Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

I didn't really know much about Iain Sinclair when it was suggested that I spend an afternoon with him walking around the large construction site that is London 2012, out towards the Lea Valley in East London.

As it happens, I have personally been something of an enthusiast for the London Olympic games, mainly on the grounds a) that a bit of wasteland will be made nice and b) that it tends to make everybody happy that their country should be the centre of world attention for a couple of weeks in their life.

Iain Sinclair, I quickly learned, was rather less enthusiastic about the project than me.

And he knows more about it. He is local to the area, a prodigious walker who knows the paths around the site, and combines a wonderfully subversive nature (he once breeched the security round the construction by taking a dinghy on the waterway through it) with a curiosity about the games and the construction.

Above all though, he is cross about the games spoiling the area he loves.

We had a wonderful stroll and recorded at least 40 minutes of conversation. (Spare a thought for Jasper, the producer, who had to edit it down to a broadcast-able length).

But the debate between us essentially amounted to one between what might be called naΓ―ve modernity (me) and world-weary scepticism (Sinclair).

Underlying it, was the fact that his very developed aesthetic sense could find far more beauty than I, in the old poisoned wasteland that was the site before the bulldozers moved in.

And his obvious doubts about the authorities in general exhibited itself in far more suspicion of the intent and competence of those running the 2012 show than I held.

It was a sunny day, we had a lovely walk. And at the end of it, I realised that Sinclair had won the argument.

But it was one of those interesting arguments where - despite the other person winning - you remain somewhat unconvinced of their case. He argued it just too well.. I rather came to think he could win any argument he made.

You can judge for yourself by listening, and by looking at the of the walk we took.

But for me, the moral is never take on a true master of words unless you want to be defeated.

It's the second day of . I'm not sure how their pay dispute will end or whether we are in for a summer of discontent.

But it is already clear that as economic times get tough, the inevitable battles over who takes what pain, heat up.

Now I've had a couple of recent experiences interviewing union leaders about this on the Today programme (most recently, Dave Prentis of Unison yesterday).

I put what I think of as the obvious points about strikes: "we have to avoid wage price spirals"; "if the money isn't there for a pay rise, it isn't there"; "there's no entitlement to an inflation-matching pay rise" etc.

But on each occasion, the answer comes back that chief executives have not shown the same level of restraint, so why should workers?

The issue has come up in tax debates too - the answer to "where will the money come from?" is some variant of "from extra taxes on the chief executives who have seen their pay rise so many times faster than everyone else's".

It doesn't make for a very interesting conversation to accept the point without challenge.
But if you want to offer arguments against, they have to be credible. So how do you do it? Why should the low paid make a sacrifice that the rich don't bear?

As far as I can see, the potential strategies to adopt in that kind of interview are:

a) to accept that the poor should be paid more, and to agree that something should be done about chief executive pay

b) to stop using arguments that appeal to a need for restraint at a difficult time for the nation, and to talk about other reasons for pay restraint

c) to say that the rest of us need to be restrained even if our employers are not.

I think in the context of an interview, the third provides the most realistic basis for an interesting argument with a union leader.

Yesterday, I said to Dave Prentis that if we all tried to have pay rise like chief executives, the country would obviously go bankrupt very fast.

I was right to make that point - we can't all benchmark ourselves against the group getting the biggest pay rise.

But it never sounds very convincing.

It would be nice if chief executives took that into account when setting their pay.

And well done to Mervyn King for foregoing his bonus... if he hadn't, no interesting interview on pay would have ever been possible.

Given the news from home-builders this week, there were a lot of potential questions for Caroline Flint, the housing minister who came on at 8.10.

I probably tried to squeeze too many of them in.

Obviously the and other developers was one issue that had to be raised. It was interesting that she was not ready to retreat from the target that 3m new homes will be built by 2020.

It was ambitious before the downturn, but we'll be drifting off track imminently.

But there were two other questions I was keen to engage her in - rather complex ones that were hard for her to answer in the time available.

First, was the general one on house prices: does she want them to stay up, or go down? I asked it because there's a tendency for people to hold contradictory views - both in wanting "more affordable homes" and ever rising house prices.

Ms Flint herself got round the possible contradiction by quite reasonably expressing her desire for a stable housing market. But she also wanted more homes to be built, something that if she achieved (in any significant measure) would tend to .

It's an important issue. In general if we think the price of something has gone up to an unsustainable level, we should surely want it to come down to a sustainable one, painful as the adjustment might be.

The second more specific question I would have liked more time to discuss was on the subject of newly-built city centre flats. The anecdotal evidence suggests there are a lot of them on the market struggling to sell. The question is whether we encouraged too many of them, perhaps as a result of government targets that encouraged high-density development?

I think we should come back to that one, as there do seem to be an awful lot of new two bedroom flats, and not many takers for them.

I enjoyed speaking to Hilary Benn about food this morning. It would have been easy to use the interview to belittle the government's exhortation that we should eat our leftovers and stop throwing so much away.

I didn't go very far down that route however. One reason for that is that I didn't get the feeling that Mr Benn was responsible for highlighting the advice in the first place (and indeed, he conspicuously distanced himself from about it emanating from some briefing or other).

And anyway, the idea of reducing waste deserves more serious scrutiny than mere ridicule.

I suspect the real problem with the idea of cutting waste is how you disentangle that bit which is genuine waste, and that which is rational and efficient.

For example, I know that I sometimes buy more food than I need. That is not because I am stupid, but because the price of food is still quite low relative to my perception of the cost of running out of it and having to visit the shop specially to top up.

Other people must make - implicitly or explicitly - the same calculation.

I also suspect many people throw leftovers away because they want to vary their diet and not eat the same food for two days running. It costs more to do that, but it might be a price worth paying for variety.

It involves throwing food away, but is it waste? I don't know.

I doubt that it is any more damaging to the planet or the world's hungry than other ways of spending lots of money on food - such as eating too much of it, or eating expensive, resource-demanding items rather than simply eating porridge.