Here beginneth the sixteenth epistle of the Mad Blogger of Carmarthen... Kirkpatrick Sales’s epithet. Up at eight after a blustery night and spent the first five minutes wrestling with the Llaeth Llawn. If blue tits can find there way into milk bottles on suburban doorsteps then surely it shouldn’t be this hard to open the milk. Llaeth Llawn means whole milk. Ten minutes later with mission accomplished and muesli consumed I settled down at my desk to the strains of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The D Major one was the only one he wrote.

Ludwig brought five work-thoughts scurrying across my mind. My Swedish trip came in at number four. I had decided over the weekend that I would be renting a place in Malmo or Lund from the beginning of April to the end of September and would probably take a trip to Sweden in February to talk with people in Lund.

A newletter has been winging its way to me from Lund University over the internet for the past few months. Rooms, houses and apartments are available at half English rents and two or three come up every week in Lund or in Malmo...often for immediate letting with pretty flexible dates. My enquiries told me that accommodation would not be a problem. The next task was lining up money for the trip.

Over the past few years I have accumulated almost 60 000 ‘sparpoäng’ with the Swedish bank JAK. Members can borrow interest-free up to a hundred thousand Swedish kronor...a little over £7000...without old aunts getting wheeled out as guarantors or the family silver going into hock. With this money in mind I had set up internet banking before Christmas. Time to test my brand spanking new ‘personligkod’. It worked a treat. But loan applications could not be done online. So this was put off to another day.

Two of the other work-thoughts bouncing around my head were about year-end statements. I like to get these out by mid-January and had two left to do...Cultura and the Magpie Sagas. I had all the data at my elbow but somewhat irresponsibly...and not without a slight twinge of guilt...I passed these by on the other side. My other two work-thoughts were awesome in their scope but this weblog can cope.

With a conference looming now was a good time for a piece on my political views. I accept the main thrust of the arguments for a return to the human scale in the affairs of man. But I see no way this can happen this side of a collapse of civilization unless the root causes of giantism and centralisation are understood.

Samuel Pepys was at the heart of the action at the tail end of the 17th century when Dutch double-entry book-keeping tricks came to London town. I see how it’s gone since 1694 when the Bank of England Corporation set up shop in Threadneedle Street. In Lund my interest is the finances of the Hanseatic towns in a world before central banking. My book will be called A New History of Banking. The book will be in three parts. I: From Hansa to Houblon; II: From Houblon to Holocaust; and III: From Holocaust to Holobolo. No. Don’t ask! All will be revealed at the appointed hour.

Work-thought five was a piece on the right size of schools. Towns would be much better if planning started with the alleyways and not the motorways. By the same token schools would be much better if things were turned around. Start with the customer...the children not the teachers...and assume a basic right to walk or cycle to school. Here is your criteria for the new 21st century schooling infrastructure.

Mere fleeting thoughts before getting down to my weblog for Sunday 15th January 2006. Like today two hours had cracked it so I was finished by ten. But that was only the first draft. After that comes the tidying up, the posting to the web and the link research. By 1130 I was through with blogging for the day. Time to move. I took out the compost, took the car for a drive to the local store, slipped down the road to the local cafe for a coffee and a read of the newspaper, popped next door for a couple of buckets of ash for the toilet and then devoted a quarter of an hour to the joyful task of chopping wood.

In the afternoon an e-letter went off to Toni Pinschof abourt cesc weblogs and, in my capacity as a Contributing Editor to Fourth World Review two suggested articles went off to the editor for the next issue...an article on Secession by Kirk Sale discovered on the Middlebury Institute website and a piece about the Assymetry of Scale from The Characters of Physical Laws by Richard P. Feynman found lurking one click away from the Energy Morphology section of my article on Energy Wars.

A phone conversation with Francoise de Naillat who ran an up-market restaurant in Étaple with her husband Anton many years ago. Much amused upon hearing the thought that ‘I’m not suffering from insanity...I’m enjoying every minute of it’, Francoise felt the urge to text it to me. Why she should think of me I can’t imagine. Chicken Tikka Masala and an evening with Inspector Morse on DVD rounded off my day.