William Shepherd

There are 15 000 lobbyists in Brussels...and they are coalescing. The 31 members of the European Public Affairs Consultancies Association represent 600 of them and include giants like Burston Marsteller and Weber Shandwick. Art Thieving is another boom business. Art is stolen for use as collateral in arms and drugs deals. Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure hoisted by crane in Hertfordshire is probably sitting in a shipping container.

Metsu’s Love Letter was stolen in Ireland and turned up in Istanbul. It was collateral in a heroin deal. The heroin was supplied upfront while the seller agreed to pay once he had sold enough heroin to raise the cash. The painting was given to the supplier as surety on the deal. Art works can circulate in criminal networks for years. Insurance companies often pay a ransom for the return of valuable works...thereby underpining the price. Notice how the good, the bad and the ugly coalesce into a single self-replicating system or mechanism. Toni Pinschof wants us to take a leaf from the gun runners’ handbook. Here is his recent memo on politics and power.

‘Most movements are seccessionist in origin wanting to separate from the herd rushing toward the cliff's edge. Any number of workshops on related or unrelated topics will go nowhere afterwards unless they identify, then meet each other...maybe coalesce or stay distinct...but set up some sort of organised continuity for action.

‘Disparate people meeting and talking have little common territory when thet arrive for a conference. They all go back home afterwards but they should at least in spirit ‘emigrate’ together and declare a territory that they then continue to inhabit. The next generation would then naturally be a nation born into the values and myths of physical or figurative seccessionist emigrants. The practical effect would depend on the extent to which their new territory is manifest on its outreach or simply its ‘reach’ ...a word which is cognate with ‘reich’.

‘Whatever thoughts we have and over however many decades we caress them, we shall drop off the twig without a whimper long before we get anywhere near to having the power to do anything about them collectively unless we get behind the effects to the causes. So long as the power of choice is wielded only individually we shall go on blindly to the cliff's edge. But, if you seek a theme to bind together all those disparate workshop themes that might interest both the quick and the dead go for power and its use (= abuse) in all its forms...’

This merited my endorsement so I added my tuppence to the debate by suggesting that every true radical can take onboard Toni's points about power...the thing the reformers feel uncomfortable talking about. In a diplomatic attempt to persuade our convenor to take this line I suggested we might focus on Chapter 5 of Village Democracies. This opens like this: 'Any practical proposals which do not focus on the problem of power and of ways of securing control of its play...are only too likely to serve as little more than a distraction.'

I went on to propose that 'Local Power...and how to get it back!' might be the conference theme and that a Middlebury Institute-style organisation...The Edward Goldmith Institute...should be established in Thomas Naylor/Kirkpatrick Sale fashion at the end of the conference. Patrons, officers and logos would be in place ahead of time. That way instead of a wishy-washy 'We will establish an institute' the conference could give a resounding endorsement to the work of the Edward Goldsmith Institute and direct its future work. Participants would get the fifth chapter of Village Democracies as a booklet plus discount tokens for Village Democracies. I then started work on a 1500-word essay entitled Local Powers for the next issue of Rye's Own.

I drove into town in the afternoon to watch Merry Christmas...a film with English subtitles to the French and German. The setting is the trenches at Christmas in 1914. French, Prussian and Scottish soldiers celebrate mass together, play football in no-man’s land and fraternise in a serious breach of military discipline for which they are all duly reprimanded. I hesitated between Papworth and Goldsmith as the name for the institute but eventually came down 55:45 on the side of the piper. In the film it is the piper who trigger the cease-fire.

A Danish soprano and a German tenor had got permission from the Kaiser’s son to entertain the troops on the front line. As the trenches were only 25 yards apart they entertained the Scots and the French trenches too. Soon the Scots were joinng in with their bagpipe accompaniment. Then the officers had a word and suddenly fraternity burst out. A.A.Milne missed something. I want some archbishops on the Peace Party’s pre-emptive peace list...alongside the politicians, media moguls and arms manufacturers.

There are four million closed circuit cameras in England. Your average Londoner gets her picture taken 300 times a day. The latest police system links 3000 cameras to the car registrations records. Now you know why you never see a bobby on the beat. They are back at the nick going boggled eyed at their television screens. Compare the 1 in 14 caught on camera in England with the 1 in 12 on the planet who own a gun. Nicholas Cage poses the real question in Lord of War: ‘How do we arm the other eleven?’ Mark Thatcher keeps trying.

One of the highspots of my trip to Cardigan yesterday was buyng my last issue of the Daily Mail. But what a good deal. For five pounds I have got myself a set of a dozen Classic Detectives DVDs. Each night for the past two weeks I have settled down to watch another DVD. Yo! This is the life! Sherlock Holmes and Robbie Coltrane in Cracker wouldn’t work and I have Jonathan Creek to go. But here are the rest in order of choice.

In first place comes John Thaw and Kevin Whateley as Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis with Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect not far behind. Next comes Patricia Routledge as Hetty Winthropp, Michael Kitchen in Foyle’s War and Roy Marsden as P.D.James’ detective Commander Dalgliesh. Felicity Kendal and Pam Ferris as Rosemary and Thyme were the worst of the bunch...division four for them. In my third division are George Baker as Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, David Jason in A Touch of Frost and Peter Davison in The Last Detective. It was the characters of these third division detectives that I didn’t really like. I couldn’t warm to them as people. Now you know what I have been getting up to in the evenings.

These weblogs are about what I do all day. Occasionally I let slip a thing or two about love and money. But these subjects are not really on-message. However I have spent a significant amount of time over the past three weeks addressing some of the concerns that Heidi and I have about how to dovetail our two independent lives. At one point I felt the need to define the way I go about things...my modus operandi if you like. This I refer to as indicative planning. Here is how I tried to explain it to Heidi.

There are long lead times in the academic world for grants, positions, papers, conferences etc. So for the past thirty years I have run my life on a rolling 12-18 month plan. Final plans...the only things outsiders are ever likely to hear about...are firmed up closer to the time so that geographical moves tend to be settled 4-6 weeks ahead of time. Plans often do not work out...particularly when money is a limiting factor...less so otherwise. My policy is to share details of the options under consideration with those affected by them and those closest to me sooner rather than later. Within this 12-18 month rolling framework I respond opportunistically to things that come up without there necessarily being changes to the indicative plan.

As this begged more questions than it answered I then tried to dig a little deeper by defining my philosophy of the world and how I act upon it. This was what I came up with. Theologically I take four fundamental positions within a sceptically agnostic framework: 1. Life lives me and I do not live life; 2. Life is what happens to me when I am busy making other plans; 3. The gods help those who help themselves. I act upon the world; 4. I plan as if I have complete free will but act as if I am subject to fate. I don’t often find people talking about these things. I think they should. There were a couple of other things I felt needed to be added.

We live at present in a non-sustainable era of cheap air travel and this means that I regard myself as being never more than one day's travel away from any other place around the North Atlantic Ocean. This won’t last. But while it does I have no qualms about taking side trips off the indicative plan to other places for 3-6 weeks at a time. I would happily do so several times a year. Normally when something like this comes up I choose a particular project and try to focus my creative attention on this project while keeping everything else ticking over. It is also quite clear to me that family, friends and colleagues rule over a great abundance of empty living and working space and that this could be available for my use. However people need to be convinced that I am not a scrounger and a loafer. I am in no doubt that my work deserves their personal support and the support of the wider public. But it is my job to convince them. These weblogs are part of the process.

China eased above the Brits and the French after another year of nine percent growth. Before long they will overhaul the Yanks too and be back at Number One...two hundred years after they were last there. Mind you all these statements are the most awful nonsense and I say this for two reasons. Firstly to include China in the same list as Luxembourg is ridiculous. Size matters. Secondly the definitions of internal trade and exports ignore the realities of transnational companies, intra-company and intra-state trading and economic activity within and without families, clans, diasporas, city regions & imperial megastates. Also ninety-five percent of economic activity by everyone everywhere is untraded and uncashed. Aggregation and consolidation matter too.

I have this trick to stop myself frittering money away. It’s rather like innoculation. I treat myself to some little thing and the delight of this little treat stops me from feeling so poor that I eventually can’t stand it any more and splash out lots of money on something really foolish. Yesterday I paid the Barnados shop in Cardigan £2.99 for a Beethoven Great Composers CD. I have been writing weblogs to it all day with just a walk to the river at lunchtime for a break. This is my third one...written before the day ends. Maybe I’ll make up the rest.

On Wednesday an e-mail arrived at williamshepherd@cesc.net from Guardian Unlimited. I picked it up today. They were offering me a new free e-mail service that would provide ‘a snapshot of Guardian Unlimited including the day's top news stories sent to your inbox every day at 9 am’. Well I beat them to it...in more ways than one. Some months ago I set up a daily feed from the Guardian to MyYahoo! which I have set as my browser’s opening page. But I fed myself the columnists...not the news. This feed receives equal billing with the feed carrying the William Shepherd Letter. The RSS technology on my Berlin-based weblog server allows anyone else to do the same. You could have started a month ago. Click on 'What is RSS?' below on the right.

This agenda setting side of the mainstream media is not talked about much. Have you noticed how tv, radio and the newspapers feed off each other...taking the news agenda for the day from each other? One thing I liked about Alastair Cooke’s Letter From America was the fact that you never knew what he would talk about. But one thing was certain. It was always interesting. And when he did choose to talk about mainstream news he would talk about it in a different way. Matthew Parris in The Times on Saturday and Simon Jenkins several times a week in the Guardian have this Alastair Cooke feel about their articles.

My three polite reminders earlier in the week did their job. Two of them had hit the jackpot and my main Barclays business account that feeds the William Franklin PayPal account and doubles as a client account for Cultura (UK) was awash with money. As several hundred of it is mine I brought forward my Carmarthen Day and spent the morning motoring around the Welsh countryside.

Though technically still a building society, as far as online banking, credit cards and checking accounts are concerned, the Nationwide is as modern as any bank. But a prudent entrepreneur always has one account somewhere that is a cash account. That way you know exactly where you stand. My cash account is with the Nationwide. And they also entrust Academic Inn Books with a Treasurer Account passbook. Good Yacht Guide cheque sales pass through this account so Heidi looks after it when I am out of town. The passbook is just like the ones from the 1950s...but is updated electronically at the branch. My nearest branch is in Carmarthen.

I woke up at four thirty and didn’t much feel like going back to sleep so was down to work by five. I had some invoices to do for Heidi and needed to respond to the long conversation with Constanza the previous afternoon. More on this next week. I set off for Carmarthen at eight and was strolling down St Peters Street as the clocks were striking nine. By nine fifteen I was finished at the Nationwide. The library didn’t open until nine thirty so I bought myself a hot pasty and left town heading for Cardigan.

Think of three sides of a triangle and you will have some idea of my 120 mile round trip. I was now on the second leg. I left Carmarthen on the Aberystwyth road through Newcastle Emlyn. This road follows the river as it winds its way off the high plateau down to Cardigan Bay. By 1130 I was sitting in Celinis with my cup of coffee by my side, Rod Stewart singing the old songs...the Jerome Kerns, Cole Porter, Frank Sinatras etc...and a complete set of the year’s weblogs in front of me for proof reading.

I had one nervous moment. I went to the lending library for a DVD and was asked whether or not I usually paid half price. As I looked puzzled the young assistant tried to help by telling me that pensioners rent their DVDs at half price. How my face dropped. Now it is true that I am only a few months short of my sixtieth birthday but I rather pride myself on looking ten years younger than I really am. So this took the wind out of my sails...and I still haven’t got over it. Mind you, remembering back to my younger days, I looked on anybody over thirty as old and tended not to discriminate between a bit old and very ancient. Yes. I am sure that’s it.

I read Heidi just before leaving Rye two months ago and really enjoyed it. In fact I was surprised at how good it was. Now the film of the book was in town for two days over the weekend. So I just had to see it. I loved it. My daughter once told me that The Little Prince was the best thing I had ever written. The manuscript is gathering dust somewhere. The film Adaptation borrowed from the library was about twin brothers...both script writers...and both played by Nicholas Cage. Jack Priestley worked on Hollywood scripts in Arizona. Hmm.

Davos is in the Swiss canton of Graubuenden. It hits the headlines for a couple of days at this time of the year...and these two days cost the taxpayers of the canton 33 million Swiss Francs. Still it is better than it was. Nowadays the Swiss get eighty US cents for their Swiss Franc. Five years ago they only got sixty. But why do they pay to host this monstrous regiment of billionaires? I must be missing something. I thought the Swiss had real democracy. Perhaps the taxpayers don’t pick up the tab at all. They certainly shouldn’t have to pay for the 5500 troops drafted in to protect 2300 indignantaries. And they can’t even take their currency profits of twenty cents in the franc. Costs have tripled since 2003 because of extra checks at rail stations and airports...and the other high-tech security measures from the stupidity services...like barbed wire across the roads. Ooh! Scary!

Woodlands Junior School is thirty minutes from Rye across the county line in the Garden of England. It is the only primary school in England with three top Ofsted commendations. The school's website gives 25 000 visitors a day a glimpse of life in England through the eyes of its students. My comments on population came from here so by way of a thank you I left my grubby digits in their visitors’ book. Here is what I wrote.

While searching the internet with Google for some basic population numbers I chanced across your website and found it to be the only one to offer me what I needed and to present it in a way I could use for my weblog. How about having some fun projecting future populations based on different birth rates...and as you are so close to Dover why not base your future figures on different immigration and emigration rates too?

For good measure I threw in some facts. In Europe 2.1 is considered to be the population replacement level. In other parts of the world this figure is much higher as it needs to cover babies who never make it past their fifth birthday...often half of them...and for mothers dying in child birth...quite apart from Aids which takes less than one in a thousand of the English population (60 000 were HIV positive at the last count). The current birth rate in the UK is 1.74 children per woman but the Greeks will disappear soon at just 1.29. Here are some others: Spain & Italy 1.3, Germany 1.4, Holland 1.7, Norway & Sweden 1.8 and Ireland & France 2.0.

Today I emailed Constanza in Mexico City and suggested that Pensart arrange sponsorship for Woodland’s English cultural pages. Her husband Peter Dale read Spanish Literature at Oxford University so I thought the Woodlands culture pages might give themselves a multicultural flavour. Mexico City cricket results that sort of thing. I wonder what silly point is in Spanish? I also floated the idea that Gimnasio Jose Joaquim Casas might go for some English/Spanish twinning with Woodlands Junior School and their Kent colleagues.

Constanza had emailed me the latest Wheelock College newsletter. Headlined were the glad tidings that this Boston-based college had received half a million dollars in new funding from the US federal government. Well jolly hockey sticks and whack-o to all that! But I raised my eyebrows when I read the small print. It seems that in December, George Dubya Bush signed legislation that included funding for Wheelock College as part of NASA’s 2006 budget. This funding ‘builds on the college’s work with the NASA Opportunities for Visionary Academics Programme (NOVA) which seeks to create unique opportunities for elementary teacher preparation emphasizing maths and science.

Apparently Wheelock College plans to use the money ‘to improve classroom technology, enhance math and science teaching labs, and develop new cutting-edge curricula for educating elementary-level teachers.’ Like what? Neurolingistic Programming? An updated version of the programmes Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were working on at Harvard University a few decades back? Or something more mundane like computer freebies from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or wind-up laptops from Nicholas Negroponte at MIT just down the road?

The Gospel According to Forbes has Roman Abramovich at 363 in its rich list for 2001, 127 in 2002 and up to 49 in 2003...one of 17 Russian billionaires. America tops the list with 275 billionaires with Bill Gates in the top spot on 490 billion dollars. Our poor little Security Council misfit France does not fare so well with just ten...one less than Mexico, the home of the widowed Carlos Slim Helu and his six children.

Now if you are talking eligible they don’t come much more eligible than the richest man in South America with 14 billion dollars to his name and to those of his nominee companies, family trusts and offshore accounts. His prospects are good too with his wealth up $5 billion on the year thanks to windfall profits and stock surges from his flagship Téléfonos de México...a landline monopoly notorious for undercutting the competition...and his América Msvil telcos. Slim is a vocal opponent of free trade and free market prescriptions for developing Latin economies. Now there’s a surprise. Echoes of Richard Branson. Are there limits to hypocrisy?

Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich have one thing in common...giving away half a billion dollars. Nobody knows the source of the Abramovich billions...oil, share deals etc. But Bill Gates’ billions came from keeping his source code secret. Our superheroes have different ideas on spending money. Gates’ millions pay for global wars on malaria and tuberculosis. Abramovich’s dosh buys foreign footballers for Chelsea Football Club.

Now let’s say that upon my demise I get the job of membership secretary at The Pearly Gates. One day I see Abramovich and Gates floating up the drive. My immediate boss St. Peter wants my advice...and he wants it now. For Peter it helps to keep it simple so I rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. My criteria? How much happiness they bring into the world. Not an easy call. I’ve been a Chelsea fan all my life. But fortunately ‘now’ in heavenly terms is much the same as eternity. I tell Peter I’ll get back to him on this one!

Last Saturday I wrote that ‘at the end of the nineteenth century the population of England was five million’. I thought about it during the week and decided this was wrong. I read quite a bit of R.H.Tawney last year and his figure of five million had stuck in my head...but Tawney’s period was the sixteenth century. So today I went rummaging around in Google for the right figures and corrected my web posting by doubling the population. The sentence now reads that ‘at the beginning of the nineteenth century the population of England & Wales was ten million’. You deserve the benefit of my research...free at the point of use.

Since the Middle Ages the population of England and Wales stayed around five million. It went up and down with events like the Black Death wiping out a third of the population. But five million is a good number to keep in your head. The big picture is then of numbers starting to increase in the eighteenth century, shifting into overdrive in the nineteenth century and then slowing down last century.

A good place to start is 1700 when England and Wales had a population of about six million. The first doubling took 120 years. The population reached 12 million in 1820 just as the gas lights were going on in towns and cities all over the country. The next doubling took just sixty years. By 1880 England and Wales had a population of 24 million. The third doubling to 48 million in 1970 took 90 years and since then the pill has kept the quantity down...but the jury is still out on what the pill has done for the quality of the nation. Current estimates put the population of England at 50 million, Wales at 3m and Scotland at 5m.

The contours of my day took on their traditional homeday pattern. My weblog was done by ten. It was a lovely Welsh winter’s day...blue sky, a few clouds, bracing temperatures. It took me an hour to walk to Efailwen picking up my copy of the Daily Mail at Glandy Cross on the way. An hour at Caffi Beca and an hour to walk home. The final stretch took me along the river and above the slate gorge just a few minutes from home.

The slate industry was as vital to the local economy, culture and history of Wales as the coal industry. Both industries arose out of nothing, became giants on the world stage and then suffered catastrophic decline and almost total extinction. In the boom years prospectors would be out scratching at barren hillsides all over Wales. There were many speculative sites but the giant quarries employed thousands.

Water power was the primary source of energy with networks of dams feeding the water wheels through wooden or slate lined leats. At the quarry water would cascade from wheel to wheel. Even after the advent of steam the water wheels were retained to save on coal and wood. Conditions in the quarry barracks and lodging houses were appalling and accidents in the quarries were frequent. Unguarded machinery, roof falls and lung diseases all took their toll. Working underground in the industry was more dangerous than in coal mining.

Welsh slate went all over the world from small ports like Porthmadog and purpose built harbours like Port Dinorwig. Narrow gauge railways were built to access these ports and connect the quarries to the nearest town or main line railway. Welsh slate peaked in the 1890s. After this capital dried up, imports grew, roofing tiles became cheaper than slate and men left for easier ways to make a living. The once mighty Dinorwic Slate Quarry finally closed in 1969. I am rather proud of my local Llangolman Slate Workshop at Pont Hywel Mill.

The afternoon was spent catching up on matters sidelined by the Swedish accounts. JAK tells me I can have my seventy five thousand kronor in a couple of weeks if I can provide some collateral but otherwise I go onto a three month waiting list which puts my Lund trip back to the end of April. What to do?

Constanza called from Mexico as Steve Wright on BBC Radio Two was telling his seven million listeners that Mexico City has more taxi cabs than anywhere else in the world...sixty thousand of them. Constanza has a five-year plan and wants to talk to me about it. We set a time.

I was in touch with Toni Pinschof in Brittany. His son is about to embark on his first solo overseas adventure and has been placed under the grandiose wings of Tapeley Park. In 2001 Dmitri hitched a ride with Vemara back from Morlaix to Rye to attend a cousin’s wedding in London and my daughter had instigated the introductions to Hector Christie...the brother who ‘lost’ Glyndebourne on the toss of a coin.

Each member of the UN Security Council has one vote. Nine yes votes are needed on procedural matters but on substantive matters all five permanent members must vote yes. Other organs of the United Nations make recommendations to Governments. But the 191 members of the United Nations...United States would be more accurate but the name had been taken...are obligated by their treaty commitments to carry out the decisions of the Security Council. Gun runners rule the world OK!

After an excellent lunch on Sunday 22nd May 1977 a top secret meeting took place at Chequers. Present were the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Admiralty James Callaghan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healey and the Industry Secretary Eric Varley. There was only one item on the agenda: the British Leyland Affair. Shock and horror! Fleet Street were reporting that the firm used slush funds, bribes and back-handers to obtain export orders. People think they have facts but it is only crisis chatter.

A classic government cover-up ensued...replete with lies in the House of Commons, denunciations of the press and a conveniently discovered forged letter amidst the avalanche of true documents. An everyday story of government folks...except for two little footnotes. One other person was invited to the meeting. Not the Defence Secretary or the Attorney General but the Secretary of State for Energy Tony Benn. Why? And all of a sudden out of the blue the Daily Mail resurrects the story today in a double-page spread. Why? It was probably just a coincidence that on the same day The Guardian front-paged a new attack on George Galloway.

The UN Security Council has fifteen members. This year’s five subservient members up for their second term are Argentina, Denmark, Greece, Japan and Tanzania. The new kids with their heads on the block are Congo, Ghana, Peru, Quatar and Slovakia. These are elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms. The five permanent members are the five biggest gun-runners in the world: Britain, China, France, Russia and the USA.

Last Friday Kirkpatrick Sale wrote to me wondering how actions to make local government local could come out of the September conference. In passing he also asked what a forum on shops was about. I addressed Kirk’s question today in a response to a memo from John Papworth. Here is what I said about shops.

The conference needs to talk about fair trading, just pricing and food miles. The food and groceries provision and infrastructure needed by our villages, towns and cities 25 years hence is the real issue. If we can get some agreement on that, we can talk intelligently about the transition to this new world after the demise of Big Oil. Supermarkets and their role over the next ten years might then be sensibly discussed in this broader context. That’s quite a lot of meaning to put into a four-letter word like shop. Here are some thoughts on food futures.

Parachuting in organic food from Germany to line the pockets of the pension funds investing in Tesco and Sainsbury makes some sense in the short term but could be counterproductive in the long-term for countries adopting the type of town & country strategy that I favour. This twin strategy works like this.

The First World looks rather like the Third World with three distinct food sectors: organic, chemical and parachute. Rationing organic produce by price is the wrong answer. Ralph Borsodi was closer in the 1930s with his insistence on production for use. Locally and organically grown produce should be eaten by people living in the surrounding countryside. And why not throw in some social engineering incentives to reverse the urban-rural balance and encourage a flight back to the country. I take the French view about agricultural subsidies. The principle is fine. The problem is with the structures doling out and raking in the dosh. Who? Whom?

The Distributists were on the right track a hundred years ago with their agenda for land and money. The gift of five acres and a cow to every man on his eighteenth birthday would also do wonders for smallholding in England and Wales. There are plenty of available five-acre plots. They are just in all the wrong hands. Putting smallholders back on our National Trust and Ministry of War land would be a good start in England.

This rural approach would have the effect of challenging the towns and cities to come up with their own plans. Ken Livingstone’s answer for London would be interesting. They need to replace a supermarket distributed diet of chemical and parachute food with Fidel Castro's Havana Solution. People everywhere should be talking about how to eat well in their particular local corner of an increasingly crowded world.

From this discussion good ideas would emerge. Let’s slap custom duties on food moving across a parish boundary...on a sliding scale based on the distance the food has travelled. Parish league tables for food miles? Toll gates were not very popular last time around. They served the wrong people. Let them work for producers instead of merchants...for locality not outside interests. My school had its own farm. Why not every school?

Google has broken through The Great Firewall of China...but at a price. We bloggers must follow Samuel Pepys example and write in code. No mention of the Balai Mama or the Dalun Bong. And we must never suggest that paramilitary police shot protesters in the village of Bongzhou last month or massacred thousands of young citizens in Tinderbox Square in 1989. We must also be careful what we say about the next Chinese Civil War. There is no truth in the rumour that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are furiously arming both sides. After all the breakaway Chinese province of Paiwan doesn’t really exist does it?

I was through with weblogging by nine after getting up at six. I also spent an hour at the tail end of the day doing weblinks for my Constant Gardener piece. Putting in the links is a separate task that often starts with a Google search. This helps me choose the link I like best. Still one of the side effects of my early liberty was finding out that my local cafe doesn’t warm up until midday. It was a cold night and Caffi Beca was freezing.

Apart from this excursion I stayed home all day to finish off the Swedish accounts. The end results went to Stockholm at 1800 hours dated 24th January 2006. I would have preferred the fifteenth but was pleased enough. We billed less than a hundred thousand kronor through William Franklin last year...well under a fifth of total billings...but only started the UK accounts in June. Eventually we are looking to put 40% through the UK which means a threefold increase on the 2005 rate. This needs careful planning as there is no point in billing from the UK with its low taxes unless the profits end up here. This means spending the money in Sweden.

In 2005 income was £ 5655 and cost of sales £ 5090 leaving £ 565 for William Franklin’s fees...10% of income. For 2006 we are looking at twenty rather than five so we need to plan our use of the eighteen after William Franklin’s tithe of two. We are almost entirely electronic with money received and disbursed from PayPal and through Barclays’ online banking arm ibank.

My idea was to put me on the payroll in Sweden. I would pick up the Swedish company’s social costs by effectively reducing my take by a third...these benefits go to me after all. It may be a step too far but I thought the option worth floating. I would hope the rest gets spent on a base in Cambridge that can double up as accommodation for the firm’s directors when they are in England on business.

My proposal means that four of the six thousand pounds I earn in 2006 gets paid as salary with two sent to the Swedish Government as payroll taxes. I get a monthly salary of three thousand kronor with the balance of twenty thousand as a year-end bonus that relates to my translation and scripting work, project management and factoring services. We will see how that idea flies. Here’s a fragment of our book-keeping for 2005.

Nov 11 Job 592 £ 271.50 cr
Nov 16 Leena £ 53.91 db
Nov 23 Andreas £ 230.00 cr
Nov 23 Martin £ 166.00 db
Nov 25 Job 5104 £ 62.58 cr

This tiny slice of our accounts provides some insight into the flavour of the globalisation going on in our little corner of the business world. Martin is a Norwegian musician based in London who we used last year for the Norwegian voiceover on a film for the oil giant Shell. The Shell contract was won by firm who work out of New Zealand and is run by Andreas, a German national who speaks German and Russian and a few other languages but passes the Scandinavian languages over to us.

Job 5119 was for a Stockholm-based high-tech company. We put their newsletter into English. Last year they decided that their Swedish website needed to be available to punters in English, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian and Spanish. We got the job. Andreas got the Russian. Leena lives in Eastbourne and does our Finnish scripts. Job 5103 was for a Norwegian media company. We did the script and voiceover for Oslo Museum.

I am not a connoisseur of wine. Connie taught me fifteen years ago that only two things matter when buying wine: alcohol content...the higher the better...and price...the lower the better. The Finns drink to get drunk. Nonetheless I know somebody who tastes wines for a living. His discernment is impressive...beyond anything I would have thought possible. I shop for my wines in the supermarkets of Boulogne and rarely pay more than a euro for a bottle of 12% red table wine. At Tesco I pay £2.49p...four times French prices.

Connie would be amused. She now has science on her side. Here’s something for you to try out on the next wine snob to grace your dinner party. Take four diffferent types of red wine...Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah...using cheap and expensive versions of each. Blindfold your wine tasters and feed them some cheese. Then challenge their discernment. You will give some amusement to your guests. Cheese masks the subtle tastes of wine. So next time you are putting on a do go easy on the vintage wines after dinner and spend your money on good cheese instead. The scientists? California. Now you know where to go to do your PhD.

February is the biggest suicide month of the year. In January you notice little difference from day to day. But in February it gets light several minutes earlier each day and a week makes a real difference. Suicidal types figure out that if they make it through the winter everything will be alright. Come February they find that things are just as awful as ever. So they top themselves. Not very believable is it? Every suicide is a preventable tragedy.

You might think this rather a morbid way to start a weblog. But it was prompted by a little piece of Radio Two trivia. Today, listeners were told, was the most miserable day of the year. Now there’s something! Goodness knows where this statistic comes from. The reason? Tax returns...income tax and value added tax...and sickness. Not a lot of people know that. And not a lot want to.

I had every reason to feel suicidal after a text from Pete Butler ‘hi pete they have sold ya boat shall I get ya stuff’. This meant an unscheduled trip to Cardigan to dispatch letters to Brian Walker my solicitor in Sevenoaks and Carl Bagwell the Harbour Master in Rye. ‘Events, dear boy! Events!’ was Harold McMillan’s reply when asked the hardest thing about being Prime Minister. More some other day.

Clearly such trials and tribulations energise me. By the time I took myself off to bed I was feeling quite pleased with my day. Reminders had gone off to two customers...worth a thousand pounds when they pay up. And at long last...I exaggerate as I am only a week behind my self-imposed mid-January deadline...the 2005 accounts were on their way to Stockholm. To my delight they showed that most of the money coming in is mine.

Twenty years ago I wrote an essay entitled Green Houses or Blue Moon Waves in which I discussed the work of the marine scientist Otto Pettersson. My sole source was a book first published in 1950 entitled The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. My manuscript remains unpublished but I included the Otto Pettersson section in The Art of Fine Publishing which I posted onto my website last year.

However Otto Pettersson's work remains unknown buried with the object of his research at the bottom of the Skaggerak. A year ago I did a Google search which confirmed his obscurity and prompted me to write away to Oslo University for more information about the gentleman and his work. Today’s search came back with 415 references to this great scientist. And my comments were right up there on the top page in fifth position.

The background to this tale is that while browsing in the Ashford County Library I chanced across a Rachel Carson book published in 1968 by MacGibbon & Kee entitled The Sea. The book was a 3-in-1 reprint of The Sea Around Us, Under the Sea-Wind written in 1941 and The Edge of the Sea published in 1955.

Under the Sea-Wind was not a success. It enjoyed excellent reviews but few readers. But then ten years later in 1951 came The Sea Around Us and instant success. Between one spring tide and the next Rachel Carson was world-famous and being showered with honours. The book remained high on the best-seller lists for eighty-six weeks and was translated into thirty languages.

There were two interesting side-effects. Firstly Under the Sea-Wind was reprinted in America and published for the first time in Britain. But for the triumph of The Sea Around Us this remarkable book would have remained gathering dust in the basements of a few American public libraries. Secondly her success brought Rachel Carson the financial independence essential for the research and writing of Silent Spring...and about this book the introduction to The Sea had this to say:

'There can be few literate people who have not heard of Rachel Carson. Her last book Silent Spring sounded a tocsin round the world prompting governments in many countries to restrict the use of pesticides. It has been given to few women, other than the mistresses of emperors and kings, so to influence governments. It has been given to no other woman to do so through the medium of a book.'

The mid-Victorians delighted in regarding Nature as ‘raw in tooth and claw’. It made them feel better as they bulldozed their way through the countryside. Of course the tooth and claw are real enough. On my way through Mynachlog-ddu yesterday morning the birds of prey were out in force perched atop the telegraph poles. Too small to be eagles. Buzzards perhaps. I am a bad birdwatcher and can only do small garden birds. Birds of prey are something else.

The Cousteau and Attenborough ‘wonders of nature’ approach is more to my liking. Take the other wales for instance...the ones with an ‘h’. Before her demise in the shallow waters of the Thames Estuary Wilma would dive over a mile for her food...ten times deeper than Tanya Streeter the British world record-holder in free-diving. Here the pressure is 150 times as great as on the surface. The Northern bottlenoses treat the dive as a matter of course. How do they do it?

I left for town at two to catch the afternoon performance of The Constant Gardener. In many ways this was the perfect film. The photography was stunning. The film is set against the backdrop of the little known northern tracts of Kenya beyond Marsabit around Lake Rudolf and the Ethiopian and Sudanese borders. This wilderness setting is seen in sharp contrast to urban Nairobi where a high-rise Western-style downtown of Hilton hotels and imperial embassies jostles uncomfortably alongside Kibera, the largest squatter settlements in Africa with its poverty and Aids, its vibrant colours and tragic destitution. The film pulls few punches and you come out feeling you have been given a glimpse of true African reality.

The film has been put up for a whole raft of awards and there has been little attempt to sabotage its distribution. The same remark can be made about The Lord of War. This suggests a new policy. The basic John Le Carré plot is built around the murder of Rachel Weisz who plays a social activist on the trail of an evil drug company falsifying its research results to fast-track a new tuberculosis vaccine and save billions of research pounds by bringing the drug to the world markets three years early. Hundreds of poor impoverished Kenyans lose their lives and are buried in unmarked graves along the way. After Rachel gets herself murdered Ralph Fiennes her widowed husband takes up her cause and ends up dead as well.

So we have a dark plot in which both hero and heroine fail to make it to the end of the film...officially she is killed by bandits and he commits suicide. Christopher Booker would place the story squarely in the tragedy category...The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories...has a typical Le Carré twist in the tale in his portrayal of the British Government and their stupidity agencies in the conspiracy. The film’s ending is built around the Westminster Abbey memorial service where, from the pulpit, Rachel’s cousin reads out a top-secret letter from Bill Nighty...a Foreign Office diplomat who slinks away in his chauffeur-driven Daimler as the credits roll.

I read Le Carré’s book when it came out several years ago and this ending feels wrong...too neat and contrived. Suddenly the evil is not corporate but personal...a rogue diplomat to be dutifully scape-goated off camera later. Even the evil corporation gets its come-uppance. But Le Carré doesn’t sanitise his plots for the comfort of The Establishment. I must read the book again.

I have some concerns about proposals for the September conference. When I got home I dug out some early copies of Fourth World Review from 1985 and typed up the announcement of the fourth Fourth World Assembly in FWR nr.9...we are now on nr.136. ‘...this year our path has been wonderfully smoothed by the far-sighted generosity of Radhakrishna, the Secretary of The Gandhi Peace Foundation...cables: satyagraha, New Delhi'. There were to be eight forums: 1. Human Scale Economics; 2. Politics and Community Empowerment; 3. Communications; 4. Ecology and Bioregionalism; 5. Urban Life; 6. War, Non-Violence and Community Power; 7. Ethnic People and Decolonisation in Asia; and 8. Village Development.

Aah! Mr Gandhi and satyagraha...passive resistance or civil disobedience. In today’s one-world government by fear Mr Gandhi wouldn’t last five minutes. Nowadays assassination is done pre-emptively...and is a fully privatised service. Have you noticed the gaping flaw in the film script? Right. Bill Nighty Letters never get written. There are no smoking guns or deep throats...just walks in the woods and knowing nods exchanged over brandy after dinner at the club. The only paper trails are the ones laid for entrapment by the Stupidity Services.

Petra Karin Lehmann was born in Bavaria in 1947 and lived in the US from 1959 to 1970. She changed her name to Kelly after her mother married an American Army officer. She was educated in a Roman Catholic convent in Günzburg and attended high school in Georgia. An admirer of Martin Luther King she graduated from the School of International Service at the American University in Washington DC in 1970 and worked at the European Commission in Brussels from 1971 to 1983.

Petra Kelly was one of the founders of Die Grünen, the German Green Party. Between 1983 and 1990, she was a member of the Bundestag for the Greens. She received Jacob von Uexkull’s Right Livelihood Award in 1982 "...for forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice and human rights." In 1992 she was murdered in Bonn.

The Investigating Authorities decided her partner ex-NATO general Gert Bastian shot her and then killed himself. Nobody else believes a word of this official cover-up. In the words of her friend, the Dalai Lama: "Petra Kelly was a committed and dedicated person with compassionate concern for the oppressed, the weak and the persecuted in our time. Her spirit and legacy of human solidarity and concern continue to inspire and encourage us all." I wish! Actually she has been completely forgotten. It would have been nice if The Constant Gardener had been dedicated to Petra Kelly.

Yesterday I let some fresh air into the place by throwing open the windows. One of them is set in the roof as a skylight...lovely word...and got forgotten. This morning when I woke up at seven the bird song was pouring in. I tried to bottle it. I like living close to nature...well close-ish. Oscar Wilde has his own take on this...in his essay on Socialism if I remember aright...he was for it on aesthetic grounds. Much of my past twelve years have been spent onboard a boat moored on a tidal river. Twice a day the boat gets lifted ten feet off the mud by the rising tide before being put gently back down again four hours later. This keeps me a-tuned to nature’s rhythms.

In principle I get up and go down with the sun. But at this time of the year this would mean a mighty short day. I cannot get my head around all this shifting back and forth of clocks. But today it was light by eight and dark by half past five. On the equator dawn and dusk happen. They are events. But in England and Wales dawn doesn’t so much happen as saunter up on you. It passes the time of day for a while and then plays herald to the real McCoy as the sun peeps up over the horizon. Spring and Autumn are like this too.

Nine hours of daylight means rather a lot of darkness. Manchester solved its urban darkness problem for a while by treating itself to gas lights in 1811. What good these did the Redcoats as they chased the Luddite insurgents up onto the moors is not immediately apparent. Another mystery is why the City of London felt the need to persuade the politicians to deploy the largest army ever seen in this country against them. Interesting.

But before Thomas Edison and the wonders of electricty much of the world’s lighting needs were looked after by the nearest whale population. Suicide bombers in their own way, sacrificing themselves so Man could see. Whale oil fuelled the lamps of the gentry. It is a wonder there was not more pressure on the whale population.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the population of England & Wales was ten million. Now it tops the fifty million mark despite regular spates of carnage on foreign battle fields. The absentees were not abroad administering The British Empire either. The Scots did that for their English masters. Plus ca change plus la meme chose. Today the Scottish want-to-be-Prime Minister Gordon Brown wraps himself in the British Union flag in the vain hope that the English will accept the idea of being ruled by a minority dialect wielded by four million far-northerners with special parliamentary priveleges. Yet another bubble that will surely burst.

Not that the Celts’ English masters have changed much. They will still be found in the gaming clubs of The City and St James. They no longer waste their afternoons in Westminster or Whitehall. As Tony Benn famously declared when retiring from the Houses of Parliament. ‘I am retiring as an MP to go into politics!’

But who is calling the shots? Some claim that nobody is and this is the real problem. The argument is that the ruling classes lost the plot with The Kaiser War and Spaceship Earth has been on automatic pilot for the past hundred years...heading for oblivion. These people tell us the world needs a hefty dose of control if our course is to be reset for utopia. This is one possible reading of William Engdahl’s book. Who? Whom? as usual.

Our 20-foot northern bottlenose whale ended her days in the Thames. This could have been her intention. Whales do beach themselves when they are sick. But the auditory stress from the papparazzis’ motor launches would not have improved the young lady’s chances. She got as far as the pagoda in Battersea Park before heading back for a reunion with her distraught mother thirty miles away in Southend. She never made it.

She might have been better off in 1240 when her demise would have been short and swift. Our chronicles report that in this year a monster of prodigious size swam under London Bridge pursued by a rabble of sailors armed with ropes, bows and arrows. They killed this poor lad at Mortlake near Chiswick Bridge. Another one got stranded near Dagenham during a storm in 1658 and caused the death of Oliver Cromwell the next day. Don’t mock! Everyone believed in omens back then. And as omens go, stranded whales are not glad tidings.

I took today off although my e-mail got checked and a few other things got done...like chopping wood and expressing my interest in an apartment in Lund at £250 a month. I also figured out how the Amazon Marketplace works and e-mailed Clive Ogden to give me details of half a dozen books by Romney Marsh writers to run a pilot. The Daily Mail are in the middle of a two-week give-away of Classic Detective DVDs but I need to take my tokens to W.H.Smith in Cardigan. While in town I did some printing and bought my ticket for The Constant Gardener. Wine, pizza and Hetty Wainthropp for dinner.

Here is some whale lore to round off today’s weblog. Northern bottlenoses spend three quarters of their time in deep water and dive a mile for food. In one week bottlenoses eat their own body weight in squid, cuttlefish, starfish and herring. They can hold their breath for up to two hours at a time. But apparently they don’t sleep as they lack the automatice programmes we depend on to keep our breathing going while asleep...which begs more questions than it answers.

Today I created a weblog for The Etherden Clan so that research by individual members of the clan can be made more readily available for others over the web. You will find it at http://etherden.blog.co.uk. I started it up with an email exchange I have been conducting this week with Jane Hammond, a fourth cousin living in Nottingham. I rather like it. It has a nice feel about it. I emailed the posting to Mike Slavin in Rye Harbour who is creating a personal history record for villagers past and present. The blogging technology looks ideal.

Wall Street shares went into a tail-spin today and lost two percent of their price...value is something else. The financial press reported ‘unsettled markets’ as oil prices topped 68 dollars a barrel after a ‘purported threat’ by Al-Qaeda fueled worries about ‘potential supply disruptions in Iran and Nigeria’. Much more significant were the glad tidings that a whale was swimming around in the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament. The clean-up of air and water in London is one of the great unheralded successes of the 20th century.

Another great unheralded success of the 20th century is Anton Pinschof. I am bullying him into weblogging himself. A Pinschof gem came in today on the subject of executive power...in response to an e-mail exchange originating with Living Economies in New Zealand. ‘Your contention,’ Toni wrote, ‘that the solution lies in eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the wielders of power, is patently false, as historical experience must surely have proved. Plenty of worthy individuals, including prime ministers and heads of state, spoke to Hitler & Stalin and were hoodwinked and ignored and did not understand what they were up against.’

Anton Pinschof continues. ‘When an individual wields power, that power dominates him as well as the rest of us. It is the hierarchical power behind the decision-maker that counts, not truth or morality or anything else. The other obvious example is the way the rich & powerful are rarely obliged to listen to unarmed & powerless people. How many unarmed citizens demonstrated against the second Iraq War before it began?

‘The same is true of the anonymous behaviour of big business. When did you ever hear of citizens stopping yet another supermarket from parachuting in on some small town that already had two? The decisions were not announced, and were made hundreds of miles away in unaccountable boardrooms, long before the site was acquired and long before we had gotten used to the second supermarket. If a municipality has three already, a fourth supermarket will sprout by a roundabout on the edge of town, just over the boundary in the next parish, whose council will discreetly pocket the local taxes.

‘In my own experience in Brussels, the Agriculture Kommissars' underlings will every time surprise us with crazy proposals (on organic agriculture legislation) completely contradicting what the movement has been telling them for years. Why? because hierarchical power cannot NOT be wielded, once it has been accumulated, and before it is wielded, it listens to all the other invested influences that are more powerful than any original movements that might have constituted an historical initiative in the first instance. The fact that the influence is exerted behind the procedural façade is an integral part of the situation. Not only is a relationship impossible, but the realisation that we have been manipulated causes enough frustration and mutual recrimination to destroy the unity of the grass roots movement concerned.’

Academic Inn Books has half a dozen titles in Books in Print. Seven years ago I signed up for a fax-based telephone ordering service that Whitakers...the almanac and ISBN people...were running. I was working closely with David Neame at the time so arranged for Neame Designs in Rye to receive the faxes. It worked well until David retired last year. But no longer. Last year Nielsen...the market research people...bought out the Whitaker’s service and set it up on the internet as BookNet Web. Today Academic Inn Books signed up so I can now log in and collect my book orders online in the same way that I collect my webmail.

I must be moving soon as I have established a working routine. This is actually the bane of my peripatetic life style. It takes weeks to create routines...then I move on and have to start over again. Five minutes walk away from me is my platonic ideal of a river. It is 10-15 yards wide and rushes between slatecliffs tumbling and falling over itself in whirlpools and eddies as it dashes towards the sea many miles away. High above the little river is a footbridge one person wide. When I have a homeday I wander up the hill to the river after finishing my morning’s work and scramble around the slate workings on the far side. Heaven cannot get much better.

Eight hours after being cut open oranges have lost a fifth of their Vitamin C. I don’t believe in the vitamin industry. No doubt my scepticism will be confirmed when I watch The Constant Gardener on Sunday.

A dawn text from Sweden for the latest money situation. January month end is looming...always a hard one for small businesses after the traditionally heavy withdrawals to fund the family’s year end festivities. There are a couple of big invoices due into our bank account on this side of the German Sea. We did some speech writing for the Chief Executive Officer of TeliaSonera in November and some voiceover work for a Dutch firm in the two weeks leading up to Christmas. Both these jobs were billed through William Franklin.

We also did some scripting and voiceover work in December for a Stockholm media company working on a military product film. There was a time when we refused to take on military assignments but nowadays everything is contaminated so we just bid high so we come out being pleased whichever way it goes. Charge the bastards until their shiny brass pips squeak is our motto.

The purpose of the film was to sell Swedish electricity grids and generators to mercenaries around the world. The Swedes have an impressive imperial record...from Huskvarna to Bofors...of trading arms to all sides in every conflict. It is time to get off the backs of the Germans and Japanese and start looking at the lies the victorious English and the neutral Swedes are peddling about their wars and empires.

As with sanctions and oil for food deals, the ethical issues are complicated. Food, water, energy and medicines are never neutral. Ruling regimes use them as weapons to reward and punlish sullen populations. Denying supplies is not much different to going in with guns blazing. Children don’t get to choose how they die. Civil servants, bankers and company executives have many different ways to kill innocent people...and should be strung up for all of them. Democracy is the discriminator.

Tony Benn has five little democratic questions. Here from his autobiography Dare To Be A Daniel: ‘...if one meets a powerful person - Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates - ask them five questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interest do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’ If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.’ The Peace Party has to find ways to wield this weapon of discernment in the real world. Here is Roo's Tale from the 158th chapter of The Private Papers of Crocodile Uppsala.

Wally suggested I should have a chat with his Dad about the old times. Well, one thing led to another as one things do, so that before I knew it, I was reading about A.A.Milne who had introduced Roo to us when he was very young and still living in Kanga's pouch...Kanga was his mum though it is a little confused. Milne had four highly successful careers after surviving the war to end wars. He was editor of Punch and then a very successful playright before he won world-wide acclaim with Winnie The Pooh. He then spent a year writing 'Peace With Honour'...which vied with Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' in the best seller lists of the 1930s.

In his Ten Million-And Forty chapter Milne explored the war convention by asking what would happen were 'certain people assured that, if there were another war in Europe on the scale of the last war, they themselves would be the first victims of it.' He then selected his victims...and he was writing in 1934. Mussolini, Hitler, Goering and Goebbels head the list. They got their comeuppance but a little late in the day.

Turning to England Milne selected four politicians...MacDonald, Baldwin, Simon and Churchill; two unnamed generals and two unnamed directors of armament firms...chosen by lot; and four media moguls...Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, and the Editors of The Times and The Morning Post. France would furnish a corresponding equality of victims. 'Now here are forty people who are all going to die as a preliminary to the next war.' writes Milne. 'Are the chances of another war lessened?' Good question. 'Peace With Honour' is an excellent statement of a practical pacifist strategy...and Milne is on the right track.

If the War Party demands the right to wage ‘pre-emptive war’ then the Peace Party must counter with their own demands for ‘pre-emptive peace’ as part of a broader strategy. Over the 2004 Christmas holiday I reflected on the absence of any coherent strategy within the social justice movement for eliminating killingry. In order to work, such a strategy must be grounded in an understanding of the mechanisms being manipulated.

Here is where the Peace Party should be heading: (1) persuading power opinion behind the killingry delivery process (land mines, cluster bombs etc.); (2) bankrupting firms producing weapons of mass and individual destruction (factory by factory); (3) destroying the budgets that keep missiles in their silos and standing armies polluting local life and (4) making the killingry business unprofitable for financial and commercial intermediaries. As a project it looks as hopeless as the abolition of slavery...and may involve comparable time-frames. However uncovering the monetary patronage and the power mechanisms that drive the development, acquisition and deployment of killingry is the key.

Lost in the dim distant mists of time is my Fawlty Towers period. From 1982 to 1984 I was the proprietor of the Forest Garden Guest House in Cambridge Massachusetts. Many visiting scholars from the far-flung corners of the American Empire...Vermont and North Carolina...will have happy memories of their Forest Street lodgings and their walks to Harvard Square. Constanza Leal-Melo will be a part of those memories.

In 1980 I started working with Dr Ed Klugman at Wheelock College in Boston. Ed and his wife Hertha are two of the nicest people you would ever wish to meet and for a few years I was treated more like an adopted son than a colleague. We went sailing together out of Gloucester and worked hard to put some oomph back into the New England branch of the World Education Fellowship.

Dr Klugman was Professor of Early Childhood Education and in those days Wheelock College was vying with the top college in New York for the Number One slot in teacher training and further education. Empowerment was our thing. Out of our collaboration came a journal Take Charge and a graduate summer course at Solviva Gardens in West Tidsbury on Martha’s Vineyard The Ecology of Learning. Constanza was studying under Professor Klugman and jumped at the offer of accommodation in exchange for such services as running the Bed & Breakfast microbusiness. She did a wonderful job and we have stayed in touch ever since.

Constanza‘s father runs the top-notch Gimnasio Jose Joaquin in Bogota Colombia and her aunt runs the girls’ school. Constanza had arrived at Wheelock College as part of her grooming for the family business. But her Roman Catholic Triple Goddess had other ideas. She married an Oxford Graduate from the North-East of England and has devoted her time and energy to the nurturing and education of their three children, Gabriela (14), Christina (13) and Nicholas (9). I watch from afar and expect something interesting in the years ahead.

Nicholas took on his mortal coils on the very day that the intrepid Crocodile Uppsala reached his eleventh birthday. The family live in Mexico City...and live has a whole meaning all of its own after Nicholas barely survived a lethal urban illness three years ago. I probably saved his life. When things were at their worst I went into Västerås Cathedral and gave Constanza’s Catholic God a bit of my mind. Nicholas’ recovery dates from that moment. I was seriously annoyed with the gods anyway as they had just taken Connie from me without so much as a ‘by your leave’ or a ‘would you mind awfully’. In fact bloody furious would be closer to the mark.

Anyway to cut a long story short, Heidi once mentioned to me her dream of South America and my daughter has been telling me about the time she met the Bolivian President-elect Evo Morales in Cochabamba. ‘A true man-of-the-people!’ So since I’m in the ‘dreams come true’ business...can I fix it - yes I can...yesterday Bill the Builder dropped a line to Constanza that went like this.

‘I am organising myself to be in Rye for February and March; in Malmö, Sweden from April to September; in Rye again briefly in October and then in Tucson Arizona from November 2006 to February 2007. Susan is talking about driving me there from Boston and I might just take her up on it. Susan's son Mischa has just got married and is living in Tempe which is just round the corner from Tucson by American standards (ie a few hours drive away) so I might end up in Tempe instead of Tucson. I would love to come and see you in Mexico City or even better in Bogotá from March 2007 onwards. Am I too old to teach English at Gimnasio Jose Joaquin Casas in 2007? I could get the whole school writing weblogs in English.’

Up at seven. Weblogging until ten. Away to Cardigan by half past ten. By midday I am sitting in Celinis eating toast and drinking coffee...with everything I need to do in town done. Back home by 1430. A brief flirtation with P-mode. But I am on a roll. Come three o’clock I am racing for the post office in Clunderwen with my letter for Jord Arbete Kapital in Skövde. I now know it closes at midday. But I had got myself a eurostamp in town and only wanted a Certificate of Posting. Forget it. What are post boxes for anyway?

Please pretty please let me have 75 000 kronor on Friday 24th February. Repayments of 3500 kronor a month will do nicely. That is £250 at the current exchange rate of 14 but £350 at the rate I expect for the krona by the end of the year. Take it from my Working Tax Credit of £277 per month.

Like the Soros, Bufferts and Goldsmiths of this world I need to hedge my bets by buying £ 7500 of Swedish Kronor Futures contracts...at fourteen kronor to the pound. Spread-betting lets me do this without forking out the money. A Nick Leeson One-Way Bet. Have you spotted the flaw? A crash in the Swedish Krona. Is this the end of the world? I don’t think so. A petition for personal bankruptcy would see me back on the trading floor again a year later. Besides portfolios are for spreading the spread betting risks. Not all my bets will be bad ones. And then there are stop losses. Have you heard about them? Another time.

I first met John Papworth 25 years ago on the day of Prince Charles’ wedding to the princess Diana. We were on the other side of The City of London at the first Fourth World Assembly. Kirkpatrick Sale was there waving his Human Scale at the assembled company while Ivan Illich was going on about leather belts and falling asleep in the education forum...Deschooling Society was his current hit.

Human Scale is one of the movement’s half a dozen sacred books. The others are The Breakdiown of Nations by Leopld Kohr, E.F.Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered, John Seymour’s Complete Handbook of Self Sufficiency, John Papworth’s Small is Powerful and Ivan Illich’s collected works (Convivial Tools, Gender, Medical Nemisis etc). Edward Goldsmith’s Blueprint for Survival also deserves a mention as he increasingly puts his considerable intellectual weight behind the human scale solution.

Behind the conference scenes in the summer of 1981, Toni Pinschof and Nicholas Albery were performing miracles keeping the whole show together after Jill Tweedie had transformed its prospects by publishing an article in The Guardian a few days beforehand. Between four and five hundred people attended. Numbers have been declining every since as the reformists at the green end of the alternative movement peel off and head for the suburbs and the liberal democrat camp..and toil away to become something in government or the city.

Meanwhile our radical rumps found the eddies of modern life taking us ever further into the weeds. Schumacher might have thought it a good idea to put up his sail on the theory that when the wind blew it would take his little vessel into a sane humane ecological future. But if you are stuck in the weeds it is going to take one devil of a hooly to move you at all. Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn and The African Queen spring to mind. I am not keen on the Schumacher metaphor. At the mercy of the elements is no way to act on the world.

Twenty years later in September 2001, abandoned to our unhappy fate by the Jonathon Porritts and Jakob von Uexkulls of this political world we mustered less than a hundred souls for our gathering in Swindon. But John Seymour, Edward Goldsmith and Kirkpatrick Sale were there. Nonetheless history will report the conference as the most significant happening of the week...despite the collapse of a couple of tall buildings on the other side of the North Atlantic. Did we do that? Queer place this universe of ours.

John is a very demanding colleague so I choose to stride manfully in and out of his political life. The theory is that in this way I retain my sanity and avoid activist burn-out. We worked closely together in 2001 organising the Radical Consultation so my 4-year sabbatical was well-deserved. But whether or not I used it well only time will tell. It was either extended bereavement leave or a shrewd outflanking operation.

As we limber up for this year’s conference there is a general staking out of positions going on. This exchange captures some of the flavour. John to whoever it may concern: '...Peter Cadogan has come up with a proposal for every neighbourhod to have its own local news-sheet/magazine. I have actually started one, but it is bloody hard work and needs a local team effort to put it on a secure basis.'

My response: ‘...uncharitable souls could satirise your position within the alternative movement by saying that the reformists (95%) write to their MP, the papworth radicals (4.95%) write to their local newspaper...and kirk sale's ecohysterians (0.05%) beam weblogs to each other from behind the barricades of their electronic cottages. What was it Stalin said about the divisions the Pope commanded?

For good measure I added: ‘...I am probably the only one of your recipients that understood the bloody hard work bit of your remark. I put out the Rye Harbour Boat Owner Association's magazine for three years and had enough trouble coping with two or three issues a year...and I managed only one issue of the highly acclaimed local Private Eye broadsheet The Mudlark before giving it up as a mug's game.

A few things done today after completion of weblog duties. My IG-Index account is now up 'n running and looking forward to its first influx of hard-borrowed money for dabbling in currency futures. Company accounts for Edward Elgar Publishing Limited are mine for the downloading after registering with Companies House WebCHeck, my direct debit to BT has been cancelled and my 2002 review of Creating Money by James Robertson is winging its merry way to Living Economies in New Zealand.

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in the evening in Notorious. A quick e-mail check and then to bed. A rejoinder in from the redoubtable Reverend John Papworth. ‘The Pope is reported to have replied, “Marshal Stalin has his divisions in this world; he will meet mine in the next”.’

Here beginneth the sixteenth epistle of the Mad Blogger of Carmarthen... Kirkpatrick Sales’s epithet. Up at eight after a blustery night and spent the first five minutes wrestling with the Llaeth Llawn. If blue tits can find there way into milk bottles on suburban doorsteps then surely it shouldn’t be this hard to open the milk. Llaeth Llawn means whole milk. Ten minutes later with mission accomplished and muesli consumed I settled down at my desk to the strains of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The D Major one was the only one he wrote.

Ludwig brought five work-thoughts scurrying across my mind. My Swedish trip came in at number four. I had decided over the weekend that I would be renting a place in Malmo or Lund from the beginning of April to the end of September and would probably take a trip to Sweden in February to talk with people in Lund.

A newletter has been winging its way to me from Lund University over the internet for the past few months. Rooms, houses and apartments are available at half English rents and two or three come up every week in Lund or in Malmo...often for immediate letting with pretty flexible dates. My enquiries told me that accommodation would not be a problem. The next task was lining up money for the trip.

Over the past few years I have accumulated almost 60 000 ‘sparpoäng’ with the Swedish bank JAK. Members can borrow interest-free up to a hundred thousand Swedish kronor...a little over £7000...without old aunts getting wheeled out as guarantors or the family silver going into hock. With this money in mind I had set up internet banking before Christmas. Time to test my brand spanking new ‘personligkod’. It worked a treat. But loan applications could not be done online. So this was put off to another day.

Two of the other work-thoughts bouncing around my head were about year-end statements. I like to get these out by mid-January and had two left to do...Cultura and the Magpie Sagas. I had all the data at my elbow but somewhat irresponsibly...and not without a slight twinge of guilt...I passed these by on the other side. My other two work-thoughts were awesome in their scope but this weblog can cope.

With a conference looming now was a good time for a piece on my political views. I accept the main thrust of the arguments for a return to the human scale in the affairs of man. But I see no way this can happen this side of a collapse of civilization unless the root causes of giantism and centralisation are understood.

Samuel Pepys was at the heart of the action at the tail end of the 17th century when Dutch double-entry book-keeping tricks came to London town. I see how it’s gone since 1694 when the Bank of England Corporation set up shop in Threadneedle Street. In Lund my interest is the finances of the Hanseatic towns in a world before central banking. My book will be called A New History of Banking. The book will be in three parts. I: From Hansa to Houblon; II: From Houblon to Holocaust; and III: From Holocaust to Holobolo. No. Don’t ask! All will be revealed at the appointed hour.

Work-thought five was a piece on the right size of schools. Towns would be much better if planning started with the alleyways and not the motorways. By the same token schools would be much better if things were turned around. Start with the customer...the children not the teachers...and assume a basic right to walk or cycle to school. Here is your criteria for the new 21st century schooling infrastructure.

Mere fleeting thoughts before getting down to my weblog for Sunday 15th January 2006. Like today two hours had cracked it so I was finished by ten. But that was only the first draft. After that comes the tidying up, the posting to the web and the link research. By 1130 I was through with blogging for the day. Time to move. I took out the compost, took the car for a drive to the local store, slipped down the road to the local cafe for a coffee and a read of the newspaper, popped next door for a couple of buckets of ash for the toilet and then devoted a quarter of an hour to the joyful task of chopping wood.

In the afternoon an e-letter went off to Toni Pinschof abourt cesc weblogs and, in my capacity as a Contributing Editor to Fourth World Review two suggested articles went off to the editor for the next issue...an article on Secession by Kirk Sale discovered on the Middlebury Institute website and a piece about the Assymetry of Scale from The Characters of Physical Laws by Richard P. Feynman found lurking one click away from the Energy Morphology section of my article on Energy Wars.

A phone conversation with Francoise de Naillat who ran an up-market restaurant in Étaple with her husband Anton many years ago. Much amused upon hearing the thought that ‘I’m not suffering from insanity...I’m enjoying every minute of it’, Francoise felt the urge to text it to me. Why she should think of me I can’t imagine. Chicken Tikka Masala and an evening with Inspector Morse on DVD rounded off my day.

Four hours is devoted to each of my weblogs. Today I wrote two so blogging took up a hefty chunk of my day. I take care over weblinks. These get added after saving the link-less first post to the blogsite. This week I will try to do all forty of the week’s links in a single session over the weekend. I work to a rigid one-page format, writing my 900 words and then copying and pasting to the web. I have to concentrate. I would not fancy having people around. And only Bach, Beethoven or Mozart will do as background music...and not from Classical FM with its intrusive upper crust advertising.

Today I worked on Friday’s weblog from 0700 to 1200 and on Saturday’s from 1230 to 1530. I have delivered a daily weblog for two weeks and made fifteen postings...the first one...What People Do All Day...setting the scene. I have found it immensely satisfying. So yes Virginia you could say that I write for myself. But this means I will continue to write 900 words a day for the rest of the year...to prove I can.

My time I will always have. We use a tiny portion of the powers the gods give us. To sacrifice a fifth of my daily waking time to art (and science) for an eightieth part of my life is hardly excessive...equivalent to a day of my life averaged over a lifetime. This is heartbeat economics. I am counting on three billion heart beats...70 per minute for 100 000 beats a day multiplied by 365 days in a year and by the 80 years of my life...if I am not cut down at the height of my powers (between 60 and 80 when wisdom sets in).

But my health? Aye, there’s the rub! People get struck down without warning. Why should I be spared? Already I have claimed fifty percent more than the gods allotted to Mozart. Surely I am well above quota? For a writer health is not just the absence of disease. Writer’s block is complicated. A writer needs the active presence of wellness. Without it creation is impossible. Wellness nurtures the muscles in the brain that direct the attention and lock in the creative force...see Arthur Koestler’s Art of Creation and Colin Wilson’s Outsider.

I matched my double helping of weblogs with two films...and too much pizza. I need to share meals to keep slim. I buy the same amount for one as for two.I should make the food last for two days. The arithmetic of calories-in by eating to calorories-out by exercise is alarming. On the credit side there is half a chocolate bar in the fridge. You guessed. I forgot about it. Garfield would be ashamed of me. Confessional over. Now films.

It was a filthy day. Bucketing down all day. My diary said ‘Private 2000’. The entry had been made several weeks ago. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what it meant but the time suggested Theatr Mwldan. I was right...a showing of an Italian film by Saverio Constanzo about a Palestinian family whose home is forceably occupied by Israeli soldiers. This type of docudrama is worth a thousand newspaper articles to me. I like the anecdotal.

George Galloway’s book ‘I’m Not The Only One’ had got me interested in the Palestinian issue. My daughter found it heavy going and couldn’t finish it but I liked what I read enough to send a copy to Toni Pinschof remarking that Benn and Galloway were the only MPs that seemed to have much idea. Heidi had also inadvertently raised my consciousness. She has a map of the West Bank on her kitchen wall.

But driving thirty miles in the pouring rain in the middle of the night was not something to relish. So it was with relief that I saw there was a 1730 showing...at least this meant I could drive one way in the light. I may be showing my age here but I no longer enjoy driving at night. So off I went just as the rain finally stopped.

Private taught me a lot...and it was cleverly done. The menace of violence hangs over the film...personal violence that is...there is plenty of violence off stage...gun fire...helicopter gun ships etc. I was bracing myself for it...but personal violence never actually came to the screen or into the script...the menace sufficed. This is a theatrical trick Hollywood has forgotten...applies to sex as well. This thought lay behind an earlier weblog remark that battles would be more effective on film if reported Shakespearian fashion instead of shown.

Personalising the political...as Private does...is one key part of Peace Party strategy. Mockery of the War Party is another. Both are necessary but not sufficient. Others can go to Palestine and Iraq and get themselves killed just like an earlier generation went to Spain in 1936...see Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I admire and respect them. But this is not for me. My focus is to understand the root cause of the War Party’s ascendence and then work with others to create strategies for its demise.

The Sane Alternative by James Robertson has been on my recommended reading list for 25 years. It has the right approach to strategies for moving from a Hyperexpanionist future to a Sane Humane Ecological future. I dislike the gender implications but that discussion is for another day. Back home to Penny Serenade and pizza...with a couple of glasses of red wine on the side...a bottle of wine I can leave half-finished.

Overnight an oblique response had wafted across the Severn Estuary from Ye Olde Purton Farmhouse amidst the Wilds of Wiltshire overlooking the Somerset Levels. The morning was spent crafting my reaction. At midday the missive was fired at a satellite winging its way over the Azores in the hope that it would bounce off and end up in Kirkpatrick Sale’s residence at Cold Springs in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was a trifle dodgy as my web sources had warned me of a 100% probability of snow in Icy Springs and rain all next week.

My Wednesday weblog mentioned The War Against Chaos, a science fiction novel by Anita Mason published in 1988. This quote provides an insight into the political philosophy underpinning these weblogs. ‘...it was possible to attach labels to this evil and call it the Company or the Government, but that was misleading because another Company and another Government would be of the same nature. The evil was inherent in their very structure; anything which assumed the same structure would thereby take on the evil. And what was evil in the structure was that it was a structure for controlling...the Government’s supreme task was to preserve the State as a governable entity.’ Not what governments and companies do but what they are.

My worry is that the September 2006 Conference will end up as just a glorified book launch for Village Democracy as the present proposal is really a Fourth World Assembly under the radcon brand name. We should be more ambitious. Still all is not lost. I have two brain cells...and each had a thought.

Brain Cell One had the idea of building a radical agenda around the ideas in Village Democracy taking John Papworth’s new book as the departure point. The book's chapter headings are: 1. The Global Crisis: 2. War Democracy & Morality; 3. Mass Politics; 4. Which Path?; 5. Making Local Government Local; 6. Resolving the Problem of War; 7. Mass Communication; 8. The Democratic Deficit; 9. Survival.

We would set up a group within the conference forum structure to produce a New Testament to Papworth’s Old Testament. I’m not called shepherd for nothing. Heidi and Anton would get the Europeans involved and in this way foreign language editions would get published in 2007 with both the new and the old testaments.

John Papworth has often been likened to an Old Testament prophet. Here was his chance. His book tours could be smash hits if they came complete with Charles Dickens-style readings from his book and renditions of the works of Shakespeare and Tennyson. Heidi and I were treated to the Death of King Arthur and chunks of Macbeth and Julius Caesar during our Christmas visit to Purton.

Brain Cell Two thought that a closed forum...by invitation only...for left-wing dissident radicals working to the Kirkpatrick Sale agenda for America and Britain in a New Century might come up with something. In the conference 2006 context the group would produce a minority report...but this heresy would become the radical orthodoxy ten years hence. The forum's real task would be to deliver a think-tank that begins to address Cantonisation in the same way that Radcon II delivered the Middlebury Institute to focus on Secession.

The first task of the new institute would then be to negotiate with a co-sponsor like the Churchill Archives at Churchill College at Cambridge University or with Nottingham University at Ningbo for an academic conference on Cantonisation in September 2007 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the creation of Leopold Kohr’s 20th century classic The Breakdown of Nations.

It was a nice day and I should have taken myself out running. But I had allocated my next nice day to changing wheels on the Peugeot 106. When I took over the car there was no air in the spare wheel. Then I picked up a puncture coming down the track to the cottage on Boxing Day. With bank holidays in all directions and a three hundred mile round trip to Purton scheduled between Christmas and New Year this constituted a crisis...and one of my own making. I should have fixed the spare weeks before. No matter. Never mind (as the philosophers say). Stuff happens (as the poets say).

The long and short of it was that I ended up changing wheels in Purton when one of the two repairs failed. But by the time Heidi ‘left village’ I had five good tyres...four of them almost new. The trouble was they were in the wrong places and a dose of wheel rotation was called for. The car park at Caffi Beca was the designated spot...not least because it guaranteed a coffee afterwards. At midday rotation occurred. Target state achieved.

I closed down AppleWorks & Safari at 2100 hours and switched over to my Apple Mac Mini’s DVD-Player. The Mail and the Express are vying for punters...luring their unsuspecting victims to their papers by bribing them with DVDs. It works. Carry Grant & Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday tonight...with pizza and red wine on the side. And a repeat performance tomorrow with Irene Dunne & Cary Grant in Penny Serenade.

The scribblings on my yellow Post-it note remind me that it rained all day. Wales finally living up to her reputation. I wrote a dozen e-mails...half of them about Good Yacht Guide orders. In Captain Corelli’s Mandolin John Hurt talks to Penelope Cruz about love and marriage. I recall the actors' names and not the characters played. True love, which he contrasts with romantic love, comes from intertwining your lives. Long-term relationships are best approached in this spirit...and own-workers have more opportunities.

Heidi is looking after the Good Yacht Guide microbusiness while I am in County Dyfed. However online credit card orders come into my William Franklin PayPal account. These get passed on to Heidi as we print on demand from a local printer in Rye. Today a Motorsailer order came in from Cardiff just down the road. There are four Good Yacht Guides: Large Yachts 34’ to 50’, Medium Yachts 27’ to 34’, Small Yachts up to 27’ and Motorsailers 20’-50’. It’s a bit arbitrary but works just fine. Complications end up on my desk too...like this one with an order from David Pottinger in the Orkney Islands. To process the credit card payment, Heidi brings up the webpage, clicks on credit card and fills in the form for the customer. PayPal looks after the rest. David turned out to have a PayPal account and the PayPal system was smart enough to know this from the Visa number. So the payment system defaulted to the PayPal account.

PayPal accounts are e-mail based but we don’t collect e-mail address data...although we will now ask if they have a PayPal account. After a few answering machine exchanges PayPal’s Receive Money System sent off an e-invoice for eighteen pounds to the Orkneys. The printer gets five pounds, Heidi gets three pounds, a pound goes on postage etc and PayPal take their percentage. This leaves half the money from a Motorsailer Guide to offset against other expenses. I no longer run an office so overheads are low. My rule of thumb after doubling prices in 2004 is that a third of the money received is profit. Heidi and I go halves on this so there will be another three pounds for her at the end of the quarter from this order. A nice little earner as DelBoy might say.

The rest of my morning was spent mulling over the September conference. Thoughts needed to be shared...and sooner rather than later. In three months it would be too late. Here is the text of Kirkpatrick Sale’s e-mail from 30/12-2005 which started things rolling. ‘...a mistake to go for a repeat of Radcon I, papers, sections, final statement, etc. In the first place, with a self-selected group, you get all these liberals...who think government is the solution, both Parliament and, eg, the Agriculture Ministry...Radcon I was full of that. The line of the meeting must be John's. It's not what they...let's say, governments and corporations...do but what they are...with conversations directed to that. In the second place, I didn't feel that we came out with that much workable stuff after Radcon I...strategies, things to do next, etc., and much of what there was was conventional politics. You might take a tack of trying to end with an organization dedicated to looking at the ‘What They Are’ issue, much as the Middlebury Institute came out of [the Vermont] conference [end of 2004] that said legislation, reform, party politics are out, rebellion and revolution will fail, the collapse is coming and where do we want to be, how do we want to live, secession seems to be the answer...’

John Papworth will be convening the conference and pulling in the money so my covering memo to him went like this: ‘Attached is a one-page note about the approach to the proposed September 2006 conference’. When my e-mails get too long I break them up into a covering memo and an attachment. I try to keep letters and memos to one page. When they start spreading over into lots of pages, I regroup, occasionally re-chapter and prepare a short report instead...anything from four pages to a hundred pages. Here are the highlights.

‘...I want a European rather than an Anglo-Saxon (Britain & America) focus for 'radcon three'...and it is here that I think Heidi would be a tremendous asset as she knows and gets on well with Toni Pinschof, has German as her mother tongue and (like Toni) understands both European and Anglo-Saxon political discourse. Attached is the current draft of ‘Oil Wars & The Politics of Killing People’ based on...the work of William Engdahl. In some form or other these will be going up on the cesc website in the next few weeks...[Toni is looking it over at the moment...mailed to him a couple of days back]...I (we) have no way of knowing whether or not William Engdahl's history is correct...I've ordered a copy of his book ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order’ and will be reviewing it for Fourth World Review.’

An afternoon drive into Cardigan for library, internet cafe, Chelinis and Tescos... suppliers of muesli and petrol. A chat on the phone with Clive Ogden on my return. Clive is the proprietor of Meads Books on Lion Street in Rye and is looking out for book storage for both of us...and a nice apartment for me. His remuneration will be in website services...he needs one! Clive survived Eastbourne College by the skin of his teeth and is one good woman away from coping with its aftershock: the real world. Land Girls provided my evening entertainment ...another of the love, marriage and meaning of life genre. Excellent.

I arrived at my desk early. It was still dark outside. The wind was howling in the trees. I cannot say how many tangents I took off on before finding my groove. I have written about my P & Q modes. Here is another. The R for ‘random’ mode. The next time I slip into R-mode I will record the twists and turns of my journey. But for now let it suffice to record that all of a sudden I hit the groove. After that it was full steam ahead until I disappeared down the hole in the middle three hours later. That metaphor shows my age because compact discs, unlike long-playing ‘thirty three and a third’ records, go the other way and you fall off the edge. The first track of a compact disc is at the centre. Vinyl has it at the outer edge.

There is pressure with this William Shepherd weblog. Daily postings are unnecessary but a daily record must be maintained. With the William Franklin weblog postings can happen as and when. The first posting went up a week ago and was a declaration of intent. This year I am going to get rich and here’s how!. You don’t believe me? Then watch this space! Quite a challenge to the gods. Come and get me, if you dare! Odysseus would be proud of me...and Beowulf. On the other hand look what happened to them.

To make my first weblog interesting I wrapped the message in a little personal piece of theatre about my father: the original William Franklin. This struck a chord with a fellow blogger who sent in a comment that went like this: ‘Just dropping in to say that my 18 month old son is called Franklin - name chosen because I couldn't think of a bad example (I work in a school, so most names are tainted in some way!) and I could think of several good ones: Aretha, Benjamin, Roosevelt, that turtle thing. I'll add William to the list.’

Brian Scranage runs five blogs. Both he and his wife were born in 1963 and now have two teenage tearaways. His house in Leicester is full to overflowing with much junk, huge piles of unmarked work, dozens of redundant replica kits from Bury Football Club, his bike and The Complete History of Leyland Motors. I feel I have known him all my life.

The elder of my two younger brothers once lived in Bury. I am the second of four boys. If I understand the subtle class distinctions in the North West his move to Uppermill was a move in the right direction. This Lancashire town huddles just a little precariously between the slopes of The Pennines and the outskirts of Oldham depending on whether you look right or left when you open his front door.

Shortly after the first posting I added two more in support my reckless claim: a 5-year record of the Swedish Krona against the Pound Sterling and a 5-year history of the ABB share price. That was Sweden sorted. Today it was Germany’s turn. Posting four was prompted by a piece in the financial press about the sharks circling Scotland & Southern Energy. Posting five was a remix of an article in the Christmas issue of Rye’s Own.

The title of the article was The Politics of Wind Farming. The blog came with a few lines to establish my expert credentials and a piece on Romney Marsh. Energy politics, wind farming and The Little Cheyne Court Wind Farm then made cameo appearances before making way for The Beast of Essen, a giant power and utilities conglomerate that goes by the innocuous-sounding name of RWE and trades under such brand names as Thames Water, Yorkshire Electricity and Npower. The bottom line was to get over to Germany on Thursday 13th April and do some civil disobedience at the Annual General Meeting if you are serious about outflanking the barbarians and stopping them putting up their monstrous towers...each twice as high as Nelson’s Column...on Romney Marsh.

The rest of the day I devoted to The Politics of Killing People. You misunderstand me. I refer to an 18-page cesc publication. By nightfall the manuscript included an article that came in from Helen Dew’s Living Economies network in New Zealand. Chris Cook, a former director of the International Petroleum Exchange thinks we need another Bretton Woods to set up an Energy Clearing Union. Buckminster Fuller predicted a Global Electricity Grid ringing this One World Island of ours. Once in place currencies would fade away and the kWh would reign supreme. The title of Chris’ paper is Price Dollars in Oil not Oil in Dollars.

I have three family and four colleagues. I would like to have seven colleagues. But getting family to work in a family business is hard. It cuts no ice to remind them that they will inherit the fruits of their endeavours. This karas of mine...Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut...now receives priority access to me courtesy of Yahoo! text alerts...something they will come to regard as a dubious privilege.

A pack of fifty mail alerts costs five pounds. No sooner had I paid my dues than my mobile burst into song. The next two minutes of its rapidly depleting battery life was devoted to a-buzzing and a-beeping. After the rumpus had died down I approached cautiously. Thirteen message alerts and an e-mail inbox full to overflowing. Now I know the meaning of friendly fire. Are there limits to friendship as well as growth?

The Guardian devotes half a column each day to corrections. I will limit mine to once a fortnight. As the World Cup is in Germany this year Florian & Vasco can kick off with my first apology of the year because my upgraded deal from http://blog.co.uk gives me a hundred blogs so my Friday calculations are null and void.

Yahoo! were sadly maligned on Monday for their failure to respond to my 'Get Code!' text message. When I tried again yesterday it worked like a dream. So I am now hot-wired and get bleeped at by my mobile phone every time an e-mail comes in from Rye, Stockholm, Tucson, Morlaix, Purton or Llangolman.

I mentioned on Monday that I had e-mailed Private Post to find out if the software advertised in Private Eye was only available for PC users. Gareth replied by return with these glad tidings: ‘Hi, we are planning to develop Private Post for Mac OS X by Summer 2006. At the moment Private Post is only available to PC users with Outlook/Outlook Express. To help our development further, what email client are you using? (Entourage, Tiger Mail, Eudora etc...). Regards, Gareth Hall, Technical Support Engineer, Private Post.’

This was real friendly so I e-mailed back: ‘Hi Gareth, Thanks for your prompt response...but I expected no less since you're in Bristol just an hour's drive away from me here in Pembrokeshire on the other side of the Severn Estuary. If you had been in New Zealand it would have been different...more satellites to bounce off...’ I went on to give him chapter and verse about me and my cyber-alter-egos (CAEs).

‘...My main window onto the cyberworld is my Yahoo! e-mail account. I increasingly run my business out of my Yahoo! inbox and find that more and more of my colleagues operate this way too. My principal telcom decision last year was to shift platforms away from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs heading for Linux and Open Source. I spent quite a bit of time with eBay last year where I have a couple of accounts...Holobolo Canterbury and Holobolo Uppsala...and by the end of 2006 expect to be running an online bookshop with them...and Google is an extension of my right arm.

My main holding company is William Franklin & Sons Limited - a UK private limited company. I do all my domain name dealing through Easily where I have several websites and quite a few e-mail accounts. Easily run on Linux servers with Apache software. I sell the Good Yacht Guide online and payments come via Visa credit cards...I never see anything else...via my William Franklin & Sons PayPal Business Account.

I have business dealings with Sweden where I have an e-mail account with Spray...owned by Lycos. I also run a William Shepherd website on Passagen owned by the Swedish post office. You can find out more from my daily weblog...looked after from Berlin. You are mentioned in dispatches. Hope this helps. Anecdotes are often more useful than statistics.

The storage heater problem was all my fault. It trips out when it gets too hot...and it gets too hot when people use it to quick-dry jeans and sweaters. Mea Very Culpa. The plumber-cum-electrician was here fixing a pump today and sorted it. The trip switch is hidden inside the outer casing...and several screws must be removed to access it which seems pretty silly. But at least now I can fix it myself. ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for ever.’ Tell that one to the Scottish fishermen. Nonetheless Gandhi, Fritz Schumacher, Lao Tzu and anybody with two brain cells who has given any thought to real development...as opposed to rip-off and pillage...can’t all be wrong. Anyone want their storage heater fixed?

My day got off to a slow start when I got up late. The rain had stopped. The sky was blue. And I thought about a run. You can do these things when you work for yourself. I had picked a book off my daughter’s bookshelf last night...The War Against Chaos by Anita Mason...and couldn’t put it down. Anita turns out to be a local lass from just across the water in Bristol. My daughter is reading a lot of futuristic stuff at the moment.

Otherwise my day consisted of e-mails about Good Yacht Guide orders and access details to the Franklin PayPal account, a message to my daughter about her new Chip ‘n Pin and an e-mail to let Alan know that I had not abandoned Cultura and would be on his case at crack of dawn.

In the middle of the afternoon I sloped off to my nearest cafe...Caffi Beca up on the Cardigan to Tenby road... and used the time to write a journal entry. In the evening it was Sirens with Sam Neill and Hugh Grant.

I had my Coleridge moment in mid-morning. While in full flow at the keyboard there was a knock at the door. ‘Go Away!’ I yelled. Emerging from my hermit mode half an hour later I discovered that the phantom rapper had been my landlady, anxious to let me know that my water was about to be turned off. She had visions of a washing machine melt-down. All I lost was a couple of weblog sentences. Coleridge lost most of Kubla Khan.

The Welsh gods retaliated with a vengence and it bucketed down on Monday night. It had eased off by first light but continued to drizzle until well into the afternoon. I don’t understand my storage heater. But I do understand when it no longer gives off any heat. Something is wrong with it...and it is more than a duff fuse. Fortunately it has been quite warm since it went on the blink...and there is a wood-burning stove and an electric oil heater so I won’t freeze in the dark. But it reminds me that this good life of mine is really quite fragile.

I can stay home for a whole day but have acquired this niggling urge to jump into my little green and red car if I stay put much longer. Walking or running to the local Spar shop ought to be another option but I am addicted to car driving...something I put down to living car-free for twenty years...although I rent one on average a dozen or more times a year. I could discipline myself to staying put for two days. But one way or another, my peace of mind and soul seems to demand at least three trips a week to Cardigan. With In Her Shoes playing at Theatr Mwldn at six today a call was made on my weekly Cardigan quota. I left for town mid-afternoon. My other excuse was to print out the Papworth Papers on budgets & contracts and to acquire print-outs of my weblogs.

My digital world shifted from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs last year. My Apple Mac Mini came with Microsoft Windows Xp installed but it ran out after thirty days. Instead of paying up like normal people I took it as a challenge to go Microsoft-free. But I am also printer-free. So my first step to hard copy is to convert manuscripts from the Apple Works cwk format to Adobe pdf. Next the data gets whisked off my hard drive onto a USB flash memory stick and driven to an Internet Café. As a result my printing comes with a £1.50p fixed overhead. Today it was spread over 30 copies. At 10p each that works out at 15p. I can live with that.

Over breakfast I listed a dozen things I wanted done by the weekend. I won’t list them here as they will appear in the weblogs. None of them got done. Sloth was not the reason. Hubris perhaps. I figured that since I was spending £1.50p anyway I might as well get my money’s worth and post some files to a website. Big mistake.

There is a lot of website work pending. Websites are like the Severn Bridge. No sooner do you come to one end than you must start again at the other end. My William Franklin & Sons Limited PayPal business account allows me to accept payment online by credit card. So far only the Good Yacht Guide website has benefited from this facility. I look forward to the day that the Academic Inn Books website gets similar treatment. Then I can think about running a proper online bookshop.

But next on the priority list is cescweb. Toni Pinschof and I set up the Cliff’s Edge Signalling Company (cesc) in 1993. A website was added at the end of 2000 which was then extended to accommodate the needs of the 2001 Radical Consultation. Since then the cescweb has grown like topsy. A complete make-over is called for.

Waiting patiently in the wings for the cescweb makeover are rather a lot of jobs. Last night I was working on one of them...Dispatches From The Iraq War. This morning I was working on another...Oil Wars and The Politics of Killing People...derived from some work by Richard Moore in Wexford last year based on William Engdahl’s ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and The New World Order’.

In a rush of blood yesterday evening I had deemed these dispatches to be a natural extension of the Radical Hansard...the name given to the Proceedings of the Radical Consultation. So I renamed the Dispatches file as ‘radicalhansard.cwk’. By morning I had completely forgotten this so well over an hour was wasted trying to find the file on my computer to take to town and post on the cesc website. In frustration I was guilty of another piece of poor judgement by then turning to the Oil Wars Paper.

I ran out of time of course. So in the end nothing got posted to the website. But at least it inspired a few minutes googling up a photo and a resume of Richard Moore...and also prompted me to send him an email enquiring whether the final part of his essay ever got written. I also ordered a copy of William Engdahl’s book.

In Her Shoes turned out to be quite a classy script and the film was very well directed. Shirley Maclean and Cameron Diaz were excellent and the supporting roles worked extremely well. There is a genre coming out of Hollywood now that was absent a few years ago. The films in this new genre explore the issues of marriage, families and the meaning of life. Richard Gere has done several of these...Shall We Dance and Unfaithful being two that spring to mind. This is a very healthy trend. And the top players are picking good scripts.

I came across a receipt from the local Spar shop as I was tidying up so let me teach you some Welsh. Siopa has to do with shopping, Spar is Spar and diolch must mean thank you, because the till receipt translates ‘Diolch am siopa yn Spar’ as ‘Thank you for Shopping at Spar’. You’re welcome! Have a Nice Day!

For the past two days this place has looked like a Chinese laundry with sheets drying, shirts dripping and jeans clinging to every drop of passing moisture. Two rounds of laundry went through the wash yesterday. But as a result, after tonight, my humble abode will be laundry-free for two or three weeks.

When I came to Wales six weeks ago a pair of welly boots accompanied me across the Severn Bridge. It never stops raining in Wales I was told. But I have hardly used them. Yesterday was another glorious day. Not a cloud in the sky all day. Cold but bracing in the mid-winter sunshine.

Many years ago I discovered there were two ways to go running. Under Plan A you fixed a time with a mate a day or two ahead. Plan B was your fallback position. You put out your running clothes the night before and fell into them first thing the next morning while still half asleep. It’s a climb up the track to the post office...open two mornings a week...downhill to the slate workshop by the stone bridge over the river...then uphill all the way to Glandy Cross.

Unlike the Alice Springs Sailing Club, the Romney Marsh Mountain Rescue Team is a figment of local imagination so hills are not my forte. But I am very good going downhill. It was half and hour to the Spar shop to return my DVD...and a very pleasant run back...as far as the river. After that it was uphill. But I swept past the dogs and cats on the last leg feeling really pleased with myself. I was out for an hour and used the first excuse to phone Heidi and casually mention that I had been out running.

The Sunday newspapers are once again awash with DVDs. So I returned with a 6-inch thick pile of trees as the wrapping paper for Gary Cooper in Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Tony Hancock in The Lawyer. A good day’s pillaging. Between laundrying, running and film-watching another two thousand words went into my weblogs as I prepared to return to work the following day. I hate Mondays.

After the long mid-winter break, Q-mode...the bull in the china shop approach...had its attractions. But I defaulted into P-mode this morning and procrastinated my way through the morning on the computer. Things started to go wrong when I attempted to download some PrivatePost software. After wrestling with the beast for a while I concluded that it disliked my operating system...so an e-mail went off to this effect.

But while waiting for the software to fail to download, I noticed that Yahoo could send text messages to my mobile phone telling me that an e-mail had come in. The clever thing about it was that I could choose which e-mails got to beep at me. Foiled again! My ‘Get Code’ text message...’your registration number will arrive in minutes’... was ignored. Meanwhile the thought struck me that I should personalise My Yahoo!

Well one thing led to another and before I knew it another couple of hours had flashed by. But at least I was successful. The weather for Carmarthen, Cambridge, Rye, Malmo and Sundbyberg is now available to me each morning at the click of a mouse...it was misty in Rye this morning. What’s more, feeds now come in from two news agencies...The Guardian...and...and...from William Shepherd...yes...you can now get my weblog fed directly to your computer each morning...just click on subscribe and do what you’re told. Amazing. And free!

Having mastered the complexities of Real Simple Syndication (RSS)...yes I know it’s easy but everything hinges on getting round to it...I focussed my attention on the William Franklin weblog. Our generation needs to reinvent the 18th and 19th century ideals of a public science...and the gentleman who took part in it. The Open Source movement has been showing us the way for two decades. Cooperation instead of greed ‘n grab. So the thought is to put my financial research and day trading in the public domain. But how? Today I started to wrap my head around the question. I ended up with two new postings. Take a look. And watch this space.

And so to work. My work plans for 2006 will be people-focussed instead of business-focussed...a natural progression from the decision I made a couple of decades ago to work with my friends and with people I like hanging out with. The old adage of never mixing friends and business seems quite wrong to me. So my work list for the week comes in two parts. One part lists technical tasks like reactivating my IG-Index online account, getting my JAK account working over the internet and getting my housing in Lund sorted out.

The other part lists four colleagues I will be working with this year: Tom Greco in Tucson Arizona, John Papworth in Purton England, Toni Pinschof in Mael-Pestivien, Bretagne and Alan Pryke in Stockholm, Sweden. John of Purton was today’s focus. By the end of the day e-mails and attachments were whizzing through cyberspace on the subject of Conference Contracts and Budgets.

I am beginning to love Sundays. I have worked for myself for twenty five years and there is no need for us ownworkers to conform to the nine-to-fivers’ weekly mode of living and partly living (to quote T.S.Eliot). It got particularly silly in the nineties when Connie and I were motor-sailing the 30-foot gaff-cutter Vemara the 32 miles stretch from Rye to Boulogne every few weeks. We were both ownworkers but try as we might we could never lose the habit of leaving on Friday and coming back on the Sunday afternoon tide. The marina was empty in the week and choc-a-bloc at weekends. Weekday shopping times were more convenient. And the Saturday market finished at midday. But there is something else.

A few years ago I became intrigued when I read that different species had different heart rates. I had long taken the view that the only scarce resource 21st century economists needed to theorise about was the number of heart beats in an individual life. My thought was that normal life is measured in heart beats and we only fall short of a normal life because we feed ourselves with bad water and get diseased. Birds live shorter year-lives than us because their hearts beat faster. Think of ‘clock-times’ on computers...the megahertz or gigahertz that Dell quotes at you...and philosophically things start to get interesting. Slow computers do the same as fast computers but take longer to do it. This might explain why birds flash through a holly bush in the twinkling of a human eye without getting themselves impaled. They are sauntering in their own bird heart-rate time.

Anyway start thinking of the number of hours in a week and you have a sound basis for measuring the quality of society. There are 168 hours in a week with 7 hours of bedtime each day...and many people get by with less. So the 35-hour official EuroJobWeek represents less than a third of your weekly disposable heartbeat quota. Working hours can then get fitted into the other 84 hours...24x7 less 7x7 less 35 equals 84. This life grammar bears no resemblance to the work-life balance implied by European directives. There’s a surprise.

When I am in residence on Vemara...the Swedish king flies a flag over his palace to show he’s in residence so why don’t we all adopt the practice...I am just a 10-minute walk from the centre of Rye, a 15-minute run away from Heidi at Rye Harbour and 5-minutes stroll away from Hilden Gym with its work-out rooms, sauna and jacussi. For me it makes sense to hang out in town between 10 and 4 from Mondays to Saturdays. People are around. Shops are open. Phones get answered...I work from a mobile phone. So this is what I do. But remember ‘Hell is other people!”

Men my age are supposed to go to a place of work in the morning and come home into the bosom of a loving family in the evening. If you don’t you are looked upon as an idler and a scrounger. This opinion is confirmed if you are seen around town in the middle of the working day sitting in cafes. In fact my cafe hours are some of my most productive. I purchase two desk-hours for the price of a cup of coffee to read, scribble or talk.

My standard weekday routine takes me into town for my free library computer session at 11am with mail collected from my postbox on the way...access is denied between 1215 and 1500 hours. Errands and everything else that needs outside suppliers and services...lane swimming at the local pool, installing broadband for friends etc...gets tucked in around this daily schedule. An awful lot of work can get done between 0400 and 1100 and between 1600 and 0200...0200 and 0400 are the only hours when you are guaranteed to find me asleep.

Yet breaking away from the seven-day week is still not easy. There is a reason for this. You will not find it in the Judaic and Neo-Judaic (ie. Christian) sabbath traditions because it goes back further and deeper than this. Biorhythms come closer to the truth. But the individual who has come closest in recent times to finding the pearl among the swine is the Cambridge archaeologist Tom Lethbridge.

A couple of years ago I put ‘Tom Lethbridge’ and ‘T.C.Lethbridge’ into Google. It came back with no matches. Today there were 300. And to my delight (‘Vanity! Vanity! all is vanity!’) my article is up there on the top page. Careful experimentation with his long pendulum convinced Tom Lethbridge that megalithic energy follows the seven-day pulsating moon-cycle. That is why it has been so difficult to change the habit, not of a lifetime, but of millenia. We cultural creatives must learn to follow our natural cosmic rhythms if we want to reconnect with reality. Loving Sundays is not a bad place to start.

I started this weblog posting with the intention of writing about my Sunday with this as an introductory paragragh. Meini Gwyr was due to come up. I was there and touched the two (still) standing stones...there were seventeen a couple of centuries ago. But my self-inflicted word-quota may not be breached. So for my Sunday you must wait until tomorrow. Your only problem is that tomorrow never comes if you think about it. Philosophically this is almost as interesting as the tortoise and the hare. Douglas Hofstadter got very excited about them in Gödel Escher Bach. Put this book on your coffee table for your next dinner party. A Short History of Time has become a little passé.

This week has been Blogging Week. My 850 or so words a day weblog has been taking up a sizeable chunk of my time. But that is always the way as you start on something new. It takes time to get your writing mind in gear and delivering the goods. I have some blogging experience to draw on. In 1993 I diligently addressed my attention for a whole year to writing two episodes of The Private Papers of Crocodile Uppsala every second Sunday. The discipline instilled in me at boarding school in Horsham probably helped.

At Christ’s Hospital we had a compulsory sit-down session at five o’clock each Sunday for writing letters home. One of the jobs the monitors had was to collect the resulting missives and send them on their merry way...not for censorship but to ensure compliance. How many parents received empty envelopes is another question. But a weekly log is not a daily log...and the Crocodile Uppsala pieces were four times as long as these daily pieces. But I have experience of delivering daily entries too.

I ran the Cinque Ports Letters as a weekly newsletter for two years...over a hundred editions...during 1991 and 1992 before turning to the Crocodile Uppsala formula in 1993. I have always referred to these as my pension. They have been laid down to mature and will be taken out, dusted down and republished in a few years time when the next generation of internet technology is up and running and can do them justice.

But I was not referring to them nor to my journals...I am now on Journal XLI...where I write on average two or three single-page entries a week. In the mid-nineties while in Stockholm I set myself a very specific writing task of chronicling the things I did every day. In practice I tended to bunch the writing doing half a dozen entries at a time on occasions but by the end of the year I had learnt how to do it. The trick was to scribble a post-it note each day. Provided I did this I found that my recall was pretty reliable a few days later. If I failed to do so I would be scrambling. It only happened once and it taught me a good lesson.

My technique is pretty similar to the one P.G.Wodehouse used. Sometimes his notes for a book would be two or three times longer than the book itself. But he was able to go directly from the notes to writing a final draft...the one before you start refining, eliminating and improving the individual sentences prior to heading into the editorial process. I have yet to experience a proper editorial process but think I would enjoy it. I have seen recently how the process has improved John Papworth’s book on Village Democracy due out later this year. The articles and reviews I write for Fourth World Review and Rye’s Own go through with little alteration.

Seven years ago my closest male friends often found me bemoaning the influence over my life of the monstrous regiment of women. When urged to be specific the regiment tended to become a fighting force of three...my mother, my daughter and my partner. After my mother died in 1999 and my partner in 2002 I changed my tune somewhat. Since then the female of the species have been harnessing their forces and the regiment has doubled in strength. Today dispatches were relayed to the entire formidable force. Here they are.

text exchange with Heidi somewhere in London
1200: In London for Hope’s birthday. Theatre. And a 50th party. Like the cd I sent? x
1430: Happy birthday to Hope from her step-grandfather-to-be...I can just see her face as she tries to get her head round that one...all life is there...there is a jigsaw present for her to do on yesterdays weblog...Friday 6th January 2006...if her nice Daddy will bring it up on the screen for her...go to http://williamshepherd.blog.co.uk and click on earthworms...xxx
1700: Sitting in the car at Glandy Cross after shopping...no cd arrived yet...enjoy your weekend...wish I could be with you...pizza, red wine and Richard Gere in Shall We Dance is the best I can come up with by way of some displacement activity...xxx

e-mail to my daughter somewhere in Sweden
It is my daughter’s birthday on Sunday. As she is away in Sweden at an unknown address...she started off with her mother in Knivsta but has since moved on to friends in exotic northern regions like Arboga...I sent her a birthday card courtesy of Yahoo Greetings. Yahoo lets you schedule your cards so they get sent on the right day which is useful as it means you don't need to remember to go to the computer on a particular day. You can have a look at the card here. And here is the text that went with it. 'I feel a bit bad not waiting a few years more for my first child...'cos it means you're older than you need to be. If I had waited until I was 35 for instance you would only be 24 today...and then all those freebies that gave up on you when you breezed past 26 would still be on offer...getting kicked out of Oz...that sort of thing. So it is Kierkegaard as usual for another couple of dozen turns of the moon. Many happy returns and here's to one more delightful year grappling with living in society in time and with yourself outside of it. Hell is People as Sartre was wont to say....but a philosophy of kindness is the way to go if John Cowper Powys is to be trusted. Daddy'

Before leaving for Carmarthen I sent a thank-you e-mail to John Papworth...at least it started off that way but by the time it was shuttling around cyberspace it had become seven New Year thoughts with the thanks as just the first of them. Item 6 of 7 exhorted John to start blogging. ‘Just e-mail me the title and text of your postings,’ I wrote, ‘and I will do the rest.’ The idea was that he would scribble his responses to The Times and The Spectator over breakfast and send them to me. I figured out this way he could stop having his letters rejected by The Times. We could develop our very own digital radio channel and weblogs of our conference deliberations...a good way of getting a buzz going in the nine months ahead of the gathering.

Cats and birds next. I had been given responsibilities. My landlady (who lives next door) was going away to Snowdonia. Small birds can die if they don’t get enough to eat on cold winter days. So here I was with sacks of peanuts and buckets of bird-food making sure that earthworms have a hard time this winter. Feeding the cats also enters into the equation but I won’t get into that. The bird table began to groan beneath the weight of these avian survival rations. But by the time I got back from Carmarthen it had all gone.

My former partner Connie Lindqvist was a botanical artist. She was allowed to put the initials FLS after her name after I bullied her into applying to become a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. She was elected along with David Attenborough. She would tell anybody who asked that the initials stood for ‘fukcing lazy sod’...but she was anything but...self-deprecating yes...lazy no.

Connie made about six thousand pounds a year from her art. Nowadays she would be entitled to Working Tax Credit and Housing Benefit. Gordon Brown has rolled back nearly all the nasty pieces of Tory legislation that victimised the working poor and has brought in stealth benefits for them alongside his stealth taxes on the rich. But Connie always refused to claim benefits. So six thousand a year was what Connie lived on. She kept her 30-foot gaff-cutter out of the equation. This was her home. She worked on rich people’s boats and spent her boatwork earnings on Vemara’s upkeep. Simple...and sensible...as long as there are enough Luc Carliers around in love with enough Nelly Mathildes to provide enough of the never-ending varnishing work.

Connie spent half her time working as an illustrator for my publishing company. The rest of her working week was given over to three Rye-based potteries...and at eight pounds an hour ‘given over’ is about right. For Quin & Biddy Cole at Rye Tiles Connie painted large tile panels. These grace the kitchens of Harrods as well as the country mansions and town houses of the rich and powerful. For David Sharp Ceramics Connie painted house plaques. Dot Sharp and her son Ben still have a thriving little microbusiness running out of their shop in The Mint. Wander around the ancient Cinque Port towne of Rye and you will discover many little Connie Lindqvist masterpieces adorning the walls of the houses in the town and surrounding villages. William Morris would have approved.

Dennis and Maureen Townsend were Connie’s third pottery client. They have retired now...harrassed into retirement by the VAT Gestapo who disapproved of an arts & craft showroom on Conduit Hill being financially independent of a kilns ‘n pottery business along Rock Channel. Before Iden Pottery closed down Connie painted several hundred pieces of vertical-ware. If you ever get your hands on a piece, hold it tight to your bosom. These pieces will be selling for princely sums on eBay ten years hence.

Connie painted birds and animals as well as flowers and plants. After spending ten years of my life with her I became...somewhat reluctantly being a townie...a person Simon Barnes would refer to as a bad bird-watcher. The other day I spotted a wren and stood watching her for ages while Heidi waited patiently in the car for her chauffeur to return. She must have thought I had lost my marbles. ‘But,’ I explained, ‘the wren is a bird of augury...and they fluff up their feathers in the winter...and huddle together and shiver in little groups to keep themselves warm.’ Twitchers can be the most irritating of bores.

I listen to Classic FM when in the car or at home when reading. The other day David Mellor was talking about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Apparently he would sit in his carriage composing during long journeys. When he got to his destination he could write it all down. He was able to retain the whole composition in his head. When I’m driving around Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire I do much the same thing as Mozart. By the time I got home I had figured out Cultura’s financial strategy for 2006 and decided to spend money upgrading my weblog account instead of going for faster internet access.

For forty euros a year Florian Wilken and Vasco Sommer working out of Erkelenzdamm 59/61 in Berlin are now providing me with ten weblogs and removing all the advertising. Two down, two out on offer and a fifth reserved for the September conference. That leaves five to rent out for a euro per month. That would turn a tidy profit in percentage terms...but 20 euros a year is hardly enough to attract quality staff to run the weblogs.

I didn’t plan it this way...life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans...but over the next two days I will be driving my daughter’s Peugeot 106 well over a hundred miles. Today I did half of them going in and out of Cardigan twice. And tomorrow’s monthly Carmarthen day will do the rest. All this to-ing and fro-ing will leave me some ten pounds out of pocket. But goodness knows what it will cost the planet. The real planetary burden comes embedded in what Ivan Illich refers to as a structural monopoly. The planet needs a complete energy infrastructure make-over.

Mind you I am a little more optimistic than most about our energy futures. Buckminster Fuller assured me that the world economy went into surplus in the fifties making the classical economics of scarcity of our ruling elites redundant. This was more by luck than judgement. The bottom line is that modern scarcities are man-made. So why not peace crime tribunals to deal with the criminals who create them?

The developed world has been quietly switching from coal to oil to natural gas. The journey from a carbon to a hydrogen economy continues as the car-makers bring out their hydrogen vehicles...see my Energy Wars article. We need energy for three things: heating space, rushing ourselves and our stuff about and winding things up. Space seldom needs to be warmer than one hundred degrees celsius...the first nonsense of the nuclear kettle technology. And electricity demands will be coming down over the next few decades as the world gets smarter at doing more with less...which is the next bit of nuclear nonsense. The $100 wind-up lap-top computer unveiled by Nicholas Negroponte recently is a good example of the trend.

In just half an hour Earth’s very own nuclear reactor ninety three million miles away showers our back gardens with enough power to keep ‘us and ours’ going for a whole year. In the best of all possible energy worlds, grids and cables would be taxed until the pipes squeak and households (not companies) would be paid in local money for any surplus power they could donate to the village or parish pool. As long as the fifty year old technology...formerly known as cheap atomic power...is kept in business by massive public subsidies, the whole energy cost and price structure will be so distorted that it will be well-nigh impossible for a sane, humane, ecological (SHE) energy infrastructure to emerge.

Nuclear fission is a mug’s game and hot fusion is not much better. But don’t get me wrong. The power of atoms and molecules is well worth exploring. But the most promising effects takes place at room temperature. The science of colloids is interesting. Goethe is where it’s at...and Rudolf Steiner was first and foremost a Goethe scholar who spent his formative years pouring over the great man’s scribblings.

Check out The Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of The Soil by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird before dismissing me as a complete nutter. And if you feel really inspired go google your way through searches for scientific papers by the likes of Henri Coanda, Patrick Flanagan, Olof Alexanderson, Alex Podolinsky, Philip Callahan and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. You could also do worse than download my article Megaliths, Meis & Miners.

Anyway my excuse for driving into town was to print out my weblogs at Cardigan Library. I have no printer, remember, so I can boast of a paperless office. ‘So I contradict myself!’ as Walt Whitman remarks in Leaves of Grass. While in town I picked up the next Theatr Mwldan schedule...and discovered that the last showing of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire was that very evening at 7pm. So I did a few errands and scuttled back home for a frustrating afternoon going boss-eyed on the computer.

You guessed...broadband...and the unmitigated pleasure of perusing websites with exotic names like Tiscali, Wanadoo, 4D, V21, TalkTalk and Toucan. As night fell I was as mad as a fish. Currently I am paying BT Yahoo £15.99 a month for 150 hours of dial-up internet access. But I got the first month free and can cancel at any time on one day’s notice. So the deal works out at five pence an hour for the two months I am here. That’s one helluva deal. I gave up for the second day running. But to make myself feel productive I signed up with virgin.net for a dial-up account...Virgin do not insist on a 12-month contract, charging £50 when you cancel instead. I persuaded myself that this would facilitate any upgrade I might make to broadband.

Harry Potter was a disappointment...the person not the film (which was well-produced). Like the lead in Lord of The Rings our young teenage wizard is a pretty second-rate actor with none of the range of emotions that good actors and actresses display. The theology that has got the Christian Fundamentalists thrashing around over in the States is also rather iffy but suspending disbelief is what you do in theatres and cinemas. No, I had another problem. I went to see the first Harry Potter film with my previous partner a few days before she died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage three years ago. Too many memories came flooding back for me to have an enjoyable evening. Oy vey! This vale of tears!

Yesterday’s Guardian had a full-page advertisement for SimplySwitch, a leading independent price comparison service to help readers come to grips with the time-consuming and confusing task of choosing between the hundred or so broadband internet providers inflicted on the long-suffering internet community in this sceptered isle. After broadband speeds, dial-up is hard work. I have dial-up.

Growing up with the internet from its earliest days twenty years ago when I was a Graduate Student at MIT I have flickering memories of those early days but mostly I too have forgotten how much better everything has become. Installing a landline and an internet service were among my top priorities when moving into my daughter Helena's Welsh cottage a month ago for my two months stay while she was abroad. January’s job was to upgrade to Broadband. But all the offers insist on a 12-month contract. You can break it but the cheapest deal comes from virgin.net at £50 and BT charge youthe fill cost of your 12-month contract which is close to £200. I spent almost an hour on the SimplySwitch website...linked to www.guardian.co.uk/money ...but came away without the short-term contract I was hoping to find. Surely one of these hundred companies can see the market opportunity here? I decided to try again another day as I had work to do.

I have two ways of getting down to work. The first is my P-mode where P stands for procrastination. The second is my Q-mode where queue is what I don’t do...instead charging in like a bull in a china shop. Neither is very efficient but, what they hell, they work. I avoid writer’s block by making sure I always have several different pieces of work on the go. This too seems to work most of the time.

Today was decreed to be Blogging Day. I have run a daily diary before and I know the effort it takes to catch up once you fall behind. Here I was on the fourth day of January. There were to be two weblogs. The What I do all Day blog would be posted to http://williamshepherd.blog.co.uk while my Nick Leeson blog would go to http://holobolo.sprayblog.se . Once the two blogs were going it would be easy to slip into the style the few times a week when new postings were called for. But the first few postings would need time. Developing a style doesn't always come easy.

Work began in P-mode as I absent-mindedly flicked through The Spectator to see if there was anything worth reading. A year ago this would have taken me ten minutes and would have yielded nothing. Today was different. What had first caught my eye was an article by Corelli Barnett who runs the Churchill Archives Centre at my old alma mater. I had plans to talk to the college...and the archives centre in particular...about co-sponsoring an academic conference on cantonisation in September 2007...the 50th anniversary of the writing of The Breakdown of Nations. One of my first tasks was to find out whether Winston Churchill had ever proposed The Swiss Solution to the problems of Mesopotamia. My hunch is that he may well have done.

A meeting with Corelli Barnett and a rummage through the Churchill Archives would justify an overnight stay in college and dinner at High Table...one of the privileges afforded to alumnae of Churchill College. This and a day at the Cambridge University Library would make sense en route to Lund University in the first or second week of February.

It was mid-afternoon before I got started on my weblogs. There was not an article or a feature in the 31st December 2005 issue of The Spectator that did not hold my attention. Indeed all seven articles, the Spectator Archives feature and several other pieces went into my private archives...the highest score for any magazine for a long long time. I put this down to the publisher Kimberly Quinn returning to her husband after her dalliance with a New Labour Home Secretary on the grounds that the alternative explanation that I was turning Tory in my dotage was too awful to contemplate.

Once free of The Spectator I made good progress on my weblogs and was well ahead of schedule by the time I finished work for the day a little before nine. The only loser was a pepperoni pizza which found itself burnt to a frazzle while my thoughts were elsewhere...a fair trade for the sugar in my muesli.

I harbour no false hopes of getting back into the work groove before the end of the week as I was still missing Heidi terribly when I awoke...this will last for most the week before abating.

After coffee and a bowl of muesli I spent a little time on the computer clearing back the three hundred emails in my inbox from the past few days to the twenty that were of interest to me. After noting who they were from I deemed them all non-urgent and decided against opening them. This is a crucial decision from a time management point of view as I like to give well-written considered responses to incoming e-mails and this takes time.

Just as my son the intrepid Crocodile Uppsala has taught me that the only way to have a paperless office is to have no printer, so the only way to avoid spending time on e-mails is not to open the incoming mail in your inbox until you are ready to spend a few hours dealing with it properly.

I took the car the 15 miles into Cardigan to get rid of my six plastic bags of accumulated holiday rubbish at the recycling centre outside Somerfields, sorted between glass bottles, newspapers and everything else. There are strong arguments against the logging of the Amazonian forests and the cutting down of hard woods in South East Asia. But the complaints against newspapers as a destroyer of trees is essentially bogus. Newspapers are printed on recycled paper so the cellulose just goes round and round in much the same ways as our overground metal mines.

In fact I don’t know exactly what happens to the old newspapers that go into the Cardigan recycling container...John Papworth runs a group in Purton called Ps & Qs that investigates this sort of thing and then reports back to the community...but my assumption is that the paper neither goes up in smoke nor down into landfill sites.

More comfort eating...this time a £4 vegetarian breakfast (two vegetable sausages instead of bacon and a pork sausage) with coffee included in the price. Then to the library to drop off the rented DVDs and across the street to the post office. Heidi is a very organised traveller and a joy to travel with. But she has an interesting habit of leaving one item wherever she goes by way of a sacrifice to the gods before departure. Perhaps it is her way of asking St Christopher to keep her safe. John Papworth had inscribed copies of Kirkpatrick’s Human Scale and Leopold Kohr’s Breakdown of Nations to Heidi in his bid to woo her into taking on the task of conference organiser for our ‘Five Years On’ gathering in September and it was Leopold's book that was the sacrifice for this trip.

Finally a coffee in Caffi Mwldan before collecting the car and driving to Tescos for my two kilogram bag of Swiss style muesli which at £ 2.39 works out at 12p per 100 gms...less than a third of most packaged cereals and the best deal in town. I usually take their blue bag as this has no added salt and sugar. But today I had to be content with the red bag with its double helping of both (19% and 8%). Food labelling is gradually improving in this country after a slow start and it is now almost possible to get some sort of handle on what you eat when buying provisions from the supermarkets.

And so back home to a relaxing evening with Tony Benn. I talked to Heidi on the phone. She was very pleased that her letter to the local Labour MP Michael Foster had resulted in a long letter from the British Embassy in Nairobi. At the radical end of the social justice movement, writing to your MP is a standing joke but the power of a well-written letter to an individual in authority should not be underestimated. Opinions do change, letters are read and if polite and well-argued, they are often circulated and discussed.

Tony Benn was making much the same point when remarking about the bugging of telephones. ‘I always speak clearly on the phone,’ he writes, ‘as I want them to hear what I am saying!’...adding as a wry aside that this was his only connection to the establishment nowadays.

Scots need a day more than the Welsh and the English to get over their Hogmanay celebrations so they are allowed a second week of double bank holidays. Heidi was less fortunate and was expected back at Thomas Peacock Secondary School on the morrow. My first task of the day was to get her to Narberth Station on the Swansea to Haverford West line. Being a punctual traveller myself I got her there half an hour early. The station was deserted. Heidi's ticket had been booked over the internet several weeks before so nervousness set in after a few minutes sitting in the car with the engine running contributing to global warming. Mobile phones are a godsend in these situations. We phoned the telephone number on the platform and to our surprise it was answered immediately...and, yes indeed, the train would be arriving at ten o’clock. Clearly we live in a golden age...and this particular call centre did not sound as if it was in Bangalore or Mumbai.

The unlikelihood of so prompt and efficient a response put me in mind of John Seymour’s novel Retrieved From The Future. John Seymour died last year at the age of 90. I am writing this weblog a few miles from his Welsh farm where his wife Sally is being looked after by his daughter Jane after suffering a stroke. John’s book had come up in conversation when Heidi and I were staying in Purton with John Papworth last week. John Coleman had been extolling the virtue of the book...his publishing firm New European Publications had published it. But the book merits high praise. The German version crept into the charts and the book is high on my recommended reading list. But I disagreed with John Coleman about the realism of the Seymour scenario where he has half the population of England wiped out as the cities fade away not with a bang but a whimper the first winter after the oil tankers fail to arrive. The townies either starve or freeze to death so we avoid marauding gangs from the cities menacing the countryside. I don't think our rural villages or Kirkpatrick Sale's ecosteries will have such an easy time of it. But our lucky generation can continue to count their blessings for the time being.

The train came. Heidi left. I moped. Christmas puddings and mince pies had halved in price since Christmas so I bought some brandy butter and did some serious comfort eating. It was a beautiful day and I should have gone running. But there you are. Instead I spent the day reading Tony Benn’s autobiography Dare To Be A Daniel. Heidi had bought me the book for Christmas but this was the first chance I had as she had been determined to finish it before leaving.

Tony Benn was born in 1925 so it is probably too late to draft him back into high office but for my money he probably rates as one of the best prime ministers this country never had. A doctoral thesis on why he never made it would make interesting reading. I met Tony Benn at Harvard Law School back in 1984. I had bought a splendid old eleven room Victorian house at 6 Forest Street in Cambridge in 1980 just off Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Square and Porter Square on the edge of the law school campus so was in the area. At the end of his talk Benn went round the assembled company with his collection tin. He was MP for the Chesterfield mining constituency and the Miners Strike had just begun. It would last almost a year and end in the disappearance of the coal mining industry. Now Big Global Oil and Scottish Oil have peaked and the West finds itself dependent upon Russia and Ukraine managing the pipelines and Saudi Arabia continuing to swap oil for fighter aircraft the questions are again being asked about the wisdom or folly of the Thatcher Government's apparent victory over the miners twenty years ago. Time will tell.

I have been a fan of the film director Oliver Stone for many years and took the chance of watching the DVD of Alexander. I was disappointed. The set pieces were fine but I am tired of bloody battles. The rest didn't really seem plausible. He was Alexander The Great after all...and there are rather a lot of Alexandrias around...eleven at the last count. The movie industry's obsession with warmongers worries me. Lord of The Rings seems to be nothing but battles and C.S. Lewis' Narnia, though better, still has the feel of a James Bond or a Star Wars movie. I don’t know why producers and directors don’t skip the battles and have a runner reporting to the camera the way Shakespeare does in his stage plays. Having a talking head would save the studios an awful lot of money. Charging elephants and ever more elaborate special effects can't come cheap.

Nigeria has a finger in both pies...global oil and global media. It now comes third behind Hollywood and Bollywood in film production. Heidi and I had the good fortune to spend some time with Dele Oguntimoju and his wife Ester last week. They were staying in another wing of the Papworth Mansion. Some weblog postings later this year might even come from the village where Dele was brought up and has just built himself a new house. Funny old world. Heidi was home safely by six o’clock...and I cried myself to sleep four hours later.

My friends Malcolm and Claire run a conference business that goes by the name of Dynamic Events. They work incredibly hard and are very successful. But they have one rule. On Sundays they stay in bed the whole morning. Wo betide anyone who knocks on their door before one o'clock! They are not at home to foreigners. My nation is the circle of my friends. And the only friend they have on Sunday mornings is each other.

Heidi and I had just such a Sunday morning. Neither of us had done such a thing for years. We decided it was a wonderful way to bring in the New Year after spending New Years Night at the Angel Inn in Cardigan with mini-skirted young things a quarter our age all around us...though strangely none of them danced to the live music and the boys and girls stayed together in their segregated groups.

In bed we read our horoscopes, talked about making New Year Resolutions (but then forgot to do so), had interesting conversations prompted by articles we read in the previous day's Guardian, drank coffee, made love, kissed and cuddled, listened to the radio, played some CDs...and decided we should expand the concept and declare (with Bob Geldorf who also entered into our discussions) that we too hate Mondays...and Tuesdays...and so it was agreed that we should do this on the other days of the week as well. How I wished!

In fact Heidi was visiting for ten days over the Christmas and New Year and the next day was taking the train back home to England (and almost to France for she would be stopping just thirty miles short on the English side of the Channel). This was our last day together for some while. We took a walk in the afternoon...at least we started off along a footpath heading out for the local Spar store to top up Heidi's mobile phone...but we ended up turning back and taking the car.

Welsh footpaths are interesting...they start out boldly signposting the unsuspecting rambler through woods, across tumbling brooks and high on narrow bridges over the rushing waters beneath. Over stiles and into the fields you go, led on by the little yellow arrows proclaiming footpaths in two languages. Then all of a sudden the signs peter out...and explore as you may...you will find no welcoming little yellow sign to guide you out of the field, over another stile and on to your destination.

In Sussex the footpaths are nowadays a source of some pride to the county councils who have laboured long and hard over the past decade to put up their signs and maintain the trails and bridal paths for man and horse. Arrows point somewhere. Paths join up...and destinations arrive. Not so in Wales.

Linda McCartney gave us dinner...two of her vegetarian dinners for £2.50 did us proud over the New Year...another bottle of wine found its way onto our dining table, into our glasses and then strangely disappeared to goodness knows where...leaving us in mellow mood for watching Gregory Peck in Moby Dick on DVD...my household does not believe in televisions and has figured out that a lot of DVDs can be loaned and watched on my Apple Mac Mini before costs come even close to the annual TV licence fee. But we had expected better.

The film was terrible...on that we both agreed. Strange. Malcolm Bradbury and John Huston had written the script and John Huston had directed the film. Unwilling to end a happy day on a sad note, we dusted off my Cardigan Library copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin...Nicholas Cage is one of my Hollywood heroes...Lord of War is his most recent triumph...and we had watched The Family Man over Christmas...made in 2000...we knew because the New York skyline still had the twin towers that were blown up in September 2001.

We had both seen the film before but the difference was that I love watching good films again whereas Heidi has yet to acquire the habit. One of the nice things about doing things together is talking about it afterwards. So watching a film by yourself is different to watching it with someone else. Besides I experience a film differently the first time...when my attention is riveted on the 'what next, what next' of it all.

J.B. Priestley wrote a wonderful little book called Delights...he managed to find well over a hundred of them and included fountains and fireworks...his Festival at Farbridge is one of my favourite novels. Happiness comes in many guises but I agree with Jack Priestley that delights certainly lie at the root of one of them.

My day had been filled to overflowing with delights...and as a special New Year bonus I had also lived lightly on the land...although I could hardly claim to have ended the year in credit...this became only too clear to me the next day when I took my half a dozen plastic bags of holiday waste to the recycling centre in Cardigan.