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.