Today I created a weblog for The Etherden Clan so that research by individual members of the clan can be made more readily available for others over the web. You will find it at http://etherden.blog.co.uk. I started it up with an email exchange I have been conducting this week with Jane Hammond, a fourth cousin living in Nottingham. I rather like it. It has a nice feel about it. I emailed the posting to Mike Slavin in Rye Harbour who is creating a personal history record for villagers past and present. The blogging technology looks ideal.

Wall Street shares went into a tail-spin today and lost two percent of their price...value is something else. The financial press reported ‘unsettled markets’ as oil prices topped 68 dollars a barrel after a ‘purported threat’ by Al-Qaeda fueled worries about ‘potential supply disruptions in Iran and Nigeria’. Much more significant were the glad tidings that a whale was swimming around in the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament. The clean-up of air and water in London is one of the great unheralded successes of the 20th century.

Another great unheralded success of the 20th century is Anton Pinschof. I am bullying him into weblogging himself. A Pinschof gem came in today on the subject of executive power...in response to an e-mail exchange originating with Living Economies in New Zealand. ‘Your contention,’ Toni wrote, ‘that the solution lies in eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the wielders of power, is patently false, as historical experience must surely have proved. Plenty of worthy individuals, including prime ministers and heads of state, spoke to Hitler & Stalin and were hoodwinked and ignored and did not understand what they were up against.’

Anton Pinshof continues. ‘When an individual wields power, that power dominates him as well as the rest of us. It is the hierarchical power behind the decision-maker that counts, not truth or morality or anything else. The other obvious example is the way the rich & powerful are rarely obliged to listen to unarmed & powerless people. How many unarmed citizens demonstrated against the second Iraq War before it began?

‘The same is true of the anonymous behaviour of big business. When did you ever hear of citizens stopping yet another supermarket from parachuting in on some small town that already had two? The decisions were not announced, and were made hundreds of miles away in unaccountable boardrooms, long before the site was acquired and long before we had gotten used to the second supermarket. If a municipality has three already, a fourth supermarket will sprout by a roundabout on the edge of town, just over the boundary in the next parish, whose council will discreetly pocket the local taxes.

‘In my own experience in Brussels, the Agriculture Kommissars' underlings will every time surprise us with crazy proposals (on organic agriculture legislation) completely contradicting what the movement has been telling them for years. Why? because hierarchical power cannot NOT be wielded, once it has been accumulated, and before it is wielded, it listens to all the other invested influences that are more powerful than any original movements that might have constituted an historical initiative in the first instance. The fact that the influence is exerted behind the procedural façade is an integral part of the situation. Not only is a relationship impossible, but the realisation that we have been manipulated causes enough frustration and mutual recrimination to destroy the unity of the grass roots movement concerned.’

Academic Inn Books has half a dozen titles in Books in Print. Seven years ago I signed up for a fax-based telephone ordering service that Whitakers...the almanac and ISBN people...were running. I was working closely with David Neame at the time so arranged for Neame Designs in Rye to receive the faxes. It worked well until David retired last year. But no longer. Last year Nielsen...the market research people...bought out the Whitaker’s service and set it up on the internet as BookNet Web. Today Academic Inn Books signed up so I can now log in and collect my book orders online in the same way that I collect my webmail.

I must be moving soon as I have established a working routine. This is actually the bane of my peripatetic life style. It takes weeks to create routines...then I move on and have to start over again. Five minutes walk away from me is my platonic ideal of a river. It is 10-15 yards wide and rushes between slatecliffs tumbling and falling over itself in whirlpools and eddies as it dashes towards the sea many miles away. High above the little river is a footbridge one person wide. When I have a homeday I wander up the hill to the river after finishing my morning’s work and scramble around the slate workings on the far side. Heaven cannot get much better.

Eight hours after being cut open oranges have lost a fifth of their Vitamin C. I don’t believe in the vitamin industry. No doubt my scepticism will be confirmed when I watch The Constant Gardener on Sunday.