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.