Tender trap

It's good to be able to keep in touch with former workmates, but it's something which at times I feel I "could do better". One of the things it presupposes is that you leave on friendly, or at least civilised, terms. Tick. That you then go on to have something at least vaguely interesting to say to your former workmates, and they to you. Tick (well, the latter at least). And that you're not leaving because, for example, by a suspicious coincidence your workplace was anihilated by aliens one day while you happened to be the only member of staff on leave. Tick.

And so, for some time (about six months, in fact) after leaving my last place of work, a few colleagues and I kept in touch by email. Apart from anything else, they had been thoughtful enough to present me with two trees when I left, and I wanted to send pictures of the said trees, first in their new surroundings, and then a few months later in leaf. But one of the emails, or at least a throwaway comment therein, really brought me up short. It will take some explaining.

There was one particular piece of work that used to appear, with quite some regularity, on my nearest colleague's desk. Let's call it Dusty Park (no not the desk, I mean the project). It was to be the design (but not construction) of a truck park for people whose tough and dirty work shifts would finish mid-afternoon, and who would then, it was assumed, want to shower down and have a spot of lunch before heading home.

Shortly after I first started work there, the project was in quite a nebulous form and all we had to go on was a site map. We pored over it like Generals, in my case plotting out any possible ways and means of supplying it with renewable energy and in other ways reducing the amount of damage it would do to its surroundings, and in his case working out practically everything else. Someone had already done a site survey, so we had precise gradients and ground types. They must have had to work out exactly how to construct it so as to be able to withstand the daily pounding by heavy trucks. The usual ecological options of gravel or porous cover, it turned out, wouldn't pass muster as it would allow the trucks' oil, brake fluid and other undesirable substances to seep through and pollute the surroundings. So we found, detailed, and priced-up a system for catching the runoff and filtering it before letting it loose on the environment. All the many hours we spent working on Dusty Park were included on timesheets which we were obliged to complete each week, to enable (among other things) each project on which we worked to be costed.

Over the months various other finer points of Dusty Park were fleshed out: we spent what seemed like weeks detailing the pros and cons of on-site or modular construction for the buildings. The site was long, thin and triangular, making the layout design awkward. I began to notice how many of our other projects shared this particular problem: perhaps it's because every conveniently-shaped piece of land has already been built on. Then again, if you want a comprehensive and efficient (for its users) road network you inevitably end up cutting the country into triangles, so perhaps that was the problem.

And so we designed our layout and our buildings. The project then disappeared again for a while until our boss approached my colleague with the chance to learn a fun new software application. Having set it up and running, he was able to simulate driving the trucks around the site and parking them. I got the impression that this meant re-designing the bays. Several times. The project, having reached quite a fine level of detail, then disappeared from our desks once again. I never managed to identify any facility at that company that enabled us to follow the progress of other departments in their own contributions to a project on which we had worked. Projects therefore seemed to appear and disappear at random. It was a bit like progressing through thick fog. So I had no idea of what became of Dusty Park until when, months after I had left, my former colleague dropped me a line to ask about any news and said they had "finally got the Dusty Park tender off".

I just sat there and stared.

Because by definition, all but one of any bunch of tenders for a particular piece of work must be unsuccessful and therefore bring the company lodging them no financial reward at all. Chances were that we had, effectively, carried out all that quite detailed work for nothing, and none of it was going to get used. We'd have to write off all those hours to experience. And in fact, in every case where there is "competition" in this type of arrangement, which hasn't been corrupted by some process by which the results are known in advance, it will turn out that a half, or two-thirds, or nine-tenths (depending on how many tenders arrive on the desk of whoever invites them) of all the initial work is wasted.

But firms don't perform all this work on a charitable basis, and as far as I know it can't even be written off as a taxable expense. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it all.

In fact of course it would be compensated for by raising the final pricing of all our successful bids. And everybody else does the same.

And so every time I hear someone pontificating about "outsourcing" and "competition" being more efficient than having design work done in-house by people who don't have to compete for the privilege (because they already know what they are doing), my mind wanders off to Dusty Park.

Blue-sky research

The better part of my working life has been spent in the wonderful world of academic research. Over those years I noticed something of a trend: the results of all our investigations seemed to be becoming ever more predictable. It got to the point where, if a project set out to look for something, it was expected to find it, and precisely that. To build something, and it was expected to build just that, and not be diverted by anything else equally fascinating that might be stumbled upon along the way. We applied for our grants, and in doing so we were expected to specify, with more and more precision as the years went by, exactly what the project being paid for was going to "deliver". We had to become more and more "efficient", and this process was leaving ever less room for us to do anything else.

We were, in other words, becoming more and more like an industry. Of course, industry is very useful, but it's not research, and there are already plenty of other people doing it. If you've got customers who want useful widgets (mobile phones, for example), and shareholders who want you to turn a profit, you can't afford to have your development team sitting looking out of the window all day thinking abstract but fascinating thoughts. But looking out of the window has its uses.

We were investigating the effect of the weather on radio waves. I was building a "model" based on past research coupled with what we ourselves were seeing on a long-distance radio link over the sea. The "model" had several parts, and one of these dealt with atmospheric turbulence.

It turns out that anyone who was anyone in the early days of research in atmospheric turbulence, was Russian. Meet Alexander Obukhov, Andrei Kolmogorov, and "V.I." (you only ever saw the initials) Tatarski, for example. I used to wonder what gave Russia the edge in these matters. Then one day when I was sitting number-crunching in the lab, it started to snow. Of course, I looked out of the window. All of a sudden the eddies and waves described by the very equations I was dealing with, could be seen, as the snowflakes traced them out. Suddenly it become easier to understand how the grand sweeps of the larger eddies were being diverted, by instability, into ever-smaller ones, until the gyrations reached the size of a large snowflake, at which point they just dissipate into heat.

In those pre-Gorbachev years it was a truth universally acknowledged that it always snows in Russia. And so, I used to wonder, when it came to understanding the dynamics of the atmosphere, was that part of what gave the Russians their edge? And if that sounds far-fetched, consider that (on the opposite side of the Cold War) the inspiration behind one of the pioneering researchers in the field of Chaos Theory, was noticing the shapes of clouds while looking out of the window.

And who exactly was it who needed to know what all this weather would do to their radio waves? Why, the Telecommunications industry. Including, of course, the people who brought us mobile phones.

Serendipity wine

Like many of the best things in life, it started at a party. Famille Lunchista went along together, because our hosts were former workmates whom everybody, especially Fille and Fils, remembered fondly, and whom we hadn't seen for years.

But when we got there, it transpired we hardly knew anyone else, and there was nobody with whom Fille and Fils could natter about the sort of things you like to natter about when the answer to that universal question "So, what do you do" is very obviously that you're still at school.

So while they went home to write what turned out to be an excellent satirical song about people at parties talking about their professions (and the relative pose-power thereof), I had a chat with my former boss who, it transpired, had lots of spare apples from his garden.

He brought them round to our place the next day, and I started to make purée out of them on the Monday. After using up all the spare space in the freezer, I still had about two dozen apples left, and they weren't eaters so they weren't going anywhere unless I did something with them. On the Tuesday, with my hand now definitely on the mend, I was back on shift at the Erudite Space. A crate of books about food had arrived, and I was detailed to spruce up the relevant shelves. I put out big, decorative books full of healthy recipes that people might find compatible with their new-year resolutions, or budget recipes that might appeal to hungry students. Sandwiched among all these glossy colourful tomes I found a modest little paperback about wine-making, complete with atmospheric thumbnail sketches of all the kit you might need, and whose instructions started from the point of an absolute beginner. To cap it all, the very first recipe in the book was for Apple Wine. Sold, to the woman with the bandaged hand.

Now some people out there have parents, and some of these parents were around in the 1970s when there was a bit of a fashion for home-made wine and beer. I remember my parents wrestling with technology like demijohns, Campden tablets and packets of yeast. Having had the vague notion of wanting to try the same, I had last year acquired two demi-johns and a food-grade bucket. The final push came from realising that wine, not having been cooked at any point, would contain more vitamins than jam. To this day I count a glass of Red as one of my 5-a-day.

But I needed more kit.

There were rumours of a winemakers' supply shop somewhere in the east end of the city. I set out on foot: it took me an hour, but what a place! It was a proper, you know, shop: in other words, an Aladdin's cave of everything you could possibly need for the enterprise, and a chap selling it who really knew his stuff. I came away with rather more than I had intended to buy: as well as Campden tablets, a clean bottle-brush, airlock and yeast, I bought a (reduced price) "kit" for making Rosé wine, and a proper metal corker (not wanting to risk another hand injury from hammering corks into glass bottles!).

Even as I write this, the first "Must" in its clean bucket is giving an interesting aroma to the living-room where Fille practices on her keyboard. She has taken to playing slightly decadent Blues-type music in there, can't think why.

The first dozen bottles of Chateau Lunchista may, with a bit of luck, be ready for drinking for the end of the year. If "the economy" carries on as it has been doing, we might just need them.

Dark Star

Community Orchard Management Committee meetings take place in our Committee Chair's house, a few streets away from ours. I usually cycle but, not wanting to risk my hand, I decided to walk this time. It's surprising how much longer this takes, and what gets noticed as a result, that would otherwise be missed. Like this odd piece of street furniture.

From the ground up to about my shoulder height, it was obviously a lamp-post. From there on skywards, it was empty space. Someone had come along with an angle-grinder, sawn it through at shoulder height, and removed it. They had then thoughtfully covered the hole at the top of the severed column with green-and-yellow striped plastic tape, of the sort that would say to an electrician "Earth".

Standing in the circle of darkness granted me, for once I could look up and see a few stars. But the whole thing begged far too many questions for me to concentrate on finding Cassiopia or a stray planet.

Who would carry off half a lamp-post, and why?

Our City Council are trying to save money. To this end, they are planning to replace the city's lamp-posts with more energy-efficient ones. Our local Councillor has even put "I like lamp-posts" on his facebook page. But according to numerous "Disgusted, Viking City"-type letters in the local paper, what has been happening "on the ground" is that lamp-posts have been disappearing randomly, clumsily and unaccountably from various streets throughout the city, and the only new lamp-post to have been seen anywhere has been put up right next to its predecessor, leaving the latter still in place, and both (allegedly) shining merrily away side-by-side through the night. To cap it all, the two are identical: there's no sign that the newer one is working any more efficiently, or cheaply, than the original. And it's every bit as ugly to boot.

But we might be seeing more than simply an everyday tale of mismanagement.

The price of scrap metal is soaring, and one consequence of the resulting crimewave is that the present right to sell scrap anonymously may not be in place for much longer. Metal marauders will be going on one last frantic binge, and what better cover than as Council workmen removing lamp-posts that everybody knows are due for replacement?

But what if someone even more devious is using the metal-marauders as cover?

What if Astronomers, fed up of the tyranny of ubiquitous light pollution, are having to resort to crime just to get a look-in, hiding behind respectable reputations and using all-night observations as alibi?

Tea Break

We thought we'd have some biscuits with our tea...

We left one extra,
just like the quantity surveyor at JiaYuGuan gate...

He was client-focused!


Time for something a bit more esoteric:

Fighting the Cuts

Some Wensleydale-and-honey sandwiches are more dangerous than others. Putting together this particular individual had necessitated opening a half-used jar of honey whose lid just...wouldn't...budge. But it didn't slip in my hands either, so rather than just grabbing a tea-towel I went straight for the Nuclear Option: one of those things that look like giant nut-crackers and hold the lid while you twist the jar. But instead of opening, the jar just imploded, taking what looked like a chunk of my hand with it.

Fast-fowarding through three hours spent at A&E, I am now two weeks into the stage of the self-made repair job. A body sends, or makes on the spot, items whose job it is to bridge gaps and prevent invasions or further damage. So, new skin and muscle cells start to assemble, white blood cells gather to fend off infection, and any potentially disruptive movement is minimised by a rapid message to HQ telling me that moving my hand hurts! My only conscious job in all this, in other words, is to leave the site well alone, free of outside interference, and let a body get on with it.

Sadly, this is rather inconvenient for my ambitions of digging the Plot.

Suppose, though, that instead of remaining un-dug for a couple of weeks, the Plot and its neighbours were simply abandonned altogether. How would they look if a visitor were to come back in ten, twenty, a hundred years' time?

Of course the bindweed would have a riot this summer, and doubtless the same the year after, aided and abetted by the brambles. But then, assuming nobody tries to graze animals on them, the Plots would start to do something new. You wouldn't see the self-seeded birch, horse-chestnut and hazel trees at first, they'd be shielded by the undergrowth, which by a happy coincidence is just how they like it. Left to grow undisturbed, long strands of fungi would thread through the soil, somehow coming to an arrangement whereby goods are swapped with any plants they encounter. Going by what has happened in other bits of abandonned land nearby, I'd guess the birches would start to show above the brambles in about ten years, followed by trees with heavier shade, which would put paid to the bindweed's ambitions. Ever seen bindweed growing in a forest?

Meanwhile some more shade-tolerant characters would colonise the ground: perhaps descendents of that sorrel I planted. Snowdrops and other early-flowering plants might get a hold. In twenty years' time, the Plots might be a good place to hunt for blackberries, hazelnuts and mushrooms. And of course, for squirrels.

Birch trees tend to expire after fifty years or so of hard work bringing minerals up from the subsoil and leaving them lying about on the ground for everything else to enjoy. So would anybody. Eventually, then, the Plots would become home to slow-growing trees of the type found in Britain's oldest forests, but perhaps interspersed with a few fruit and nut trees left over or descended from today's individuals. The Plots, then, would be the Ancient Forests of 2112.

And all we would have had to do to achieve this would be to leave the site well alone, free of outside interference, and let the earth get on with it.

Sadly, this would be rather inconvenient for our ambitions...

Secret shelves

"Yes I'd love to come to the meeting...but...I'd be at a loose end in town for three hours". Not a prospect I relished at this time of year. Not only have I never really grasped the concept of shopping as a form of entertainment, but one of the three hours would fall in that awkward lull you get in every British city between the shops closing and the "evening economy" firing up. Two of the hours would be after dark, and all three would be cold. And windy. Then I remembered a conversation from earlier in the day:

"There's a library round the back of the_"
"Really?? Open to the public?"
"Yes. Until quite late. It's the City Archives. Anyone can go in"

I left my investigations til after dark. The building's less than a hundred yards from the nearest shops, after all. But you have to know where you're going: there's no light. There are lawns (black), gravel paths (audible), a couple of small car-parks (tenebrous) and, so I'm reliably informed, a legion of legless Roman soldiers marching silently through a basement off to the left somewhere. I feel distinctly under-dressed: my coat should be longer, my hair blacker and my face paler. I walk past a tramp who's looking through some large commercial bins, and then through a gateway in some iron railings ("CCTV in operation") into a velvet-black garden. The tramp decides that lost-looking people are more interesting than bins, and comes over: though he talks with some difficulty, he's obviously "in" on this Archive lark.

He tells me the velvet garden's infradig and if I'm looking for the library the door's just round there. I nearly walk in through a brightly-lit window: the door's right next to it, in complete darkness. It looks like the sort of door that usually has a sign on it saying "Do Not Use This Door". But it's unlocked.

Inside it's wine-chiller cool. There are huge heaters, in theory, but the heat simply soaks into the mediaeval walls never to be heard of again. The staff at the reception desk take time to explain what I can find here, but it all just goes in one ear and out the other as I marvel at how such a place can carry on existing just a hundred yards from shops that are desperate to sell anything to avoid going under with the high rents.

The huge tomes in the first room I investigate, are records from parishes all over the country. I spend some time looking for any of the (many) places with which I have any connection, but draw a blank and start to look for some science. What I find there, quite by chance, are some real eye-openers. J.S. Haldane pondering the social and ethical dilemmas that are (or at least, should be) still alive in science today. A fascinating account of the perils of how the then-new (late 30s) chemically-assisted agriculture renders soil weak and sterile, which wouldn't have looked out of place in this month's Permaculture Magazine. Who knows, if I'd been able to carry on looking, I might even have come across Farmers of Forty Centuries, (celebrating its centenary this year) in which the soil is named as the "staying power" behind China's achievement as the only ancient superpower still extant in modern times.

But it was throwing-out time at the Archives, and anyway I had a meeting to go to.