Yesterday I let some fresh air into the place by throwing open the windows. One of them is set in the roof as a skylight...lovely word...and got forgotten. This morning when I woke up at seven the bird song was pouring in. I tried to bottle it. I like living close to nature...well close-ish. Oscar Wilde has his own take on this...in his essay on Socialism if I remember aright...he was for it on aesthetic grounds. Much of my past twelve years have been spent onboard a boat moored on a tidal river. Twice a day the boat gets lifted ten feet off the mud by the rising tide before being put gently back down again four hours later. This keeps me a-tuned to nature’s rhythms.

In principle I get up and go down with the sun. But at this time of the year this would mean a mighty short day. I cannot get my head around all this shifting back and forth of clocks. But today it was light by eight and dark by half past five. On the equator dawn and dusk happen. They are events. But in England and Wales dawn doesn’t so much happen as saunter up on you. It passes the time of day for a while and then plays herald to the real McCoy as the sun peeps up over the horizon. Spring and Autumn are like this too.

Nine hours of daylight means rather a lot of darkness. Manchester solved its urban darkness problem for a while by treating itself to gas lights in 1811. What good these did the Redcoats as they chased the Luddite insurgents up onto the moors is not immediately apparent. Another mystery is why the City of London felt the need to persuade the politicians to deploy the largest army ever seen in this country against them. Interesting.

But before Thomas Edison and the wonders of electricty much of the world’s lighting needs were looked after by the nearest whale population. Suicide bombers in their own way, sacrificing themselves so Man could see. Whale oil fuelled the lamps of the gentry. It is a wonder there was not more pressure on the whale population.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the population of England & Wales was ten million. Now it tops the fifty million mark despite regular spates of carnage on foreign battle fields. The absentees were not abroad administering The British Empire either. The Scots did that for their English masters. Plus ca change plus la meme chose. Today the Scottish want-to-be-Prime Minister Gordon Brown wraps himself in the British Union flag in the vain hope that the English will accept the idea of being ruled by a minority dialect wielded by four million far-northerners with special parliamentary priveleges. Yet another bubble that will surely burst.

Not that the Celts’ English masters have changed much. They will still be found in the gaming clubs of The City and St James. They no longer waste their afternoons in Westminster or Whitehall. As Tony Benn famously declared when retiring from the Houses of Parliament. ‘I am retiring as an MP to go into politics!’

But who is calling the shots? Some claim that nobody is and this is the real problem. The argument is that the ruling classes lost the plot with The Kaiser War and Spaceship Earth has been on automatic pilot for the past hundred years...heading for oblivion. These people tell us the world needs a hefty dose of control if our course is to be reset for utopia. This is one possible reading of William Engdahl’s book. Who? Whom? as usual.

Our 20-foot northern bottlenose whale ended her days in the Thames. This could have been her intention. Whales do beach themselves when they are sick. But the auditory stress from the papparazzis’ motor launches would not have improved the young lady’s chances. She got as far as the pagoda in Battersea Park before heading back for a reunion with her distraught mother thirty miles away in Southend. She never made it.

She might have been better off in 1240 when her demise would have been short and swift. Our chronicles report that in this year a monster of prodigious size swam under London Bridge pursued by a rabble of sailors armed with ropes, bows and arrows. They killed this poor lad at Mortlake near Chiswick Bridge. Another one got stranded near Dagenham during a storm in 1658 and caused the death of Oliver Cromwell the next day. Don’t mock! Everyone believed in omens back then. And as omens go, stranded whales are not glad tidings.

I took today off although my e-mail got checked and a few other things got done...like chopping wood and expressing my interest in an apartment in Lund at £250 a month. I also figured out how the Amazon Marketplace works and e-mailed Clive Ogden to give me details of half a dozen books by Romney Marsh writers to run a pilot. The Daily Mail are in the middle of a two-week give-away of Classic Detective DVDs but I need to take my tokens to W.H.Smith in Cardigan. While in town I did some printing and bought my ticket for The Constant Gardener. Wine, pizza and Hetty Wainthropp for dinner.

Here is some whale lore to round off today’s weblog. Northern bottlenoses spend three quarters of their time in deep water and dive a mile for food. In one week bottlenoses eat their own body weight in squid, cuttlefish, starfish and herring. They can hold their breath for up to two hours at a time. But apparently they don’t sleep as they lack the automatice programmes we depend on to keep our breathing going while asleep...which begs more questions than it answers.