and ask, with special stickers with a recycling logo on and the legend "No Junk Mail Please: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle" or somesuch, to stick on your letter-box and ward off the worst offenders, such as plastic envelopes containing CDs with information about expensive hearing aids (it has happened).

Let's just say that in complete contrast, the type of missive delivered by Lunchista (newsletters from our Councillors, information about recycling, Warm Front and the like) is rather more public-spirited, occasionally even useful, and at the very least anyone who doesn't like it it can lob it on the compost, in the recycling or on the woodburner.

If you want a nice quiet morning or afternoon getting to know your immediate neigbourhood while clocking up a spot of excercise, then "leafletising" (as one of the smaller Lunchistas calls it) takes some beating. It's far cheaper than getting a dog, and there's no muck to clean up afterwards. It is also a totally shameless excuse for a quick kneb at people's gardens.

It's a slightly strange sensation walking around in the middle of a weekday: I'm used to there being far more people about. Apparently of the 60 million Brits, only about 30 million actually work in a job. Knock off an additional 10 million or so who are at school, and there should still be a good third of the population around somewhere. It's a fine day (difficult to deliver leaflets if it's raining: they get soggy and won't go through the brushes in people's letter-boxes), there are front gardens, the nearby shops are open, it's peacetime, so where is everybody?

I wonder, is sitting in your front garden reading or watching the world go by, something of a lost art? Because the only person I have ever seen doing this in a street near us, was at least a generation older than me. Every morning at 7 am (yes, really!) he would walk out of the old folks' home on the corner with his cushion and sit on the wall: well, perch on it really, because a high hedge overgrew the wall, meaning that no-one from the old folks' home could watch the world go by from the comfort of their lawn. I always used to say hello. You wonder what people did in their past: perhaps he once took part in a daring escape from a PoW camp. Perhaps he was a spy (or perhaps he still is).

So, here's Lunchista, bag over shoulder, setting off for the usual round of about 300 houses. There's a certain ettiquette: after all you are the ambassador for whatever it is that the leaflets are promoting. Gates have to be opened and closed (not climbed over); walls between neigbouring gardens should be walked around, not jumped over; dogs should be talked to, even the ones that scare you witless. And above all, because so few people are in, the leaflets should completely disappear into people's doors, instead of poking out all day saying "hey Mr Burglar, nobody's home here!". This happened once at Chateau Lunchista: I was near the door at the time, so the baseball-cap who'd delivered the leaflet got an impromptu lecture about crime prevention. It was only fair: the leaflet in question was, of course, about Crime Prevention.

Your turn!

Picture the scene: Burns' Night (that's 25th January if you're not in the know about such things), massive "supper", the type that kicks off with the dramatic entrance of The Haggis, complete with bagpipes and ode praising its life-sustaining qualities, followed by its distribution to all present, and by some of us at least eating rather a lot of it. Just before you start to scream, might I add that there is such a thing as a vegetarian Haggis, they're delicious, and somebody had thoughtfully made sure that they were available on this particular night.

Now Burns' Night tends to follow a certain loosely-agreed "order of battle" which, after the main speeches about Poetry, Life, the Universe and Everything, the "Toast to the Lasses" and the ever-witty "Lasses' Riposte", can involve the rest of the evening's entertainment being put in the hands of the guests. Lunchista had a bit of a reputation for banter among this particular crowd, which was cheerfully invoked by the MC before I was invited to come up and get the evening's show off to a good start. No prior warning. For about a hundred people. Including the family.

Well what would you do, if this happened to you?

It wasn't until days later (it turned out to be an extremely good evening!) that it crossed my mind that the things that people have learned off by heart are in a way a resource, just like food or fuel. If you have them, you can provide for other people. A lot of us haven't bothered with this for centuries though, first because we could always look up poems in books, and later because we had the choice of switching music on, rather than having to go through all the hassle of playing it ourselves. It is also sadly true that commiting things like poems to memory, or learning to play musical instruments, both take up rather a lot of time: time which is in short supply when we are all frantically alternating between earning as much money as we can, and spending it in such a way as to impress the largest possible number of people.

But occasionally large amounts of sort-of-spare time get dumped on us without warning, for instance if we are lain off work, or go off the edge of the piste and break something. Many moons ago Lunchista got involved in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas(!) and it turned out that the chap who, for five years running, sang all the classic "patter" numbers (like "The Nightmare Song" and "Modern Major-General") only had to brush up lightly on his words, because he had used his time on an isolation ward during a Malaria scare several years previously to practise them to the point of perfection.

Even if you're not unlucky enough to be suspected of harbouring malaria, you might still be unlucky enough to have to commute, in which case some of the time might be salvageable for memorising poetry or sketches. The 60-minute train journey of my London to Brighton commute, it turns out, was used by some enterprising soul a few years after I left as a venue for her French conversation class.

Meanwhile the smaller Lunchistas, after all this, have been inspired to memorise a couple of items of choice: one of them can now sing all of The Galaxy Song, and the other is working on an anthology of terrible puns: perhaps this runs in the family!

Before I finish I might point out that here in the British Isles, it's us English who are the real slackers in the spontaneous home-made entertainment department. In Ireland, so I'm reliably informed, it's not unusual to come across an evening in a pub where all the "turns" are done by just anybody who feels like joining in. Scotland, as already mentioned, has Burns' Night and various other occasions, and I might add that my Burns' Night experience as described here took place in Wales. Yes, Wales, home of the Eisteddfod, and possibly even of Rugby songs.

Anyway, in the time it took me to get to the front of that room I remembered that there was a poem I had learned by heart decades ago, because it was funny and I happened to like it. So Silly Old Baboon (thank you Spike Milligan) kicked off the evening's entertainment, raising quite a few laughs into the bargain.

How to afford a year-long lunch break: 2

Perhaps I should have called this post "Dives I Have Known", because it's really a matter of cheap rented gaffs, how I found them, and how I got by living in them. One of my luckier finds was very much like this house (thank you Ned Hoskins of Artists' Open Houses) although it was not, sadly, full of artists.

On landing a new job, which is of course many miles away from your previous job, a Brit has 2 choices: stay where you are and commute, or up sticks and move. There is also the ghastly third choice of weekend commuting, but Lunchista has tried this and found that short of actually dying it's the quickest way ever to lose touch with your friends and, indeed, most of your life. I have also watched other people do it and end up divorced, or worse still stuck in a jam on the M25 at 4:30 on a Monday morning.

Of those three choices, by far the best for an unattached, and un-roadworthy, Lunchista was to move. In the days before Google Earth, and assuming the place is so new to you that you don't yet know anybody who lives there, the first step was to go to the new city, get an AtoZ and a local paper at the station, take a taxi to somewhere vaguely near the workplace (not forgetting to chat to the taxi driver for interesting local information), find a seat, get out a pen, then find a phone-box and start calling (and walking). If it was raining I just got wet. The important thing is to avoid agencies, because these people are paid extra to get you into somewhere expensive, and waste a lot of time talking about places which are totally unsuitable. "It's a beautiful village" "I'm sure it is, but it's 15 miles from where I want to live, and I don't drive...".

The list of priorities was as follows:

1. If I can't walk there, forget it
2. Cheapness
3. Brightness
4. Hot water
5. Non-immaculate decor

And that was it. The hot water needn't mean heating, it's surprising how quickly you get used to life without it. The non-immaculate decor might need some explanation. It so happened that while I was still a student, I noticed a definite correlation between a Landlord (or Landlady)'s laid-back attitude to appearences, and a happy crowd of tenants. Also, decor is only superficial and anything that was too rough even for Lunchista could easily be sorted ("Do you mind if I paint that wall? It looks a bit sad..."). I also developed a preference for older, terraced houses.

Let's just say that the places I found using this algorithm were not for the faint-hearted. There was the landlord whose brother was rumoured to be a gun-runner for the Contras in Nicaragua. The council found out that we had no fire escape so we all had to move out that week. My protestations that I lived in the basement flat, and anyway it was far too damp to ever catch fire, fell on deaf ears. There was the attic flat that was my utter favourite, until the ceiling fell in one night (while I was away. Why was I elsewhere? Because two nights previously I'd had this terrible nightmare about the ceiling falling in...)

Some people made a lot of noise: the couple who argued on the stairs at 2 am when I had to get up at 5 were the worst. But music-type noise could be dealt with: here is my method, and it really does work.

Walk into the room where the music is being played, ostensibly to borrow, return, ask, something unrelated to the music. Just take in the atmosphere. Notice where people are sitting and what they're doing. Ask anything (except, at least initially, if they're into Heavy Metal), just generally chat for a while, then make your excuses and slope off. Next time whoever it is is playing music, you have a ready-made mental image of what they're doing. It's nothing drastic, or scary, or unknown. The music's just music, the back of your brain no longer regards it as a threat and you can get on with your Physics, reading, or sleeping.

Things would sometimes go wrong, though, at my "end of the Market". There was one Landlord who went bankrupt, left the country and then the whole street came up for sale. Another had a nervous breakdown (nothing to do with me, honest...). One of my Chinese friends had an elderly landlord whom he used to look after a bit. One morning he brought this old chap his usual morning tea and found he'd passed away in the night.

But cheap rented gaffs had their consolations. Chief of these was the concept of the shared kitchen. Because with the shared kitchen came new friends, local information and new dishes to try: in those days everyone had at least one dish they could cook, so the more people you shared with, the more you learned. I consider myself lucky to have done all my kitchen-sharing before the hegemony of the dreaded Microwave.

Here was my contribution to the fray: classic student-style Spag-Bol (feeds four at one sitting, or one student each night of the working week). Gently fry 2 chopped onions and 2 finely-chopped cloves of garlic, then tip in 1 pound of mince and fry til it has changed colour (it doesn't have to be completely done yet). Meanwhile in a separate pan, put in 2 tins of the ever-useful Italian tomatoes, some sticks of celery (finely-chopped), a few mushrooms (ditto), herbs like thyme and a bayleaf if available, and a spoonful of Bovril or Marmite. Lift the meat and onions out of their liquid and add to the tomato mixture. Heat these up until just shy of boiling, then turn down and simmer for at least 1/2 an hour. For added panache, pour in any wine that nobody wants to drink (anything up to a large glassful, and check first that no-one has dropped anything in it). For the pasta I have found that about 75g as measured when dry, per person works.

Of course another consolation of cheap rented gaffs was their sheer cheapness, which enabled the saving of money towards a project of choice (going on a course, visiting China, waiting for a recession so you could buy a house, or even being able to follow your favourite footie-team...) The people of the 1980s always said "rent is Dead Money", but if it didn't amount to much, did that really matter? And anyway, can someone remind me what exactly the first four letters of the word "Mortgage" mean?

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.

Donkey who?

Lunchista has been tilting at windmills. Obviously the first thing you need to do in this case is to find a nearby windmill at which to tilt. I happened upon one while perusing a website about general local goings-on, and lo and behold it has a "Friends of" (well, Preservation Society actually) who are busy restoring it to its former glory, including the ability to mill grain. Lunchista paid them a visit today.

It's interesting to look back on the history of this kind of endeavour: a timeline forming part of the display showed two previous attempts at raising a restoration effort, both of which had come to very little. These happened in the 1950s and the 1980s. Lunchista can't remember the 1950s, but from what I can gather people weren't really into older things at the time: wanting to forget stuff like two world wars, they were more into new culture and technology at the Festival of Britain (1951), a brand new Queen (1953), and energy that would be "too cheap to meter" (ongoing, still metered). In the 1980s I guess most people would either have demolished it to make way for a supermarket car-park, or bunged a mobile phone mast on the top. Now, however, it seems we're a bit more clued-up.

The present effort started in 2001 and initially proceeded at glacial pace (I have just been reminded that this remark is unfair to Glaciers, some of whom move quite fast these days). It took til 2005 to raise their first £10,000. Then, though, things began to take off. It's that "everybody loves a winner" thing I suppose. A lottery grant (ironically funded entirely by people who weren't winners) is paying for the restoration, and a lot of the mechanism is already in place. The sails are in kit form in somebody's garage, and they (now hopefully "we") are starting to put them together next week.
Here is the result being aimed for (except it is now painted white, instead of being covered in black tar like a ship). And guess what? Unlike the case with a lot of other wind-powered enterprises, nobody is going to complain that "It doesn't look nice"!

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.

Support your local

What is the most-abused word in the English language? I mean, this year, because fashions in word-abuse come and go. Anyone remember "Aspirations" (from the 1970s)? "Care" (from the 1980s, once used notoriously by the PM to describe her attitude to the National Health Service)? More recent victims have included "Empower", and there is at least one word which has been abused so badly it has effectively died and had to be replaced. "Sympathy" (which literally means "the same feeling") is now no longer strong enough for those who wish to profess their fellow feeling. These days it has to be "Empathy" (which also literally means "the same feeling"), thank you, and nothing less.

But all that is just the warm-up act to the most-abused word of this decade. That word, in case you've just come back from an extended holiday on another planet, is "Sustainable" (and its relatives). Appropriately enough, it looks like remaining so for quite some time. It all started in 1987 with a nice clear definition by the then Norwegian PM Gro Harlem Bruntland:

"Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"

and it's been downhill ever since, a recent landmark (well all right then, low-tide-mark) being Lunchista's home city's adoption of a "sustainable growth strategy for retail" or somesuch, which presumably means they'll carry on building shops forever.

But (and this is a big But) one abiding characteristic of abused words is that, from time to time, they turn up in places where their use is entirely justified. An example of this happened in Lunchista's front room yesterday.

Our Parish Council has created a Sustainability Working Group, whose job it is to advise the said Council on all matters to do with Sustainability, which Lunchista interprets as "the black art of how to use things (including abstract things like Goodwill and aesthetics) without using them up". Lunchista was invited on board. Meetings rotate around various venues, so Lunchista offered the front room.

One of our first jobs is to look at how the Parish Council's own places can be made more sustainable. Lunchista's suggestion to start with simple energy audits led to the interesting revelation that for some of these places the bill-payers, and even the owners, were not known. Going from my previous experience of this type of work, this is not unusual. You nearly always find that energy efficiency isn't a physics problem, it's a chain-of-command problem. Except chains of command are So Last Century and we now have "Partnership working" instead, which gives everybody the opportunity to advance their career by blaming someone else. Meanwhile it transpires that our most important building has just had a total refit, so the most Sustainable thing to do with it now, in all probability, would be to leave it alone.

Next, and a bit more interesting, is to look round our parish and find all the people and places which are already quietly getting on with being sustainable, and see if any of them needs any help. While doing that you often come across places which provided local needs in times gone by but are now derelict and could, with a bit of TLC and the right Insurance, be brought back into use. Like the old Orchard, for example. Or old manor gardens, woods that could be coppiced, water-mills, tythe-barns, you get the idea. All of these classic pieces of infrastructure could carry on being useful indefinitely, without the need to constantly source petrol/plastic/electricity or take away rubbish (other than things you could just bung on the stove or the compost).

However the liveliest bit of all, at least in this particular meeting, was talk of what we'd like HMG to do to help all this stuff happen. Welcome to the shiny new Sustainable Communities Act, which came about after some nifty campaigning, and enables anyone whose Council has signed up, to put in ideas for national laws which can come in on the side of people who are working on a local scale to do the sort of thing that our Sustainability Working Group is trying to do.

The deadline for the first round of ideas is 8th May (VE Day no less).

For those who can't come up with ideas on an empty stomach, I offer scones, made and brought home from school by the same younger member of our family who brought you Vegetarianism and Football.

Put the oven on gas mark 7. Rub 50 g of butter into 200 g of self-raising flour. Add in 50 g of either sugar or grated cheese. Then gradually stir in 120 g of milk, until you have a smooth dough. Roll it out onto a floured board and put circular pieces onto a greased tray. Bake for 15 minutes.

The scones were not very sustainable, in that they didn't stay around for long.

May Day holiday: a history

It is a fact of life, when one is on a year-long lunch break, that May-Day bank holiday is just another day. However all over Europe, and in China, it's a time when, historically, the hard-working Masses get to step off the treadmill for a day and celebrate the end of the Heating Season (for those, that is, who can afford heating). The UK was dragged kicking and screaming into this tradition by the (then) EEC, in 1978. Lunchista was, while still at school, an eyewitness to some of the kicking and screaming. I invite you to share in the drama of How May-Day Holiday Was Won, at least in our part of the country.

Picture the late 1970's: the Winter of Discontent, rubbish piled up all over Liverpool, kipper ties, boarding schools, the IRA, "Life on Mars" if you can't remember the real thing, you get the idea. Lunchista's school (the very same, but about a year before, the notorious "fellwalking" incident): was a rather old-fashioned establishment and had either just finished celebrating its 250th anniversary, or else fallen through a time-warp. The buildings had a Hogwartesque touch. The headmaster loved Cricket and Shakespeare, and you might sit there and think "so what", but for the time he had once famously launched into fiery oratory, one Speech Day, about how one racist taunt overheard at Lords had (and I quote) "turned an idyllic English summer afternoon into a Vision Of Hell".

But even that sense of justice didn't mean that he'd allow his school to indulge in Workers' Holiday. So we all turned up as usual, and had a totally usual day, until just after lunch when the bell rang, and didn't stop. Someone had telephoned the school with a bomb scare and we all had to go home. Buses were summoned early, and Lunchista's class had to freeze all the way home in games kit.

No-one ever officially found out who did it. But let's just say that The Brightest Lad In The School had been taught a cracking Irish accent by our brilliant English teacher the previous year, so that he could play McCann in the school production of The Birthday Party. And I might add that, although many countries featured in our intake of about 350 people, at the time neither part of the Emerald Isle was one of them.

Let's face it, given the circumstances things could have got ugly. But we were spared panicking staff, "Life on Mars"-style policing and Bomb Disposal detonating people's bags, desks and suspicious-looking objects in the Physics lab at random. So Lunchista raises a glass to all those whose cool professionalism allowed me to enjoy my first ever May-Day holiday.

Bean-Counters

A younger member of famille Lunchista announced one afternoon, on arriving home from football, that she was going to go vegetarian. Nothing to do with me, Sarge, all I ever did was mention, just the once and ages ago, that I'd had a go at being vegetarian in my misspent youth, gone anaemic and given it up. The ensuing silence was deafening. Twice as much cooking! Having to find something new and at least vaguely interesting for two lots of people not just one! And all this with both of us working and one of us not even getting home til 7 pm (yes, it wasn't even as if I did most of the cooking). If I'd been one of those portly old blokes who goes to a club I'd have said "preposterous!" (in a particularly silly posh accent). But Lunchista is not an old bloke and couldn't afford a club even if we sold the house and banked the proceeds. And so evolved The Plan.

I pointed out that we could get almost as good a result, on the less-meat-eating front, if we all went vegetarian for one day a week. I also happen to think it's healthier for a growing lass to do low-meat than no-meat, at least to start with, and it's better for morale if we're all sitting down to share the same food. Sunday seemed like a good choice of day, because it was the only day of our week which afforded any spare time to pick up the pieces if anything should go wrong. So Sunday it was then, with The Cranks' Recipe book and a trip to the local Wholefood emporium for supplies and inspiration. It was there that I was reminded of the taste, variety and sheer protein-infested-ness of beans (and picked up The Suma Recipe book for nowt). Beans...they keep for ages in ordinary cupboards (and look fab). They go with absolutely everything. Their only two drawbacks as far as I can tell are that you have to remember to get them out in advance to soak them (hours or overnight) and you can't barbecue them.

Fess-up time: that was 18 months ago and we haven't managed to stick religiously to vegetarian every Sunday. But we have collected a useful repetoire of veggie recipes, and during that time a new middle-Eastern shop has opened its doors near the Uni. I wandered in just the other day and was greeted with shelf upon shelf of phenomenally cheap 5 lb packets of all sorts of beans, each type of which has a different recipe on. And as if that's not enough, the guys who run the shop have drawn up a load of recipes of their own, from their various countries of origin, and printed these out on pages which they helpfully offer to anyone who, like me, they jalouse is in need of veggie inspiration. They are also incorrigible flirts, especially with the more, erm, "traditionally-built" ladies who come into the shop: watching them in action from the safety of behind the far shelves is great fun!

On the back of a giant pack of black-eye beans we found the following simple recipe for 4 people:
Soak 200g of the beans for at least 5 hours (you will now have just over 400g, or about 1lb, of beans). Cook until soft, then strain and put aside. Put on one mugful of rice to boil then simmer. Finely chop an onion and fry it til transparent, add 1/2 tsp turmeric, 1/2 tsp chilli powder and a tin of the ever-useful Italian plum tomatoes. Stir for a few minutes, add the beans and cook for a few more minutes, then serve.

It tasted great. Not only that but it's cheap as chips and all the ingredients can be pulled straight from your in-case-of-Swine-Flu emergency store.