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!