Cool Space

A dilemma occurs over lunch: the weather is hot enough that any butter left in the butter-dish on the kitchen counter turns, in short order, into unpalatable goo. And yet, if we were to put the same butter in the fridge, it would be too rock-solid to make ham-and-raspberry sandwiches*. 

I found myself wishing we had a Beurrier-a-l'eau,one of those useful little devices that no self-respecting French kitchen would be seen without. And this got me thinking about France. 

Americans like to sneer that the French have yet to discover the delights of air conditioning. But have you ever noticed, on a hot day, how cool it is inside, for example, Chartres Cathedral? Heat energy soaks into the walls. When it gets there, instead of heating them up, it goes to work on evaporating years'-worth of accumulated dampness from them.

An air conditioning unit uses the same idea, but with an ugly twist. Instead of leaving the dampness floating around in the open air, only condensing once it has found a place (or a time, like 4:00 a.m.) cool enough to do so, the unit expends a lot of energy compressing the vapour it creates, so as to retrieve and re-use the liquid. The compression process produces heat, which is then dumped unceremoniously on to passers-by of the car or other space in which our transatlantic punter wishes to remain, well, cool.

In other words, the thick walls of Chartres Cathedral, and the entire French fleet of beurriers-a-l'eau, are quietly doing their job in a much more considerate and public-spirited way than typical air conditioning. As befits French dirigisme rather than American laissez-faire, in fact. They also give much less of a shock to a body as one moves from one space into another. 

After all this existential musing, I now recall that there is a
beurrier-a-l'eau lurking in a high-up cupboard here at Space: it was bought as a souvenir in, where else, France.









Looks as if it's time for lunch...


*At 32^oC it is a touch too hot for Wensleydale-and-honey

A crisis in Space

Lately, backstage at the Erudite Space has turned into something of an obstacle course. Our crates of donations perch even higher and more precariously than usual, with bags more sitting in corners, under desks and even lurking in the dumb waiter. And still donated wares come. I start recalling the pictures in Dr Seuss books. No matter how rapidly we sort them, label them, sneak a quick peak at some of them (yes we've all been tempted...well, mostly me, actually), and then put them out on display...and indeed, no matter how enthusiastically our punters buy them, the piles still grow and the room for manoevre becomes ever more thin, divided and frankly triangular.

And then the lad who brings donations from the city's various drop-off points turns up with an entire carload of books. As I help unload, I notice what interesting tomes they are, and in what excellent condition compared with the usual fare from that quarter. It transpires they come, not from the drop-off points, but from a Canadian family, who are quitting Blighty and returning to the Great White Space.

"I can't blame them, with the weather we've been having..." and therein lies, apparently, the cause of the Erudite Space's predicament. Our sister shop on the coast, who usually take our surplus if we think it'll appeal to the Holiday Reader, are presently flooded out. There is no alternative route for excess donations that will still sell, and so here they all sit with us, patiently waiting 'til the coast is clear.

Spring and Autumn Annals

The trouble with Spring is, it's becoming too unreliable.

It has always been the case that it will lure you out under false pretences, whether you're a tree that blossoms in early sunshine only to have your finest artwork destroyed by late frost, or a Lunchista who steps out into the bright new day in a teeshirt only to have her limbs bitten by a cold wind.

But now there's a new dimension to the unreliable-ness of spring: will it be drought or flood? Or, like last year in these parts, both?

And that is why I have taken to planting seeds in the autumn instead. Put it this way: most seeds appear in the autumn. Where, then, does Mother Nature in her wisdom suppose that they should spend the winter? Should they nip over to the Southern hemisphere and reproduce twice as fast? Dematerialise altogether for six months? Lay up in a friendly kitchen drawer somehow, in the billions of years before kitchen drawers were invented?

There's a Kale plant in our front garden that's been there for so many years it has practically turned into a tree. Including the winter two years back when the front garden got down to 8 below zero. Just this year it decided it had had enough of producing lots of lovely green leaves, and went to seed: perhaps because some Celebrity has declared Kale to be a Superfood, and got it running scared.

And so the seeds find themselves planted on the Plot, next to the bed where the broad beans have just come up, and just down from the purple sprouting broccoli (which has also just come up), because it was a ludicrously lukewarm 11 degrees today and I could dig the bed in my shirtsleeves.

The one concession I have made to the fact that winter can be tough (and birds can get hungry), is to cover them with black netting.

Where has all the Weather gone?

There exists the phenomenon of "whiskers" in electronic circuits. This doesn't mean that the cat will spill food all over them, but rather that the solder joints and other tiny metal bits will, for reasons best known to themselves, grow microscopic spindles in the same way that crystals do. Over time these spindles change the way a circuit performs, and eventually a pair may touch, causing a short-circuit and the end of life as we know it for the device. By a horrible irony, the more complex and compact the device, the smaller are the gaps between circuit components and the sooner this breakdown is likely to happen.

This may, or may not, have been the fate that overtook our little weather station after a decade of faithful service. And so when somebody asked that usually unanswerable question "Is there anything in particular you'd like for Christmas?", for once I had an answer.

Meteorologically speaking, Space has gone up in the world. Besides temperature, humidity and pressure trend, the new device also measures wind speed and direction, and rainfall. The last two months, though, had been so full of all these things that we didn't have a chance to install the various pieces until last weekend.

But since then there's been no rain, no wind and no change in pressure.

It was exactly the same when I bought the newest water-barrel: its delivery and subsequent installation ushered in a drought of legendary proportions, meaning that it was several weeks before I learned whether it worked at all. Since then it has spent some of its time frozen solid (to its credit, it survived intact) and most of the rest of the time full but surplus to requirements.

The solar panels, when first put up, were privileged to meet an historically sunless August. The Plot, likewise, has just seen two of the worst years out of the past generation for actually growing any food.

There are times when I feel I ought to install or acquire some appliance which can only work in the event of something dreadful happening. It would be a sort of three-dimensional equivalent of Insurance.

All ideas wecome.

Mind the Gap II

Let us swiftly pass over the "summer" of 2012, because that's probably the best thing to do with it. Unless of course you happen to be a slug. Or the river, which found its way into pastures new, including some of the lower-lying plots on our site, devastating the bees and hens.

We come now to the misty autumn morning which finds my other half on his daily run down the path alongside the Plot. Looming out of the fog, in the corner by the western wall, is...nothing! No shed, just charred remains, sitting in the middle of which are the warped remnants of a barbecue-stand.

By an amusing irony, the only two objects that survived the conflagration had both been brought to the shed, over the past 18 months, by previous trespassers unknown. Something about their survival ("Bread and Buddha") made the whole thing bearable. Along with the fact that no other parts of the Plot, including the two wooden compost-holders, and the free apple tree from the City Council, had suffered any damage at all.

Far from it! Though it has lost a shed, the Plot has gained a lifetime's supply of Terra Preta. Mayan apocalypse? Pah!

Longitude

One of the pages that regularly greets me when I get on to the Internet is Science Daily. Sometimes I read the top few stories, which are generally based on press-releases from research institutions of various types (Universities, Institutes, Government departments) about their latest findings having been published somewhere in the academic press. The topics covered range from the physical via the other wonders of nature all the way through to the psychological and social. And in this last, in particular, you occasionally encounter the phrase "A longitudinal study". At which point I always find myself wondering, how did they get funding?

Now there are many reasons why someone may wonder how a research project got paid for. If the findings are really banal ("Being beside the sea is good for you"), it's "Why on earth did somebody shell out to get a re-statement of the bleedin' obvious?". If the findings exonerate something that common knowledge holds to be harmful ("Sugar 'Not main cause of tooth decay' _ study") we suspect a sponsor in the relevant industry.

And finally, in the case of a longitudinal study, I wonder, "Who is the enlightened, and long-lived, sponsor, that these lucky researchers have found?". Because the thing about longitudinal studies is that the results emerge years, sometimes generations, after the funding starts going in. Someone, somewhere, has to take the long view. In fact, has to be able to take the long view. It has to avoid being the victim of funding cuts, re-organisations, failure to replace staff, changes in "fashion" in research topics...in fact everything ranging from simple neglect to the effects of warfare. I like to find them: these days, they're something of an endangered species.

One way round all this is for your research institution to find longitudinal information from someone else: someone whose paid job it has been to collect it, for some perfectly prosaic reason unconnected with research. A happy hunting-ground for this is the field of Meteorology. A colleague in one of my previous research jobs was once lent 50 years-worth of minute-by-minute rainfall-rate readings from Spain (bear in mind that for some of those years, the country was embroiled in civil war).

Well I can't match that, but we do have, elsewhere in Famille Lunchista, twenty years of handwritten notes in meteorological diaries. I've decided to take it on as a bit of a Project, and see if it reveals any earthshattering insights about the climate in the Lake District.

Space below zero

Here we see an ordinary, mundane, run-o'-the-mill British field, as seen all over the country, and as overlooked by all of us (except, perhaps, the good folk who earn their living from it)...transformed, at no cost to the taxpayer, into an exciting, free, and healthy place of family entertainment.

We even saw the field's owners, out with their family doing exactly the same: they didn't seem to mind at all that someone was borrowing the field next to their house without so much as a "By your leave".