Sinister musings

Ah, Wimbledon...strawberries and cream (thank you, "The Life Of Luxury", ooh and a Pimms too, while you're at it, with a sprig of Borage), summer afternoons, "quiet, please", and more left-handers per square foot than anywhere else on earth.

The other day Lunchista found out, quite by accident, that the wonderful Anything Left-Handed, which disappeared off the face of London ages ago, is in fact alive and well and living in Cyperspace as part of the Left-Handers' Club. It was too rainy for the garden and there wasn't anything much happening locally at the time, so I browsed around. There were all the familiar tales, for example of the research that found there were fewer and fewer left-handers as you go up in age in the population, and concluded that we probably die young in horrible accidents involving badly-designed chainsaws, before the results were overturned by someone who pointed out that until about 1960 it was practically illegal to write left-handedly at school, meaning that all the elderly lefties were in fact cunningly disguised.

There is also the Theory of Continuity Of Lefties, which says that left to itself a population will settle with about 10% of us, with slightly fewer women than men in that 10%. I've always assumed this is because women have historically been under more "pressure to conform", but the more fashionable explanation apparently involves the effect of Testosterone. Which is probably a load of


(Thank you, NASA).

Anyway, the Left-Handers' Club are carrying out a survey in an effort to identify which jobs are more commonly chosen by us Lefties. President of the USA seems like a popular choice, but apparently left-handedness is something of a career-limiting move if you want to be Pope.

In fact there seem to be a disproportionate number of lefties who have risen to the top of their profession: I'm amazed to find, for example, that Bill Gates is one. I also remember noticing Colin Powell sign something important using his left hand.

Meanwhile down in the ranks there are certain results which you might kind of expect. Given that most of our ability to imagine 3-d shapes, and think laterally, resides in the right hemisphere of the brain (which works the left hand side of the body) you'd expect to find a lot of lefties doing things like architecture, scultpture, and so on. And sure enough, there they are. Widening the "creative" net a little, media posts are also quite well-populated with lefties. So are a lot of sports (except, I presume, things like hockey).

From the survey results, they put together a table correlating jobs which give an advantage (or the opposite) to left-handers, with jobs in which we are over (or under) represented. You'd expect, for example, not many of us to be involved in "Admin", because of the combination of right-handed kit and lack of opportunities for lateral thinking. But Students? And the cited reasons just look silly: yes computers usually have the mouse on the right, but that's only so that people like Lunchista can search for information on the web and take notes at the same time. All the rest of the kit would have been the same when I was a student, and I remember that quite a few of us were left-handed. And the further I studied, the more of us there seemed to be, until in the rarefied atmosphere of academic research (but curiously, not lecturing) we were really rather common.

But I was a student a quarter of a century ago and, well, things change. Student grants have turned into loans, and extra money has to be found for tuition fees, so that today's students are consuming a service rather than being invested-in by our country. Lunchista studied for the love of it (I mean, whoever heard of a career in Astronomy?) but today's pressures mean that that sort of attitude seems to have gone out of fashion. More students today than in my class want (or rather need, just to stay afloat) a quick, no-nonsense, assembly-line route into a good job. Universities, being also more commercially-driven than in the past, for the most part provide precisely this.

Could it be that this set-up and the attitudes within it are somehow putting off a creative, innovative and otherwise just plain interesting slice of the population from studying at Universities? And, if so, where are the missing left-handed students? What are they doing that's more interesting and enlightening than University?

Consultation Nation

We come now to the next installment of the wonderful Sustainable Communities Act process and what the good burghers of hereabouts are doing about it. To refresh your memory: this is the new act under which suggestions are being asked, once a year, for changes in national law that would enable improvements to be made on a local scale, with the first lot being requested by 8th May. Do have a seat (this one's from a nearby private park!).

Anyway, back to the Act: people rose to the occasion with alacrity, with hundreds of ideas being sent in to the local council. It all happened so quickly that the person on whose desk they arrived hadn't had time to look through the brief, and on being asked to select the best 50 or so ideas, rejected them because "They're beyond our powers and would require national legislation..." Ooops!

After a quiet word-to-the-wise, it was all sorted and 48 ideas went through to the next stage. Which it has to be said our City Council carried off with quite some style. About 50 of us, some of whose organisations had sent ideas in, and some who sit on a long-standing panel (erm...bad metaphor day!) of semi-permanent consultees, were invited along to a beautiful old hall for an evening's brainstorming, munchies provided. We sat like wedding guests at several round tables, each of which had a bunch of the ideas that fell together into a theme (such as "Transport" or "Local taxes and economy"), and we read through the list of ideas and offered our thoughts, while someone from the Council "facilitated" (I'm trying to think of something like a Chair only less bossy) and took notes.

Some of the ideas were quite radical (for example letting the Council keep all the business rates and landfill tax), while some looked like out-and-out Spam (for example allowing only compressed-air-powered cars in the city centre, letting one firm who allegedly make the things set up a factory in our midst). Some of the ideas really appealed to Lunchista and I was, quite rightly, put on the spot and asked to explain why!

It transpires that the next step in the proceedings is for the most popular of the 48 ideas to go up on a website, where we can offer further comments. These in turn will be used by the Council to put together a 6500-word case for the best ones, to be sent to HMG Central.

Now a lot of people get all cynical about consultations, and with reason. Lunchista, however, is only cynical about some consultations. For example:

Like many other places, our city is in the throes of putting together something called a Local Development Framework. For several years leading up to this, it had been on the point of completing a Local Development Plan, but then "It Was Decided" (by HMG Central) that this wasn't complete enough, so Local Development Framework it was, then. This meant starting all over again, and a lot of people in our city council had to temporarily put aside the mundane business of running our libraries, old folks' homes, rubbish-collection and addressing the rather urgent question of how to avoid having us all disappear underwater. Then, just yesterday, a survey arrived at Chateau Lunchista on which the public could register our views. It was a classic. Here is the first question:

"Key Themes:
1. Building confident, creative and inclusive communities
2. A prosperous and thriving economy
3. An environmentally friendly city
4. Special historic and built environment
Question: Do you think these are appropriate?"

Now in all honesty how could you say "No" to those? And yet, when someone wants to build a massive out-of-town supermarket, for example, they could easily say (or more accurately write, ideally in a glossy brochure with lots of pictures, including that one of the child blowing dandelion-seeds) that they were addressing all four of these points.

Many of the subsequent questions asked if we want more of something. This was done by first saying "There will be x more of this", and then asking "Is x too high, too low or about right?" Why on earth does this remind Lunchista of that sketch ("Well, which result do you want, Minister?") from Yes, Prime Minister?

Right, enough of the cynical divertissement, and back to the nuts and bolts. Done properly, as our Council's Sustainable Communities Act excercise seems to be doing, a consultation will give a government proper information, which with a bit of luck can be turned into genuine knowledge.

But there's more. Anyone remember how absolutely confident Saddam Hussein appeared during the Iraq invasion, right up until practically the very day of his defeat? He was no actor: that confidence was genuine. It came from the simple fact that no-one ever wants to break bad news to a dictator: no-one could tell him that the current course of action wasn't working. It's the same in any aspect of life: a system which has no negative feedback, in the face of even the tiny, everyday changes that it should be able to correct for, is bound to go unstable in the end and fail. Even if the road is straight, driving without a steering wheel would be a dodgy proposition.

I would like to think that this is what well-designed consultations, held with honest motives, do in the long run. Tapping into our collective know-how means we can keep looking, and keep steering. And who says the road's straight anyway?

Compost Mentis

All this talk of the humble loo-roll being elevated to the position of moral barometer of the nation (at this point my Editor is warning me of the dangers of being too verbose) reminds me of a recent, and very entertaining, lunchtime. But how I got there is a bit of a tale. Bear with me...

About this time of year two years ago, I was on a train North of here, which took me through grain farming country: to be more specific, bare fields in the spring (pedantic note: technically it is still spring until the longest day). There had been driving rain all night, but the wind had finally blown it all away and the sun was shining on the newly-ploughed fields. The rain may have gone but the wind had unfinished business. In field after field, I could see a sort of earthy spindrift blowing from the crests of each ploughed ridge, forming faint brown clouds which billowed away, presumably into the North Sea. No photographic equipment was available, so I'm afraid readers of this blog will just have to slum it with a picture of part of Chateau Lunchista's loo-roll-tube hoard (we use them for planting beans in).

Now I am no farmer, but I have a vicarious interest in other people's farms because their produce, by a long and tortuous route, eventually becomes my lunch. And so I began to wonder, is it possible to run out of soil? Which is how I ended up on the mailing list of The Rotters, who do what they can to promote things like composting.

An email came through asking if anyone could donate loo-roll tubes, so I took our hoard round to Rotter HQ. It transpired that they had arranged for a stall at a schools' science festival, and parts of the rota needed extra hands, so I took lunchtime on the opening day. Groups of 20 or so children came and sat at our tables, on which we had deployed all the kit: compost caddies (full), scissors, sellotape, newspaper, and loo-rolls.

We had exactly 20 minutes to explain what compost is, then on to how to cut, fold and tape up the loo-rolls into miniature plant-pots, help everybody do this (without mistakes), watch them fill the little pots up with compost, put a sunflower seed in each, show how they could be wrapped with newspaper so that they could be taken home without spilling compost everywhere (again without mistakes), before finally handing out information sheets about compost and the care of sunflowers, waving cheerio to everybody, tidying up and setting out the next lot of kit. You couldn't hang about.

I might as well mention the backdrop for all this worthy activity: we were in the cavernous main hall of the city's Railway Museum. Great for a bit of trainspotting, not so hot for being able to hear yourself think. Since Teacher was therefore out of earshot (but not out of sight) we could have a bit of a laugh. Swapping the scissors for the left-handers: "All the best people are left-handed: President Obama, Prince William, Napoleon..." Describing how to wrap up the little tubes became "Imagine you're wrapping up a bottle of gin for your granny for Christmas" (well it could have been worse: it could have been a Molotov), and of course someone, inevitably, asked about slugs. "Oooh yes, you get great big fat ones, you have to keep them off your sunflower" "How d'you do that, Miss?" "You go out at night after it's been raining, you find them and you squash them with a brick!" Lots of people asked if you got bugs of various sorts in compost: it could get quite graphic. Ever noticed you can get a lot of kudos from a ten-year-old for that kind of thing?

Apart from trying to out-gross me (and not succeeding!), the kids were actually quite well-behaved. They seemed to enjoy making their little sunflower Molotovs and were perhaps even relishing the prospect of nagging their parents about composting when they got home. There was no swearing or lobbing great fistfuls of compost into the delicate inner workings of the Flying Scotsman. Lunchista would make a terrible teacher though: I'm just incorrigible!

For whom the Bog Rolls

Here is a bit of a thought-experiment for a Monday afternoon.

Lunchista could be said to be over-optimistic about human nature, but I think I can be reasonably sure that there are certain petty, unpleasant things that are just never done in this part of the world these days. Not only are they not done, but they are so patently stupid and pointless that they are not even thought about.

For example: I have never known of anyone urinating on a war memorial and, swine flu or no, nobody ostentatiously picks their nose in public. Only a die-hard sociopath would shout abuse across the street at someone who happens to be in a wheelchair. And the days are long gone when anyone would nick the loo-rolls from the loos in public buildings.

Might I add that it took me a full 20 minutes to think of these examples: you could say that they are almost unthinkable, in fact. There is a level of civilisation which we so take for granted, we would be shocked if we were to wake up one morning and find it gone.

But let us suppose that some intrepid journalist took it upon themselves to investigate what we were really like, and he or she happened to find that in spite of all protestations to the contrary, a loo-roll went missing in, say, Bradford (Whether or not it was an Inside Job, I leave to your imagination). Wouldn't that be a Story? Perhaps their Editor is on a "public morals" jag that particular week, and teams the piece up with a thundering editorial about the potential threat to society posed by the plague of loo-roll thefts in the North of England. People read about it and tut. Southerners indulge in a bit of schadenfreude because It Couldn't Happen Here. Politicians pick it up, thinking it must be a barometer of the public mood. They seize on it to divert attention from the Expenses Scandal and the Leadership Question.

The effect on the Great British Public would be to hear people that we despise telling us never, ever, to nick loo-rolls because it is immoral, plays into the hands of terrorists, threatens democracy, is bad for jobs, you name it. All of a sudden loo-roll theft has come from nowhere to being an Issue. Imagine the front page of The Guardian (famous for its typos):

Toile tIssue

And the editorial in The Sun:

The Sun Says: Bog Off

Of course by now celebrities are getting in on it, meaning that a whole load more rich people we despise (or envy) are telling us how evil the practice is. Business leaders, wanting to look honest and public-spirited, follow suit.

The Archbishop of York (who has the advantage of actually being honest and public-spirited) joins in, saying it is "Wicked" and "Despicable", which happen by an unfortunate coincidence to be terms of admiration in the Rapping and Skateboarding communities.

It gets to the point where nobody can choose to not comment about the issue: you either have to speak about it (against it, of course) or look suspicious. It also gets to the point where the Great British Public are sick of being lectured.

Finally a representative of the Association of Chief Police Officers, put on the spot by a TV interviewer, admits that if anyone were to actually nick a loo-roll, then due to under-funding of the police force their chances of being caught are practically zero.

And then one Thursday lunchtime you find yourself in a little cubicle where you absolutely know that nobody is watching. Sitting before you is a whole, untouched, crisp, white, loo-roll. Obviously you are not so poor that you need to steal a loo-roll, but it's the principle of the thing: it's your chance to tell hypocritical politicians, rip-off businesses and vacuous celebrities where to go. It's a victimless crime, you convince yourself. The thought would never have crossed your mind before, but because of all the publicity, it has become Temptation Beyond Endurance.

Back in the non-hypothetical world, Lunchista (and just to clarify, it was not a BNP rosette on Thursday) has been invited to a "The BNP don't represent us!" rally. Dear reader, should I go, or should I stay at home?

Election special

Lunchista has always regarded Democracy as a very physical thing; something that happens between people, rather than as just an abstract sytem. For that reason I would no sooner vote in absentia (including by post, by proxy or electronically) than, for example, get married in absentia.

It probably all started with the tale, early in my voting life, of the many dead people in St Ives who voted (all for the same party) in 1992. Hard on their heels came the story of the elderly WWII veteran who, having walked from his care-home to a polling station with great difficulty but even greater determination, was dismayed to find that a proxy vote had been cast on his behalf, to a party (the same one with the dead voters, in fact) that he loathed.

Nope. Really, you have to be there. Seen To Be Done, and all that.

And so Lunchista has always made an effort to vote in person, and if my address moved faster than my vote it made for a lot of travelling. Brighton to Lancashire (for my first ever vote) is the distance record so far. On another voting trip (Berkshire to Portsmouth) I was served the delightful butty whose wrapper is shown at the top of this post, and which I kept (the wrapper not the entire butty) for posterity.

In a more-recent election the powers-that-be decided it would be a good idea if everyone voted by post. Everyone, that is, except Lunchista and a bunch of other die-hards for whom our Guildhall was opened specially on the day and the proper clerks and little cubicles deployed. The postal process degenerated into farce as envelopes were lost, names were transferred in error and half the women of Bradford were rumoured to have missed out altogether. But we die-hards, our votes were counted properly!

As a passionate supporter of one of the political parties, Lunchista takes part in much more of the election-related activities than just the voting. In one notorious case I blagged my way into a national election vote-count as a party scrutineer watching the tellers sort the ballot slips. I saved 51 votes for my party from going into the wrong tray. In a more recent, local, election, the count went on into the small hours as it was twice declared too close to call. Being June, it was already getting light when we emerged. It was quite surreal. As a scrutineer you get to see what people have written on the "spoiled" papers: "None of the above" is quite common, as are religious comments (of both the sacred and profane variety). I have also seen my own vote being counted: not everybody can recognise their own cross.

If you're not at a count in person, coming home just after close of polls to sit down with your fellow supporters (and some beer and snacks) to watch the results come in live is all part of the fun. There are a few constituencies who take it upon themselves to get their results declared first, giving their local tourist-board the chance of a bit of free publicity. Torbay came in first one time, another time Chris Mullin's constituency in the North East came in first, and he pointed out, in his victory interview, that he could, in theory at least, nip down to Westminster and take advantage of the 20 minutes or so for which he was the country's only MP to pass laws he'd always wanted but knew wouldn't otherwise get through. I would expect no less from the author of the tale "A Very British Coup"! And does anyone else remember the Junior Doctors' Party (in protest at their too-long working hours) "Struck Off And Die", with their peach-tin logo? In one particular count I could swear that there was a character (probably Loony Party, bless 'em) whose very long nom-de-guerre included the word "biscuit-barrel".

It goes without saying that Lunchista was "Up for Portillo".

It is common for party enthusiasts to wait at polling-stations and collect the voter numbers of the people coming in. In case you wonder why we do it, it means we can nip round to the addresses of people who've promised us their vote but not turned up: we can offer them a lift to the polling station. Although a little OTT, this is considered perfectly fair.

And so I spent yesterday (apart from the time it took to cast my own vote) sporting a rosette standing outside polling stations smiling and saying "hello" to people on their way in to vote. No counting-them-in was happening though: we can't send cars picking up stray voters all over Yorkshire! So it was really a bit like the Japanese practice of shops hiring nice-looking people to greet their customers (not sure about the "nice-looking" bit, mind!). It sometimes fell to me to explain the Euros' unfamiliar voting system (along with the fact that it gives our little party, for once, the chance of a seat).

The most memorable thing was the temperature: I'd seen a weather forecast earlier and there was wind coming straight down from the Arctic. Canadian coat and Russian thermals it was, then! The most annoying thing about the Euros, in contrast to the other types of election in which no other country is involved, is that because most of the Continent traditionally cast their vote on a Sunday, we have to hang about for three days before we get to find out what's happened. What with that and the arctic conditions, I suppose we must all suffer for our beliefs.

So I think the physical side of voting, and democracy, is crucial. Without these little reminders of what it's all about, and that affirm our sense of fairness, it would become completely meaningless. And if you think about it, voting and getting married could be said to have rather a lot in common. Both involve parties, for a start. Both have a public and a very private side. In both cases tradition has it that you are presented with (or present someone else with) an idea of how you'd like the future to pan out, and then a choice is made about whether to accept this or look for one that's more to your taste. Promises are made. If you find out later that you didn't like what was on offer, or it turns out to have been a pack of lies, you throw them out and have another go.

What would really add to all this would be, if the Boards of the world's largest companies, whose turnovers and influence are larger than those of many countries (democratic and otherwise), were to go through the same process. As a shareholder, Lunchista often has the chance to vote for or against their appointment, or their "benefits package". But these "votes" are just shots in the dark, because unlike, say, my City Councillors or my local MP, these shadows of people have no public life whatsoever.

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.

Cliffhanger

Gorgeous, isn't it? (OK, if you suffer from vertigo, look away now...) Famille Lunchista's weekend entertainment included a walk along the cliffs at Bempton, armed with a pair of binoculars and a leaflet describing each flying object in helpful detail. Without which, of course, all the Gannets, Razorbills and Puffins would have remained Unidentified Flying Objects, at least to Lunchista, who is to birdwatching something like what Jordan is to Nuclear Physics.

Incredibly, you can get here without having to drive, which is just as well because otherwise this post may have degenerated into a rant against hypocrisy as Lunchista's eyes happened upon an advert in which an RSPB "happy customer" expressed his delight at (and I quote) "coming here to escape the exhaust fumes..." But let us give our man with the fresh air fetish the benefit of the doubt and assume that he cycled here across the North Sea, or at the very least took the train. Meanwhile I'm afraid that for once we brought our own exhaust fumes.

If you can't stand the heat, never mind getting out of the kitchen just come to the East Coast: quite often while the rest of the country is baking under a big fat summer Anticyclone, the East Coast spends much of the day shrouded in Haar, its own special mist, brought to you by the light East wind which has drifted in over the cold sea.

Back in town the following day, a community picnic had been organised on the linear park down by the river to promote (among other things) the idea of growing your own food. The weather was absolutely perfect for it. Best of all, the Met Office say we're in for more of the same as the summer goes on.

Have you ever noticed how much better food tastes when you eat it outdoors? And a cup of tea has its own distinctive smell when drunk in the open air, quite different from the same tea taken indoors. I wonder if someone has ever carried out proper research to try to find out exactly why.