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!