William Shepherd

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.