William Shepherd

Yesterday’s Guardian had a full-page advertisement for SimplySwitch, a leading independent price comparison service to help readers come to grips with the time-consuming and confusing task of choosing between the hundred or so broadband internet providers inflicted on the long-suffering internet community in this sceptered isle. After broadband speeds, dial-up is hard work. I have dial-up.

Growing up with the internet from its earliest days twenty years ago when I was a Graduate Student at MIT I have flickering memories of those early days but mostly I too have forgotten how much better everything has become. Installing a landline and an internet service were among my top priorities when moving into my daughter Helena's Welsh cottage a month ago for my two months stay while she was abroad. January’s job was to upgrade to Broadband. But all the offers insist on a 12-month contract. You can break it but the cheapest deal comes from virgin.net at £50 and BT charge youthe fill cost of your 12-month contract which is close to £200. I spent almost an hour on the SimplySwitch website...linked to www.guardian.co.uk/money ...but came away without the short-term contract I was hoping to find. Surely one of these hundred companies can see the market opportunity here? I decided to try again another day as I had work to do.

I have two ways of getting down to work. The first is my P-mode where P stands for procrastination. The second is my Q-mode where queue is what I don’t do...instead charging in like a bull in a china shop. Neither is very efficient but, what they hell, they work. I avoid writer’s block by making sure I always have several different pieces of work on the go. This too seems to work most of the time.

Today was decreed to be Blogging Day. I have run a daily diary before and I know the effort it takes to catch up once you fall behind. Here I was on the fourth day of January. There were to be two weblogs. The What I do all Day blog would be posted to http://williamshepherd.blog.co.uk while my Nick Leeson blog would go to http://holobolo.sprayblog.se . Once the two blogs were going it would be easy to slip into the style the few times a week when new postings were called for. But the first few postings would need time. Developing a style doesn't always come easy.

Work began in P-mode as I absent-mindedly flicked through The Spectator to see if there was anything worth reading. A year ago this would have taken me ten minutes and would have yielded nothing. Today was different. What had first caught my eye was an article by Corelli Barnett who runs the Churchill Archives Centre at my old alma mater. I had plans to talk to the college...and the archives centre in particular...about co-sponsoring an academic conference on cantonisation in September 2007...the 50th anniversary of the writing of The Breakdown of Nations. One of my first tasks was to find out whether Winston Churchill had ever proposed The Swiss Solution to the problems of Mesopotamia. My hunch is that he may well have done.

A meeting with Corelli Barnett and a rummage through the Churchill Archives would justify an overnight stay in college and dinner at High Table...one of the privileges afforded to alumnae of Churchill College. This and a day at the Cambridge University Library would make sense en route to Lund University in the first or second week of February.

It was mid-afternoon before I got started on my weblogs. There was not an article or a feature in the 31st December 2005 issue of The Spectator that did not hold my attention. Indeed all seven articles, the Spectator Archives feature and several other pieces went into my private archives...the highest score for any magazine for a long long time. I put this down to the publisher Kimberly Quinn returning to her husband after her dalliance with a New Labour Home Secretary on the grounds that the alternative explanation that I was turning Tory in my dotage was too awful to contemplate.

Once free of The Spectator I made good progress on my weblogs and was well ahead of schedule by the time I finished work for the day a little before nine. The only loser was a pepperoni pizza which found itself burnt to a frazzle while my thoughts were elsewhere...a fair trade for the sugar in my muesli.

I harbour no false hopes of getting back into the work groove before the end of the week as I was still missing Heidi terribly when I awoke...this will last for most the week before abating.

After coffee and a bowl of muesli I spent a little time on the computer clearing back the three hundred emails in my inbox from the past few days to the twenty that were of interest to me. After noting who they were from I deemed them all non-urgent and decided against opening them. This is a crucial decision from a time management point of view as I like to give well-written considered responses to incoming e-mails and this takes time.

Just as my son the intrepid Crocodile Uppsala has taught me that the only way to have a paperless office is to have no printer, so the only way to avoid spending time on e-mails is not to open the incoming mail in your inbox until you are ready to spend a few hours dealing with it properly.

I took the car the 15 miles into Cardigan to get rid of my six plastic bags of accumulated holiday rubbish at the recycling centre outside Somerfields, sorted between glass bottles, newspapers and everything else. There are strong arguments against the logging of the Amazonian forests and the cutting down of hard woods in South East Asia. But the complaints against newspapers as a destroyer of trees is essentially bogus. Newspapers are printed on recycled paper so the cellulose just goes round and round in much the same ways as our overground metal mines.

In fact I don’t know exactly what happens to the old newspapers that go into the Cardigan recycling container...John Papworth runs a group in Purton called Ps & Qs that investigates this sort of thing and then reports back to the community...but my assumption is that the paper neither goes up in smoke nor down into landfill sites.

More comfort eating...this time a £4 vegetarian breakfast (two vegetable sausages instead of bacon and a pork sausage) with coffee included in the price. Then to the library to drop off the rented DVDs and across the street to the post office. Heidi is a very organised traveller and a joy to travel with. But she has an interesting habit of leaving one item wherever she goes by way of a sacrifice to the gods before departure. Perhaps it is her way of asking St Christopher to keep her safe. John Papworth had inscribed copies of Kirkpatrick’s Human Scale and Leopold Kohr’s Breakdown of Nations to Heidi in his bid to woo her into taking on the task of conference organiser for our ‘Five Years On’ gathering in September and it was Leopold's book that was the sacrifice for this trip.

Finally a coffee in Caffi Mwldan before collecting the car and driving to Tescos for my two kilogram bag of Swiss style muesli which at £ 2.39 works out at 12p per 100 gms...less than a third of most packaged cereals and the best deal in town. I usually take their blue bag as this has no added salt and sugar. But today I had to be content with the red bag with its double helping of both (19% and 8%). Food labelling is gradually improving in this country after a slow start and it is now almost possible to get some sort of handle on what you eat when buying provisions from the supermarkets.

And so back home to a relaxing evening with Tony Benn. I talked to Heidi on the phone. She was very pleased that her letter to the local Labour MP Michael Foster had resulted in a long letter from the British Embassy in Nairobi. At the radical end of the social justice movement, writing to your MP is a standing joke but the power of a well-written letter to an individual in authority should not be underestimated. Opinions do change, letters are read and if polite and well-argued, they are often circulated and discussed.

Tony Benn was making much the same point when remarking about the bugging of telephones. ‘I always speak clearly on the phone,’ he writes, ‘as I want them to hear what I am saying!’...adding as a wry aside that this was his only connection to the establishment nowadays.