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.