Who did you have lunch with today ? Was it a work colleague ? A friend you’ve been playing text/email/voicemail tennis with for ages trying to synchronise diaries ? Maybe you ate a sandwich at your desk and even the ten minutes spent away from work buying it made you feel guilty ? Did you take a full hour for lunch ?

I’m sure that the answer for many of you would be that you had a quick bite to eat either at your desk or on the road somewhere and didn’t really get the break that the term ‘lunch-break’ implies. I’m also pretty sure that your email inbox quietly filled up at the same time.

It’s nothing new that people often have to cram in their lunch around a hectic work schedule. After all, with the explosion in recent years of the internet, communication by email and mobile phones, it’s often so much harder to be unreachable - even for just half an hour.

In many ways, there probably isn’t too much that can be done about this. We all do what we have to do to earn the money to buy that tuna sandwich to eat in the first place. Every so often, however, something comes along that reminds us that it’s ok to stop and collectively catch our breath once in awhile. One such thing is “The Big Lunch” which will be taking place on Sunday 19th July. The idea is a pretty simple one, in that after a week of lunch on the run, not only do we take some time over our food, we eat in the street where we live and eat with the neighbours we share postcodes with. Yes, that’s right, we get the barbeque from the back garden, take it out onto the pavement together with everything we can lay our hands on to cook on it, find every spare plate, piece of cutlery and chair possible and see what happens.

Although I’m already wondering what happens if it rains and / or nobody turns up (how very British of me), I also have a vision of virtual strangers that have lived side-by-side for many years all of a sudden realising how much they have in common, as they share a burger with some pasta and salad.

“The Big Lunch” sounds like a lot of fun and it’s great to see that there are some arranged in Hove already. Visit "The Big Lunch" website for more details and find out how to get yours started.