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 Incitus £ 271.50 cr
Nov 16 Leena Kinnunen £ 53.91 db
Nov 23 Paen £ 230.00 cr
Nov 23 Otherwise £ 166.00 db
Nov 25 Ncab £ 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. Otherwise Studios does the billing for Martin Voll, 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 Paen who work out of New Zealand and is run by a German national Dr Andreas Ernst who speaks German and Russian and a few other languages but passes the Scandinavian languages over to us.

Ncab is a Stockholm-based media company. We put their newsletter into English. Last year Sanna Rundqvist decided 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 Kinnunen lives in Eastbourne and does our Finnish scripts. Incitus is 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 Pinshof 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