I was through with weblogging by nine after getting up at six. I also spent an hour at the tail end of the day doing weblinks for my Constant Gardener piece. Putting in the links is a separate task that often starts with a Google search. This helps me choose the link I like best. Still one of the side effects of my early liberty was finding out that my local cafe doesn’t warm up until midday. It was a cold night and Caffi Beca was freezing.

Apart from this excursion I stayed home all day to finish off the Swedish accounts. The end results went to Stockholm at 1800 hours dated 24th January 2006. I would have preferred the fifteenth but was pleased enough. We billed less than a hundred thousand kronor through William Franklin last year...well under a fifth of total billings...but only started the UK accounts in June. Eventually we are looking to put 40% through the UK which means a threefold increase on the 2005 rate. This needs careful planning as there is no point in billing from the UK with its low taxes unless the profits end up here. This means spending the money in Sweden.

In 2005 income was £ 5655 and cost of sales £ 5090 leaving £ 565 for William Franklin’s fees...10% of income. For 2006 we are looking at twenty rather than five so we need to plan our use of the eighteen after William Franklin’s tithe of two. We are almost entirely electronic with money received and disbursed from PayPal and through Barclays’ online banking arm ibank.

My idea was to put me on the payroll in Sweden. I would pick up the Swedish company’s social costs by effectively reducing my take by a third...these benefits go to me after all. It may be a step too far but I thought the option worth floating. I would hope the rest gets spent on a base in Cambridge that can double up as accommodation for the firm’s directors when they are in England on business.

My proposal means that four of the six thousand pounds I earn in 2006 gets paid as salary with two sent to the Swedish Government as payroll taxes. I get a monthly salary of three thousand kronor with the balance of twenty thousand as a year-end bonus that relates to my translation and scripting work, project management and factoring services. We will see how that idea flies. Here’s a fragment of our book-keeping for 2005.

Nov 11 Incitus £ 271.50 cr
Nov 16 Leena Kinnunen £ 53.91 db
Nov 23 Paen £ 230.00 cr
Nov 23 Otherwise £ 166.00 db
Nov 25 Ncab £ 62.58 cr

This tiny slice of our accounts provides some insight into the flavour of the globalisation going on in our little corner of the business world. Otherwise Studios does the billing for Martin Voll, a Norwegian musician based in London who we used last year for the Norwegian voiceover on a film for the oil giant Shell. The Shell contract was won by Paen who work out of New Zealand and is run by a German national Dr Andreas Ernst who speaks German and Russian and a few other languages but passes the Scandinavian languages over to us.

Ncab is a Stockholm-based media company. We put their newsletter into English. Last year Sanna Rundqvist decided their Swedish website needed to be available to punters in English, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian and Spanish. We got the job. Andreas got the Russian. Leena Kinnunen lives in Eastbourne and does our Finnish scripts. Incitus is a Norwegian media company. We did the script and voiceover for Oslo Museum.

I am not a connoisseur of wine. Connie taught me fifteen years ago that only two things matter when buying wine: alcohol content...the higher the better...and price...the lower the better. The Finns drink to get drunk. Nonetheless I know somebody who tastes wines for a living. His discernment is impressive...beyond anything I would have thought possible. I shop for my wines in the supermarkets of Boulogne and rarely pay more than a euro for a bottle of 12% red table wine. At Tesco I pay £2.49p...four times French prices.

Connie would be amused. She now has science on her side. Here’s something for you to try out on the next wine snob to grace your dinner party. Take four diffferent types of red wine...Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah...using cheap and expensive versions of each. Blindfold your wine tasters and feed them some cheese. Then challenge their discernment. You will give some amusement to your guests. Cheese masks the subtle tastes of wine. So next time you are putting on a do go easy on the vintage wines after dinner and spend your money on good cheese instead. The scientists? California. Now you know where to go to do your PhD.