Rules

I spent the whole of February living by the rules. The details are below. I’ve also started a new project making my way along Essex Road visiting every business in turn. The rules I’ve set are to make my way along the odd side of the road asking a set of common questions to each business and then working my way back up the even side doing the same. I must buy something in every business and take a photo of who I’ve spoken to.

February rules project

A brief google search sometime before I started this project yielded the following crude but interesting results:

There are 31.5m hits for government regulations. Refining the search to UK pages brings up 565,000. That would mean the UK accounts for 1.8% of the world’s regulations with just 1% of its population. (At last, we over index on something!)

Number fun aside there were clearly way too many things for me to learn about for the purposes of this project so I played by the rules in the following way:

1. Abide by every rule I know of that emanates from the UK government or any arm’s length body or quango and anything from the EU
2. Endeavour to find out new rules and then abide by them
3. Add any rule that a friend, colleague or contributor highlights to me
4. Appoint three arbiters to make sure I’m not cheating
5. If there is a conflict of rules I will go with the harder option as judged by the arbiters
6. If I knowingly break a rule and do not immediately rectify my behaviour I must pay £100 to charity (Headway is a good one)

Arbiters:

Sass Robertson – a friend and regular rule breaker

Liz Butler – fiance and occasional rule breaker

Matt Turner – colleague and infrequent rule breaker

Supplementary added 02.02.10

It’s virtually impossible to calculate the nutrition in food that doesn’t have a label where it can’t be weighed easily. I substituted the cheapest, nastiest supermarket alternative I could and used that.

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