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!