One of the highspots of my trip to Cardigan yesterday was buyng my last issue of the Daily Mail. But what a good deal. For five pounds I have got myself a set of a dozen Classic Detectives DVDs. Each night for the past two weeks I have settled down to watch another DVD. Yo! This is the life! Sherlock Holmes and Robbie Coltrane in Cracker wouldn’t work and I have Jonathan Creek to go. But here are the rest in order of choice.

In first place comes John Thaw and Kevin Whateley as Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis with Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect not far behind. Next comes Patricia Routledge as Hetty Winthropp, Michael Kitchen in Foyle’s War and Roy Marsden as P.D.James’ detective Commander Dalgliesh. Felicity Kendal and Pam Ferris as Rosemary and Thyme were the worst of the bunch...division four for them. In my third division are George Baker as Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, David Jason in A Touch of Frost and Peter Davison in The Last Detective. It was the characters of these third division detectives that I didn’t really like. I couldn’t warm to them as people. Now you know what I have been getting up to in the evenings.

These weblogs are about what I do all day. Occasionally I let slip a thing or two about love and money. But these subjects are not really on-message. However I have spent a significant amount of time over the past three weeks addressing some of the concerns that Heidi and I have about how to dovetail our two independent lives. At one point I felt the need to define the way I go about things...my modus operandi if you like. This I refer to as indicative planning. Here is how I tried to explain it to Heidi.

There are long lead times in the academic world for grants, positions, papers, conferences etc. So for the past thirty years I have run my life on a rolling 12-18 month plan. Final plans...the only things outsiders are ever likely to hear about...are firmed up closer to the time so that geographical moves tend to be settled 4-6 weeks ahead of time. Plans often do not work out...particularly when money is a limiting factor...less so otherwise. My policy is to share details of the options under consideration with those affected by them and those closest to me sooner rather than later. Within this 12-18 month rolling framework I respond opportunistically to things that come up without there necessarily being changes to the indicative plan.

As this begged more questions than it answered I then tried to dig a little deeper by defining my philosophy of the world and how I act upon it. This was what I came up with. Theologically I take four fundamental positions within a sceptically agnostic framework: 1. Life lives me and I do not live life; 2. Life is what happens to me when I am busy making other plans; 3. The gods help those who help themselves. I act upon the world; 4. I plan as if I have complete free will but act as if I am subject to fate. I don’t often find people talking about these things. I think they should. There were a couple of other things I felt needed to be added.

We live at present in a non-sustainable era of cheap air travel and this means that I regard myself as being never more than one day's travel away from any other place around the North Atlantic Ocean. This won’t last. But while it does I have no qualms about taking side trips off the indicative plan to other places for 3-6 weeks at a time. I would happily do so several times a year. Normally when something like this comes up I choose a particular project and try to focus my creative attention on this project while keeping everything else ticking over. It is also quite clear to me that family, friends and colleagues rule over a great abundance of empty living and working space and that this could be available for my use. However people need to be convinced that I am not a scrounger and a loafer. I am in no doubt that my work deserves their personal support and the support of the wider public. But it is my job to convince them. These weblogs are part of the process.

China eased above the Brits and the French after another year of nine percent growth. Before long they will overhaul the Yanks too and be back at Number One...two hundred years after they were last there. Mind you all these statements are the most awful nonsense and I say this for two reasons. Firstly to include China in the same list as Luxembourg is ridiculous. Size matters. Secondly the definitions of internal trade and exports ignore the realities of transnational companies, intra-company and intra-state trading and economic activity within and without families, clans, diasporas, city regions & imperial megastates. Also ninety-five percent of economic activity by everyone everywhere is untraded and uncashed. Aggregation and consolidation matter too.

I have this trick to stop myself frittering money away. It’s rather like innoculation. I treat myself to some little thing and the delight of this little treat stops me from feeling so poor that I eventually can’t stand it any more and splash out lots of money on something really foolish. Yesterday I paid the Barnados shop in Cardigan £2.99 for a Beethoven Great Composers CD. I have been writing weblogs to it all day with just a walk to the river at lunchtime for a break. This is my third one...written before the day ends. Maybe I’ll make up the rest.

On Wednesday an e-mail arrived at williamshepherd@cesc.net from Guardian Unlimited. I picked it up today. They were offering me a new free e-mail service that would provide ‘a snapshot of Guardian Unlimited including the day's top news stories sent to your inbox every day at 9 am’. Well I beat them to it...in more ways than one. Some months ago I set up a daily feed from the Guardian to MyYahoo! which I have set as my browser’s opening page. But I fed myself the columnists...not the news. This feed receives equal billing with the feed carrying the William Shepherd Letter. The RSS technology on my Berlin-based weblog server allows anyone else to do the same. You could have started a month ago. Click on 'What is RSS?' below on the right.

This agenda setting side of the mainstream media is not talked about much. Have you noticed how tv, radio and the newspapers feed off each other...taking the news agenda for the day from each other? One thing I liked about Alastair Cooke’s Letter From America was the fact that you never knew what he would talk about. But one thing was certain. It was always interesting. And when he did choose to talk about mainstream news he would talk about it in a different way. Matthew Parris in The Times on Saturday and Simon Jenkins several times a week in the Guardian have this Alastair Cooke feel about their articles.

My three polite reminders earlier in the week did their job. Two of them had hit the jackpot and my main Barclays business account that feeds the William Franklin PayPal account and doubles as a client account for Cultura (UK) was awash with money. As several hundred of it is mine I brought forward my Carmarthen Day and spent the morning motoring around the Welsh countryside.

Though technically still a building society, as far as online banking, credit cards and checking accounts are concerned, the Nationwide is as modern as any bank. But a prudent entrepreneur always has one account somewhere that is a cash account. That way you know exactly where you stand. My cash account is with the Nationwide. And they also entrust Academic Inn Books with a Treasurer Account passbook. Good Yacht Guide cheque sales pass through this account so Heidi looks after it when I am out of town. The passbook is just like the ones from the 1950s...but is updated electronically at the branch. My nearest branch is in Carmarthen.

I woke up at four thirty and didn’t much feel like going back to sleep so was down to work by five. I had some invoices to do for Heidi and needed to respond to the long conversation with Constanza the previous afternoon. More on this next week. I set off for Carmarthen at eight and was strolling down St Peters Street as the clocks were striking nine. By nine fifteen I was finished at the Nationwide. The library didn’t open until nine thirty so I bought myself a hot pasty and left town heading for Cardigan.

Think of three sides of a triangle and you will have some idea of my 120 mile round trip. I was now on the second leg. I left Carmarthen on the Aberystwyth road through Newcastle Emlyn. This road follows the river as it winds its way off the high plateau down to Cardigan Bay. By 1130 I was sitting in Celinis with my cup of coffee by my side, Rod Stewart singing the old songs...the Jerome Kerns, Cole Porter, Frank Sinatras etc...and a complete set of the year’s weblogs in front of me for proof reading.

I had one nervous moment. I went to the lending library for a DVD and was asked whether or not I usually paid half price. As I looked puzzled the young assistant tried to help by telling me that pensioners rent their DVDs at half price. How my face dropped. Now it is true that I am only a few months short of my sixtieth birthday but I rather pride myself on looking ten years younger than I really am. So this took the wind out of my sails...and I still haven’t got over it. Mind you, remembering back to my younger days, I looked on anybody over thirty as old and tended not to discriminate between a bit old and very ancient. Yes. I am sure that’s it.

I read Heidi just before leaving Rye two months ago and really enjoyed it. In fact I was surprised at how good it was. Now the film of the book was in town for two days over the weekend. So I just had to see it. I loved it. My daughter once told me that The Little Prince was the best thing I had ever written. The manuscript is gathering dust somewhere. The film Adaptation borrowed from the library was about twin brothers...both script writers...and both played by Nicholas Cage. Jack Priestley worked on Hollywood scripts in Arizona. Hmm.

Davos is in the Swiss canton of Graubuenden. It hits the headlines for a couple of days at this time of the year...and these two days cost the taxpayers of the canton 33 million Swiss Francs. Still it is better than it was. Nowadays the Swiss get eighty US cents for their Swiss Franc. Five years ago they only got sixty. But why do they pay to host this monstrous regiment of billionaires? I must be missing something. I thought the Swiss had real democracy. Perhaps the taxpayers don’t pick up the tab at all. They certainly shouldn’t have to pay for the 5500 troops drafted in to protect 2300 indignantaries. And they can’t even take their currency profits of twenty cents in the franc. Costs have tripled since 2003 because of extra checks at rail stations and airports...and the other high-tech security measures from the stupidity services...like barbed wire across the roads. Ooh! Scary!

Woodlands Junior School is thirty minutes from Rye across the county line in the Garden of England. It is the only primary school in England with three top Ofsted commendations. The school's website gives 25 000 visitors a day a glimpse of life in England through the eyes of its students. My comments on population came from here so by way of a thank you I left my grubby digits in their visitors’ book. Here is what I wrote.

While searching the internet with Google for some basic population numbers I chanced across your website and found it to be the only one to offer me what I needed and to present it in a way I could use for my weblog. How about having some fun projecting future populations based on different birth rates...and as you are so close to Dover why not base your future figures on different immigration and emigration rates too?

For good measure I threw in some facts. In Europe 2.1 is considered to be the population replacement level. In other parts of the world this figure is much higher as it needs to cover babies who never make it past their fifth birthday...often half of them...and for mothers dying in child birth...quite apart from Aids which takes less than one in a thousand of the English population (60 000 were HIV positive at the last count). The current birth rate in the UK is 1.74 children per woman but the Greeks will disappear soon at just 1.29. Here are some others: Spain & Italy 1.3, Germany 1.4, Holland 1.7, Norway & Sweden 1.8 and Ireland & France 2.0.

Today I emailed Constanza in Mexico City and suggested that Pensart arrange sponsorship for Woodland’s English cultural pages. Her husband Peter Dale read Spanish Literature at Oxford University so I thought the Woodlands culture pages might give themselves a multicultural flavour. Mexico City cricket results that sort of thing. I wonder what silly point is in Spanish? I also floated the idea that Gimnasio Jose Joaquim Casas might go for some English/Spanish twinning with Woodlands Junior School and their Kent colleagues.

Constanza had emailed me the latest Wheelock College newsletter. Headlined were the glad tidings that this Boston-based college had received half a million dollars in new funding from the US federal government. Well jolly hockey sticks and whack-o to all that! But I raised my eyebrows when I read the small print. It seems that in December, George Dubya Bush signed legislation that included funding for Wheelock College as part of NASA’s 2006 budget. This funding ‘builds on the college’s work with the NASA Opportunities for Visionary Academics Programme (NOVA) which seeks to create unique opportunities for elementary teacher preparation emphasizing maths and science.

Apparently Wheelock College plans to use the money ‘to improve classroom technology, enhance math and science teaching labs, and develop new cutting-edge curricula for educating elementary-level teachers.’ Like what? Neurolingistic Programming? An updated version of the programmes Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were working on at Harvard University a few decades back? Or something more mundane like computer freebies from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or wind-up laptops from Nicholas Negroponte at MIT just down the road?

The Gospel According to Forbes has Roman Abramovich at 363 in its rich list for 2001, 127 in 2002 and up to 49 in 2003...one of 17 Russian billionaires. America tops the list with 275 billionaires with Bill Gates in the top spot on 490 billion dollars. Our poor little Security Council misfit France does not fare so well with just ten...one less than Mexico, the home of the widowed Carlos Slim Helu and his six children.

Now if you are talking eligible they don’t come much more eligible than the richest man in South America with 14 billion dollars to his name and to those of his nominee companies, family trusts and offshore accounts. His prospects are good too with his wealth up $5 billion on the year thanks to windfall profits and stock surges from his flagship Téléfonos de México...a landline monopoly notorious for undercutting the competition...and his América Msvil telcos. Slim is a vocal opponent of free trade and free market prescriptions for developing Latin economies. Now there’s a surprise. Echoes of Richard Branson. Are there limits to hypocrisy?

Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich have one thing in common...giving away half a billion dollars. Nobody knows the source of the Abramovich billions...oil, share deals etc. But Bill Gates’ billions came from keeping his source code secret. Our superheroes have different ideas on spending money. Gates’ millions pay for global wars on malaria and tuberculosis. Abramovich’s dosh buys foreign footballers for Chelsea Football Club.

Now let’s say that upon my demise I get the job of membership secretary at The Pearly Gates. One day I see Abramovich and Gates floating up the drive. My immediate boss St. Peter wants my advice...and he wants it now. For Peter it helps to keep it simple so I rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. My criteria? How much happiness they bring into the world. Not an easy call. I’ve been a Chelsea fan all my life. But fortunately ‘now’ in heavenly terms is much the same as eternity. I tell Peter I’ll get back to him on this one!