Over on the other side of the pond January broke the high temperature records. Chicago was basking in temperatures as high as fifty degrees fahrenheit. The warmth and humidity set off thunderstorms and tornados across many mid-west states while winter cereal crops suffered. These conditions spread north to Alaska and Canada and the organisers of the thousand mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race were forced to shorten it because of lack of snow. Then on 12th February a surge of Arctic air flooded much of the US and set off a massive snow storm. New York was hit particularly hard and broke its snowfall record with 27 inches of snow in Central Park. A week later many places in the States registered their coldest monthly temperatures on record.

Meanwhile over on this side of the pond E.ON a German energy company that owns PowerGen was caught red-handed rigging an opinion poll in the Oldham Advertiser. The company is so desperate to get some free carbon credits by building a windfarm on moorland near Oldham that it told its employees to act entirely independently and simultaneously by sending a hundred emails n an hour and a half flat to the Oldham Advertiser in support of the sceme. Rumbled they dissembled. 'We unreservedly apologise. Our renewable team wanted to support the project because they believe in it but they used an inappropriate way to do it.' Just so.

A Hedge Fund is a device used by wealthy individuals and institutions to invest cash. Yet another senior investment banker has joined the stampede away from corporate banking into the hedge fund sector. The latest exile is Charles Kirwan-Taylor, chairman of US Corporate Broking at Credit Suisse. These funds are restricted by law to a hundred investors per fund so they set a high minimum investment. We are told that their freedom to invest aggressively at high risk is what makes them attractive to the rich and wealthy. Complete and utter nonsense. These toffs trade at low risk on inside information...otherwise known as tip-offs. Up against the wall with the lot of them. Chuck plans to focus on European equities.

AEA Technology is one of the ever-increasing privatised arms of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Last week the firm was fined £400 000 by Justice Norman Jones at Leeds Crown Court for failing to fit a shield plug to a two and a half ton flask carrying part of decommissioned cancer treatment equipment the 130 miles from Cookridge Hospial along the A65 through Skipton, Settle and Newby Bridge to Windscale. The flask was blasting out 129 million Cobalt-60 gamma rays per second throughout its journey. This is between 100 and 1000 times the 'normal' very high dose risk level. Anyone standing close by would have felt sick inside ten minutes, have a fifty percent chance of dying after an hour and would be brown bread for certain after two hours.

Adrundhati Roy declared to the World Social Forum in Mumbai on 16th January 2004 that we must consider ourselves at war. I think she is right. But for the first time it might be lies instead of truth that is the first casualty of war...at least it could be. Mahatma Gandhi always insisted that satyagraha was a key part of his strategy for ridding the Green Villages of India of the British Raj.

The Peace Parties must always speak truth to power. Let the War Party tie themselves into knots with their convoluted apologies that are not apologies. Being economical with the actualité is what government does…the previous statement being a typical example. Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King would agree with this approach. So would Tom Robbins, one of the four useful things to come out of Seattle…Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks are the others. Here is Tom Robbins’ hero, Switters (sometimes with the CIA), in Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (Random House, New York, 2000, ISBN 1-84243-029-9).

The Devil grows fat on our lies; the more you lie to him, the better he likes it. It’s an investment in his firm, it increases the value of his stock by fostering the practice of lying. Only truth can hurt the Devil. That’s why honesty has been banished from almost every existing institution: corporate, religious and governmental. Truth can be dangerously liberating. Did I mention that the Devil’s other name is El Controlador? He who controls. His other name is El Manipulado’. Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s response was that both manipulation and control are ‘sometimes requisite in order to secure and insure stability and if that smacks to you of the satanic, then I suggest you think of it as using the Devil to further the aims of God’.

In After Many a Summer Aldous Huxley had this to say on that subject: ‘The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word - these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals’. He expanded on this statement in his book length essay ‘Ends & Means’ (Chatto & Windus, 1966, 344 pages, ISBN 0-70110-799-5). Amazon.co.uk lists it as fiction. We live in interesting times.

It was still bitterly cold as I walked into town when the supermarket opened at ten to buy supplies of candles and firelighters. The event of the day was to be Clive and Sally's soiree at midday at 22 Church Square. These are quite the best parties I get invited to here in Rye. As a bookseller Clive Ogden gathers together an eclectic mix from among the local intelligentsia visiting Meads Books. His events are always well-attended and are guaranteed to provide interesting conversation...not otherwise a notable feature of small-town England.

Among the regulars are William and Fiona Neilson. Indeed we first met at the end of 1996 when I was campaigning as a Referendum Party candidate for the 1997 Westminster Parliament. My success was measured not so much in the two and a half percent of the voate as in the fact that I inadvertently opened up the West Oldham and Royton constituency on the outskirts of Manchester for subsequent inroads by Nick Griffin and his New Model British National Party. The tenth anniversay of attending these soirees is coming up in a year or so. William has worked in the pharmaceutical business foras long as I have known him. This year the business card announced that he was Managing Director of Talentmark...leaders in Healthcare Recruitment.

William told us that a lot of his work as a headhunter...they get four months-worth of the first year salary for their services...involves finding skilled professionals for India's pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. One of the ironies of this little corner of globalisation is that the abundance of cheap labour and highly qualified graduates that India produces is of no interest because the global drug barons use robots and intelligent machine tools to produce their product. India is moving into the forefront globally at doing this. I have been wondering for a while what the Indians would come up with to take them beyond their call centres and brain drains...computer experts have been sailing away to a life of luxury in Silican Valley while sending their remittances back home for over a decade now. Funny Old World.

When the party started winding down shortly after three I went with Heidi to a new coffee place in town and then to a concert at St Mary' Church at 4pm. A Girls' Choir from a Catholic Seminary in Minnesota were passing through town and singing for their supper. Strangely lifeless performance. Technically excellent but lacking in heart. I couldn't quite put my finger on the problem. The choir master was a musicologist rather than a musician by profession and this probably didn't help. There were several pieces by modern American composers which were uniformly awful. But singing Mozart's Ave Verum unaccompanied only makes sense if you incorporate the keyboard parts into the choral arrangement. You need the harmonies. Even the attempt at a negro spiritual and the old Shaker standard It's A Gift to Be Single fell rather flat. I didn't think it was possible to arrange away the rhythms as this takes some doing. But this girls' choir from Minnesota managed it.

It takes about eight hundred million dollars to develop a new drug. The industry has been spending to stop The Constant Gardener from winning any film industry awards. On the face of it this seems rather over the top even for such a secretive industry as pharmaceuticals. Heidi was quite bemused when William Nielsen told us this...and then took the drug companies' side. It seems there is no truth in the rumour that the drug companies are prone to dirty tricks and roam around the world depriving developing countries of their natural resources by patenting any plant that looks interesting. But eight hundred million dollars? What are they so frightened about? Methinks they do protest too much! I must check out what Zac Goldsith's Ecologist has done by ways of exposes on the legal drug barons.

World Soccer has gone the way of the Global Olympics over the past generation. The minimum wage was in force when I was growing up. Nowadays soccer is all about branding, television revenues and transfer fees with some modern slavery thrown in for good measure. Soccer Players are the gladiators of our times. You notice the change in the obituary of a player from my youth like Johnny Haynes of Fulham and England when they calculate the money he would have made were he playing today.

Of the profitability measures of yesteryear only stadium capacity and admission numbers still influence the bottom line. Top of the rich club lists in 2004-5 was Real Madrid with revenues of £176 million followed by Manchester United on £168 million, Milan on £160 million, Juventus on £157 million and Chelsea on £150 million. There are fifteen other clubs pulling in more than £50 million…seven of them British (Liverpool, Arsenal, Newcastle, Tottenham, Celtic, Manchester City and Everton).

The fire came alight first time without a problem when I returned to the boat shortly before six. Strange the odd days when it refuses to come alive...to do with pressure differentials I am told. So a toasty warm evening onboard Vemara that allowed me to finish Elizabeth Lord's Flower Girl...a compelling East End saga set at the turn of the last century in 1904.

We received 26 millimetres of rainfall in Rye in the whole of January...compared to a normal level of seventy. This made it the driest January since 1997...and the previous fifteen months the driest in the south-east since 1976. But last Sunday the heavens opened and more rain fell in a 24-hour period than in the whole of January. In this time the gods dumped thirty nine millimetres onto our ancient towne. This was followed by a week of almost incessant rain.

It was bitterly cold on Friday night with the easterly wind howling straight into the cockpit when I got back to the boat after Ryesingers' performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe. It seemed rather extravagant to light the fire so I decided to do a hardiness test on myself. Woolly hat, pyjamas, dressing gown, sleeping bag, eiderdown...out they came...the more togs the better. In the morning I was reminded of a forgotten age before central heating when windows were single-glazed and the frost made lovely patterns on the window panes. Back in 1956 I would watch my breath from beneath the blankets before bracing myself for the rush into my short trousers and long woollen socks.

A couple of years ago when my son was visiting from Vasteras in Sweden My son takes after his Uncle John and doesn't believe in arriving early at airports. So the timely departure I insisted upon was treated with some disdain. This story is for Nicholas John. This morning when a recovery van was sent out to help a broken down lorry on the London to Cambridge motorway it burst into flames. This is the motorway that feeds traffic into Stanstead Airport.

The fire brigade declared that the gas cylinders onboard the recovery van constituted a serious public hazard and brought East Anglia to a grinding halt by closing down both carriageways of the M11. There was an eight-mile tailback and hundreds of people missed their flights from Stanstead. Of course this had to be the day that the Stanstead Express was suspended for track maintenance. Murphy, always watchful, knows a good chance when he sees one. The replacement buses were caught up in the traffic jam. The road was finally deemed safe for traffic on Sunday morning. This could only happen in England. On the continent all maintenance and accident clear-up activity is geared to getting the motorway reopened as quickly as possible. Goodness knows what objectives the Highway Agency works to but it is nothing as obvious as this.

Here in Rye a few years ago we started to notice American tourists walking around swigging at bottles of mineral water. We thought they were crazy. Tap water is 10 000 times cheaper. Now everybody does it...and it is even crazier. The bottled water industry produces as much greenhouse gas as the electricity consumption of 20 000 homes. Twenty billion bottles a year find their way onto supermarket shelves in the UK...and a quarter of these plastic bottles are parachuted in from south-east France six hundred miles away...before finding their way into our landfill sites. The bottled water industry seeks to justify itself by proclaiming that their bottles are using 30% less plastic than ten years ago. Big deal. The only dim light on the horizon is the promise from a company calling itself Belu of a biodegradable bottle made from corn that composts in ten weeks. Well that's alright then.

It was just as well that I tested my resilience under electricity-free conditions because when I returned from the Saturday night party after our second and final performance of Iolanthe the stove refused to fire up...something that happens perhaps 1 in 20 times. It didn't help that I ran out of firelighters. I was annoyed with myself about this because earlier in the day I had decided that I was living dangerously with arctic bizzards on their way and the wind swinging round to north so bought myself another 25kg sack of coal for £7.25p. Goodness knows where my supplies of Maxibrite originate. Back in the days of the British Miners Strike there was much talk about the street children of Bogota being rounded up and sent to work down the Colombian coal mines. But I have heard very little about this since. Comments please.

Now I am back in Rye I am taking my free East Sussex County Council computer hour every day (except Thursdays and Sundays) I leave to walk into town at eight and after collecting my post I take coffee at Jempsons Coffee House on Cinque Ports Street before making my way up to the library which nestles next to Rye Church at the top of Lion Street. The church opens its doors at nine and the libary at nine thirty so most days I spend a quiet ten minutes or so in the Church. The ladies who run the place are getting to know me...and ignore my presence. I listen in to their conversations. Today the talk was of a trip to see the bluebells in Herstmonceaux. An annual pilgrimage. And coming up in a week or so's time.

All this rain has done wonders for our local reservoirs. Darwell is up from 68% to 70% full. Powdermill is up from 80% to 95%. And even Bewl Water in Lamberhurst...the one the water companies always talk about when putting up their prices or imposing yet another hosepipe ban...is up from 37% to 42%.

I may be on the brink of a major breakthrough. Tony Payne at PCHut has half a laptop. So together with my half a laptop...the one that collapsed on me a year ago...perhaps...Eureka! On disconnecting the random symbol generator...previously flaunting its latent power behind the false identity of a keyboard...we got an external keyboard to start working properly. Voila. My daughter doesn't know it yet but she will be over the moon if this works because I will then have a Dell PC laptop and an Apple Mac Mini at my disposal and I won't be needing both.

I had another idea about working space in Rye and asked Malcolm Wallace whether I could pay his mooring fees and electricity bills for the next two months and work on Gulliver during the day. Gulliver has splendid lines, two masts and a classic wooden boat feel about her. She has been moored on The Strand for the past several years. Malcolm thought about it but decided that he and Claire had too many trips planned to Eastbourne and points west over the next few months to want to navigate around onboard encumbrances. Tant pis!

My immediate cash flow problem was solved in classic style by selling five copies of Rye From the Waters Edge by John Seymour and Connie Lindqvist to Martello Books . This book has been a nice little earner since its publication ten years ago and will eventually show a profit on the first edition of around eight thousand pounds. Sales began to slow last year but before that I could reckon on £66 a month from Martello for ten copies and about the same each quarter from Meads Books. The books retail at £9.95 and the bookshops give it a 50% mark-up. My plan has always been to have several of these tiny publishing properties. It may happen yet...once the ownership issues around Connie's estate have been sorted.

I have been working on the question of settlement. The way trusts work is that a Settlor...me...puts money or assets or properties into the trust. Trustees are then appointed...usually four...and charged with carrying out the trust purpose in accordance with the terms and conditions of the trust. The trust is usually given a secretary who manages the affairs of the trust and the trust documents specify the beneficiaries of the trust income. Where the trust is destined to be wound up on a particular date there are also beneficiaries for the assets of the trust. These need not be the same as the income beneficiaries. So far so good.

In our ten years in partnership together Connie worked with me on nine projects. The plan is for her share of the three Rye-related projects to be placed in the Connie Lindqvist Trust. This means Rye From the Water's Edge and The Maritime History of Rye...completed just before Connie's death and poised for a Christmas 2006 publication. Shares in the partnership were allocated to John Seymour (25%), Connie (25%), Academic Inn Books (25%) and William Franklin & Sons Limited (25%).

John Seymour died last year shortly after his 90th birthday and he told me when last I met him that his literary executor would be his daughter Jane. I will need to talk to her about how we deal with John's share. As I have the controlling interest in Academic Inn Books and William Franklin & Sons Limited I should be able to reach agreement with myself...but an agreement is still needed. Finally there is the work Connie and I did for the Rye Harbour Boat Owners Association. This could be set up in the Connie Lindqvist Trust in such a way as to provide a small income for the association. The magazines we produced for RHBOA between 2000 and 2002 get a lot of downloads from the cesc website.

I spent an unusual afternoon watching Francoise de Naillat splashing paint onto canvases over at Rock Channel Quay. Her son has been going around Europe over the past few years buying up properties and converting them into young person hostels. Mum got taken on as Vice President for Interior Design a year ago and has been off to Italy and Estonia on company business in the past few months. This latest acquisition was a little closer to home in New Cross and the budget was tight. So, game as ever, off Francoise went to B & Q. Her Jackson Pollocks were quite good. And the Buttercup Meadow would also have passed muster before she ploughed it over. As for the rest. Colourful. Unusual. And innovative. What her boss will think is another matter.

I was treated to a toasted sandwich after helping her to clear up and then rushed off to get made up for Iolanthe. Lesley Brownbill...our sternest critic...was pleased with our performance. Her biggest complaint was that the chorus disappeared while the audience were clamouring for a few more curtain calls. We never thought about them. We were just relieved on the first night to have made it through to the end. Second and final performance tonight.

A Mr Stephen Gough and his girlfriend Melanie Roberts have arrived at John O'Groats after taking nine months to walk the 874 mile stretch from Land's End. Their trek irritated and shocked a few people, amused many more and achieved...well...they got some exercise and more fresh air than most of us will experience when we are out for a saunter. Perhaps nude rambling will catch on.

The main action of the day was on Brede Moorings. It began at 1.30pm when a note was delivered to me by hand. 'Notice to Remove Vessel Mr W. Shepherd 16/02/06: You are required to remove the vessel Vemara which you claim as yours from River Brede Moorings immediately. You are not permitted to take electricity or use any facility in this boat yard. Signed MJ Roud. Note the backdating of the note.

I scribbled all over the note and sent it back by first class post at 3.30pm. Here is what I had to say: 'You must show that Vemara’s owner(s) are in breach of their moorings contract if you wish to refuse the services you have contracted to provide. I do not believe this to be the case. However I understand that if (as you claim) you can obtain new tenants for Vemara’s moorings at twice the £125 per quarter of Vemara that you should wish to do so.

My solicitor is in the final stages of agreeing an official date for the transfer of ownership to myself from the Connie Lindqvist Estate and arrangements are also in hand to then pass ownership from myself to a third party...our target date for completion is 16th April 2006. My calculations show that at least six months excess of mooring fees and electricity for Vemara have been paid cumulatively by various parties. The sum owing to these parties were Vemara to move to another mooring is estimated at £400 and is accumulating at the rate or over £20 per day until electricity is restored.'I sent a copy to my solicitor and instructed him to fire a legal broadside.

I wrote a paper on The Jewish Question back in the mid-1980s when I was hanging out with a Texan artist in Cambridge Massachusetts. Bob Stuart and I put together this character Lard Heep and ran out a few cartoon strips. We decided to base this character on real life so we gave him typical redneck attitudes...and these included the whole conspiracy Elders of Zion anti-semitic repertoire. We had a few laughs and enjoyed working together for a few months.

Then I left the States. Bob was set to come to Europe a few months later but kept putting it off and in the end he went back to San Antonio instead. However during the year or so after I left Massachusetts...when I was based in Canterbury...we corresponded and Lard Heep came up from time to time. But in the end he never went anywhere...at least not yet. But I still have the Bob Stuart Papers with a pretty pink ribbon around them in my archives. They are interesting. Bob's father was a headmaster who was hounded out during the McCarthy Era so his son grew up a serious dissident.

In Cambridge during the summer of 1966 I had dated Edna Weisberg a young student from Tel Aviv and met her twice in Israel in the next few years. My first visit was shortly after the end of the Yom Kippur Six Day War in 1967. Edna's brother was high enough in the military to organise a tour of the Golan Heights just days after the Israelis had captured them from the Syrians. The second meeting was on my way back to England from Johannesburg after my second trans-African safari. I arrived unannounced the day before her wedding sending her family into quite a frenzy...fearing a replay of The Graduate.

Also one of perhaps half a dozen loves of my life was Linda Blitz a Polish Jewish woman from St Louis Missouri who worked with Marilyn Ferguson in Los Angeles. I was in my mid-thirties and vulnerable at the leading cusp of my male mid-life crisis. Linda was in Boston and on the rebound. On the afternoon we met I just happened to have the grandson of the Chancellor of MIT ...and President Kennedy's former scientific advisor...with me. He was my son's best friend at Cambride Friends School. She fell for someone she thought I was but wasn't. And I fell head over heels in love. We spent a few happy weeks in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara...and a few not quite so happy ones at Solviva Gardens on Martha's Vineyard before reality broke through, the relationship collapsed and I scurried back East...and then to England...to lick my wounds.

Bob Stuart entered my life at the end of my Linda Blitz escapade after I had done a fair amount of research into Judaism, Zionism...and anti-semitism. In The Jewish Question one of my conclusions was that despite the Holocaust anti-semitism had never gone away...and would rise again in my lifetime...before 2020. I thought that the most likely place was the United States of America. Now I am not so sure. The largest Jewish community in Europe is in France. The number of people emigrating to Israel from France increased by 27% last year after a rise of 12% the previous year. France is now there in the frame with the USA.

I would make one other observation. No latter-day Nazis could have devised a better final solution than to gather the whole of World Jewry together in one small state on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea. Here they are a sitting duck for any whacko American white supremicists in the mid-west who get themselves some funding and find a Nicholas Cage to buy them a nuclear device, a GPS and a workable plan. The Jews should have stuck to the idea of Judaism as a religion and kept clear of the idea of a state. Kirkpatrick Sale has suggested they abandon the State of Israel and retreat back into their diaspora. I would be seriously scared living in Tel Aviv. The city is indefensible.

I stayed on the boat until nine fifteen and then walked into town to collect my post from P.O.Box 36...a monthly statement from Adams of Rye...my February payment of £40 had been duly registered...£80 to go. At the library the business of the day was to send a letter to Connie's cousin Ilona Price inviting her to be a trustee of the David Martin Hutchings Trust. Here is the text. 'I would like to invite you to be one of four trustees for the David Martin Hutchings Trust. I am charged with two obligations under the terms of Connie’s will: Fiduciary responsibility for David’s beneficiary assets from the Connie Lindqvist Estate and Executor of Connie’s artistic and literary estate. I am now setting up the necessary legal structures to permit me to meet these obligations.

My target date for the completion of these arrangements is 16th April 2006. I met on Monday 20th February 2006 with Walker & Walker at their offices in Sevenoaks. Brian Walker has agreed to prepare draft documents for two trusts: David Martin Hutchings Trust; Connie Lindqvist Trust. The current proposal is for me to settle the following assets on David’s trust: m/s Vemara; Provident Accident Claim; Good Yacht Guide Business. Attached please find a copy of the minutes of my 20/2-2006 meeting.I would welcome involvement of trustees in (1) development of the trust purpose (2) specification of the terms and conditions for the trust (3) negotiating details of the terms and conditions of settlement. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you wish to discuss matters further at this time.'

A little after midday I returned to the moorings on the Rye Harbour Road and lit the fire. Outside a gang of men and machines were feverishly demolishing my sloe bushes and white hawthorn trees...new source of berries for my sloe gin required for next Christmas. Nobody seems to know what or why this is happening but the assumption is that it is the preparatory work for hammering in pilings on our side of the river...the other side was piled last year.

All this frantic work is part of a big spend inflicted on the public purse by the private insurance companies who have persuaded the politicians that the country will be flooded by global warming sea-level rises so the realm must be protected by hundreds of public works all around the country. Future generations will find that this was one of the biggest scams of the century.

Last time I looked...about a year ago...there was no scientific evidence of changes in sea levels. There is a lot of noisy chatter about the Arctic but the Antarctic has nearly all the unmelted water so is the only area needing careful watching...and here the evidence goes both ways suggesting just the normal fluctuations in local weather systems. Then there is the temperature curve for the last six million years…see below. This shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer than today followed by a three-million year cooling trend accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive higher frequency cold and warm climate cycles.

When people talk about the world being run by computers they are right. But they are quite wrong about the details. Computers run the world by falsely modelling the future. Academics in their ivory towers invent new fears which they then impose upon an increasingly gullible public by producing computer models that forecast dire consequences from their self-fulfilling theories. There should be a warning on all academic research. CAUTION: This research is based on computer modelling.

In the evening we had our last practice before the big event at the weekend. It went well. If you haven't bought your tickets yet for the Ryesingers performance of Iolanthe by Gilbert & Sullivan, do so immediately. To bed by ten.

Still freezing. I was up with the light at seven fifteen and got rained on walking into town. Thawed out at Jempsons Coffee House reading the newspapers over a cup of coffee before going across to PC Hut to sign up for five hours of computer time.

The Isle of Man is seeking to attract entrepreneurs with new rules that would mean no resident would have to pay more than £100 000 in income tax. As the highest rate on income tax is 18% this will be attractive to anyone earning more than half a million pounds a year. The island already offers a zero corporate tax rate for businesses involved in e-commerce, space technology and insurance. From 5th April 2006 this will apply to all other industries except financial servces which will continue to pay a ten percent corporate rate. No wonder that Brussels wants to harmonise tax regimes across Europe.

The policy I have always wanted to see on income tax is the one that ignores the tax rate but sticks with Isle of Man style percentages. If I was King of England I would wield my Royal Prerogative to force the government of the day to remove 90% of the working population from the income tax net within the life of a single parliament. Income tax was supposed to be a temporary tax when first introduced by Lloyd George to finance his trench warfare with the Kaiser.

I suggested to the owner of PC Hut that he should ask someone who wanted to use his computers to look after the shop so he could get away. I wondered whether to offer my services but decided not to. Tony Payne’s second tenant had been booted out making two bad experiences in six months. So the apartment above PC Hut is vacant. I offered to rent it for March and April money up front. He said he would talk to his wife Alex and come back to me. But unbeknown to me my relationship was not the only one on the rocks. Tony was ordered out of the family home and needs the apartment for himself. When not mending computers Tony draws… under the pencil name of Tony Coven.

I changed my e-mail signature on leaving Llangolman from 2-3 days response to 1-2 weeks. I am now at the outside limit so I checked through my five hundred e-mails deleting at speed and hoping that I didn't delete anything important. There were a few needing a response...Helen Dew in New Zealand for instance who was wondering whether I was still expecting her to send me the back files from Fourth World Review to post onto the website. I was.

I spent an hour or so with my friend John Pierce at his house on South Undercliff and then returned to the boat, lit the fire and put in some time on the Gilbert & Sullivan. Sunday and Tuesday had told me the places where I was exposed to the full glare of the audience...and the places where I could lurk in the shadows at the back of the stage. Very helpful. This tells you which words you really must learn...and which parts you can get away with by offering up standard Gilbert & Sullivan harmonies.

The final run-through of Iolanthe at the Rye Community Centre in the evening went well. A warm hall in sharp contrast to Sunday. Just the final practice of the musical and choral details in the Methodist Hall...our normal choir practice location...tomorrow evening and then we are live for the first of our two performances on Friday evening.

It was an absolutely filthy day...the wind howling through the rigging and me shivering in my shoes. I took the 0950 train to Sevenoaks. So much for water shortages in the south-east. The fields were flooded after a downpour the previous night. Every river and ditch that I could see from the train had overflown its banks.

I was with Brian Walker from noon until half past one and then took the train back to Rye...with a stopover in Ashford. I gleaned some kinding on my way home from the double glazing firm on the Old Winchelsea Road. Old windows burn well. A Lidls dinner in the evening...sweet & sour cicken with rice...and then a Schumacher Briefing. On this evening's agenda was Richard Douthwaite's Ecology of Money. Heidi called at ten and we had a forty five minute discussion about the proposed trusts following my meeting with the solicitors.

I used my time at Ashford Library to draft the minutes of the meeting. I always like to get minutes done as early as possible while the meeting is fresh in the minds of all the participants...and to make sure everyone knows what is expected of them. Here are some edited extracts.

It was decided that Vance Harris would be asked in writing (with telephone follow-up) to hand over all relevant documents including medical reports and explain the failure to pursue the claim. Brian would talk with some personal liabilities experts establish the size range of any pay-out and any statutes of limitation with the next steps to be agreed at next meeting once these facts have been established.

My main task will be to call a meeting of Friends of Connie Lindqvist for Friday 7/4 or Monday 10/4 in Rye Town Hall with the following agenda: Introductions; Will; Problems arising; Trusts; Exhibitions; Publications; Questions. Apart from that I was charged with the task of sounding out the trustees. Here is what the minutes had to say about the two trusts.

David Hutchings Trust document to be drafted for next meeting. Opening Date: 16th April 2006; Closing Date: 16th October 2011; Trust Purpose: to be determined at next meeting; Trust Beneficiary: David Martin Hutchings; Trust Assets: Vemara; Accident Claim; Good Yacht Guide; Trust Income: Retained except for Good Yacht Guide business expenses...ie net profit to the DMH Trust; Vemara's expenses...Harbour Dues, Mooring Fees and Maintenance Costs; Trust Manager costs; Professional Fees.

Connie Lindqvist Trust document to be drafted for next meeting. Opening Date: 16th April 2006; Closing Date: None; Trust Purpose: to be determined at next meeting; Trust Beneficiary: to be determined at next meeting; Trust Assets: Rye Maritime Heritage Partnership Assets; Connie Lindqvist's shareholdings in certain Academic Inn Books pblishing partnerships; Trust Income: to be determined at next meeting.

As for Vemara Brian Walker was instructed to agree a date with Vance Harris for the transfer of ownership from the Connie Lindqvist Estate to myself so that we can settle up with Roud and then transfer ownership to the David Martin Hutchings Trust on 16th April 2006...six and a half years before his 25th birthday. We set the date for the next meeting as Monday 6th March 2006 at 12 noon in Sevenoaks and noted that I would be travelling up from Wiltshire.

I decided to spend a few hours putting together the week of texts and e-mails with Heidi into a document labelled A Valentine’s Day Dialogue. Here is the epilogue. In a relationship the first commitment should not be to material things like careers, houses, social sanding, money etc but to the person. ‘Yes. You are the person I want to share my life with’. For me everything else is so ephemeral and transient. From this affirmation everything else flows. It is not possible to be really happy alone. Of course one makes the best of it. We all do. But having one special person in your life is something of a very different and higher quality. Family ties are not a substitute for this.

My time in Sweden is intended to serve at least three quite separate purposes. Firstly it gets me away from Rye and gives me a deadline to wind up everything to do with Connie’s Estate which has been bedevilling my existence…and my relationship with Heidi… for the past two years. Secondly it allows me to finish my fil. kand Swedish degree in Business, Development & Financial Economics which is vital for the next stage of my academic career.

Thirdly it is the most sensible route back onto the ‘scholars residential circuit’. Once I have an apartment in a (top) university town anywhere around the North Atlantic I will have the freedom to live wherever I wish by exchanging my place with anther academic moving in for the six months period normal for such exchanges. Lund is one of Sweden’s three ancient universities and rents there are half what they are in Cambridge. But this is almost entirely due to the exchange rate which I am predicting will change dramatically over the next 12 months…see http://williamfranklin.blog.co.uk. So there is a window of opportunity.

The main business of today was a full dress rehearsal for Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe in the afternoon so I stayed on the boat all morning. It was bitterly cold so I cranked up my coal-burning stove, drank coffee and lived better than any king.

After finishing my editing of the Valentine Dialogue ready for the re-opening of PC Hut I investigated the true nature of kingship by browsing through a book of the letters of Henry VIII borrowed from Ashford Library. He was quite besotted with Anne Boleyn. Indeed his determination to marry her seems to have been his principal concern. I came away feeling sorry for Cardinal Wolsey who had the unenviable task of translating this obsession into a foreign policy that would benefit rather than harm the interests he represented in the never-ending balancing of dynastic power that passed for diplomacy in those days.

Ryesingers are putting on their annual performance of Gilbert & Sullivan at the end of next week. This year it is Iolanthe. I spoke to Lesley Brownbill when I got back to Rye at the weekend to offer my services. ‘Of course you can learn the tenor part in two weeks!’ Of course. And so I have been drafted in to strengthen the House of Peers. We peers of the realm strutted around in our hunting 'n shooting garb... well-wrapped against the inclement weather inside the Rye Community Centre.

Not so the poor fairies who spent the afternoon tripping hither and thither in the freezing cold. There is heating in the hall but someone somewhere had forgotten to instruct the person that mattered to switch it on. No shortage of witty repartee. Iolanthe should have stayed at the bottom of the stream with the frogs; if you think that it's love that makes the world go round then you've never been in a freezing cold rehearsal hall in the middle of winter etc. Everybody survived. Hardy bunch the British.

A meeting was scheduled with Walker & Walker at noon the following day so I spent the evening preparing myself. The first thing was a note to myself outlining my priorities. Next a letter to my daughter outlining my plans. Finally a series of small briefing papers for my solicitor Brian Walker. The key part of the plan is a quasi-public meeting a week before Easter for the Friends of Connie Lindqvist.

I hope to get one of the rooms in Rye Town Hall. I drafted out an agenda for this Valhalla meeting. After spelling out my obligations under the terms of Connie's will I would brief them on the two trusts being set up and the two publishing projects scheduled for Christmas 2006. The meeting would then be open for discussion and end with invitations to sign up to help make the various projects happen.

Heidi and I have been trying to patch things up between us but have now given up the unequal struggle. Here are the some of the things that Heidi e-mailed during the final sad day of our relationship. Part of me is not sure of what I want but I know I don’t want to jerk you around and at present I have not the energy to crank up the feelings and the relationship after all that’s been said only to be back at the same point as before. I am not sure we can settle our fundamental differences…or I just don’t love enough to risk the journey. I appreciate that you are wanting to make it work somehow but while I do fear a break up what I fear more is our repetitive arguments which eventually result in the bottom line that our idea of conduct in a relationship is very different.

Both of us have thought that several times we made enough concessions to make it work and yet here we are again. My way makes you unhappy which creates stress on both sides and your way…to get enmeshed as you wish…makes me feel unhappy which also creates stress on both sides. The things said can't be washed under the carpet. They mean something to each of us and not talking and not saying how we feel would create problems.

I just can't see a way forward…at least not at the moment…a quick patch up isn't going to work for my part. From what you said I understand that if I can't give you what or how you want it is the end so you feel free as a single person to look for another woman who can be in a partnership as you want. I understand that too as you have a lot to offer. You ask what you can do? I would not ask for you to change what you need and what you need to do as in the end the unhappiness would surface anyway and one should not change a partner but be able to accept where they are at. While we accept certain things about each other there are fundamental characteristics that press our buttons and love is just not enough to overcome, I feel. Breaking up is hard to do. But now for quite a different subject.

Prince Charles has his private journals are all over the tabloids this week. Far from harming his reputation they will do it a power of good. On Tony Blair: 'He is a most enjoyable person to talk to. He gives the impression of listening to what one says, which I find astonishing.' Just so!

I spent the day in Ashford doing chores like checking out prices for Camping Gaz heaters and battery radios at Argos. Since losing my electricity I have actually got used to living without noise so showed only passing interest in replacing the tiny battery radio that we always used to have aboard Vemara for weather forecasts.

In our trip to Gotland in the summer of 1998 on our Linnaeus Journeys Project we discovered that calor gas suppliers became extinct once we got got to the far side of the Kiel Canal. So we went over to Camping Gaz in the Baltic. The result is two full Camping Gaz containers under the port bunk. It seems a shame not to use them.

My Ashford routine starts with an hour of Kent County Council free computer time as the public library is en route between the railway station to the town centre. Upstairs in the reference library they have two computers capable of taking my USB dongle...you get to know about these things. Number 20 and 21.

During the previous week...since our Valentine Row in fact...Heidi and I had been conducting quite a classy text exchange...the lady has a good mind. One of the problems with texting is that unlike e-mail there is no record of the text messages...or rather most people keep just a temporary record until their storage space runs out. This is changing as the increasingly abundant forms of electronic communication get themselves hooked up together. Alan and Malcolm for instance who are serious working businessmen...unlike me who's more of a dabbler...can send and receive almost anything almost anywhere.

But for the time being neither Heidi nor I are in this league. We also have a tendency to mix e-mail, text and hand-written letters...and open and respond to them somewhat erratically. Anyway I spent my library hour in the morning transcribing our text exchange and adding in the e-mails. To my surprise when I went back to the library again on my way back to the station at four the system let me on for a second one-hour session so I was able to complete the transcription leaving me with just the editing to do. Is this work?

I love book stores and there is a good Ottakars in Ashford. But I dare not go too often as every title is tempting. Not only could I buy a lot of books but I’ll waste a lot of time dipping into titles that tickle a momentary fancy. That’s the way it is with e-mails too. If you get say 40 - 100 e-mails a day it’s like being given 40 -100 books. You are tempted to open all of them.

But if you do you blow 3 - 4 hours reading them. You’re forced to answer some out of politeness. You can lose half a day. It is the bookstore syndrome but at least with bookstores you have an option. You don’t have to go daily. With e-mail you don’t have a choice. It’s thrown in your lap/face. You must look at every title to see if it might be urgent/important.

Much of the time you can tell from the titles. Most e-mails from friends/family are interesting or funny so you just sit there and read and the clock runs. With newspapers you can skip most stories after a four second glance at the headline. No such speed/luck with e-mail. In self-defense, I now don’t open most e-mail no matter who they’re from if the subject doesn’t tell me what it is and if the subject isn’t really necessary to read.

Most businessmen have a love/hate relationship with their e-mail but cannot avoid using it in today’s business world. Insteadthey have strategies like ducking non-urgents e-mails until they pile up as thousands of unopened e-mails which they then delete. If you want your e-mail opened it’s best to identify you and the subject clearly. E-mail is a part time useful tool but if it is not identified and understood the downside can be a tyrant and a half-day time-killer.

The blabbermouth aspect of e-mail is another annoyance. We have good people saying good things but they can’t shut off their mouth. They use 8 pages of copy when 1-2 would suffice if they’d cut the waffle. Excess verbiage is carelessness. People must edit down for the printed word but for e-mail there’s no space limit. As with everything in life if there are no limits people will go to excess. E-mail is like a relative who comes to see you daily and though you love her she never stops talking and drives you crazy. You don’t know how to handle her. You can’t shut her out, but don’t enjoy a talk torrent.

E-mail’s worst aspect is that government invented it…for military use at the start…and allowed it to go public, knowing it enables them to tap into everyone’s conversations. E-mail is the least private form of communication on the planet. It should be used very sparingly out of respect for your precious time and privacy.

Between bookshops, chores and computers...and a side trip to Lidls to spend £1.52 on eight cans of dessert rice at 19p a can...I settled doen in Starbucks and did things...although for the life on me I can no longer recall what things these might have been...although reading The Times was among them. But I have no doubt that I was gainfully employed.

As a result of my move across country I am lagging behind with my weblogs. In a word I am scrambling. Nonetheless my memory of Friday is of text messages. They came with this flavour. ‘I have read back through your text messages and find myself bewildered…’ When men bond they tell each other that when a woman is upset the wise man takes it seriously. Women will be pleased to hear this. But they will not like the next bit because we men also say that a wise man will take no notice of what the woman says is wrong. This men must figure out for themselves.

There is a government consultation document doing the rounds about a land tax…a sort of Henry George Lite. But not that light. It will raise a billion pounds a year for Her Majesty’s Treasury. The tax would be levied on the rise in value of a piece of land once it receives planning permission. The money raised would fund new infrastructure. This way there will be schools and shops for the residents when they move into their new houses. Glad tidings indeed.

You win some. You lose some. A day’s train ride away in Luxembourg the European Court for Everlasting Integration has told Her Majesty’s Companies House that Limited Liability Corporations can offset European losses against British profits. Ouch! No comment from the first or second lords of the Treasury on how much this will cost the long-suffering English tax-payers. Maybe not a lot. Marks & Spencer who won the case don’t contribute much to our national coffers. Most multinationals figured out long ago to book their profits in foreign tax haven.

I was on the move all day starting with a one-hour session at Rye Library. Next a stop-over at Hastings Library en route to Bexhill where I worked diligently and politely with several council officials to establish the fact that £ 3.95 per week was a little low for my local reference rent. The last time I looked it was £79. Unfortunately this minor adjustment meant that the pittance I receive for my mooring fees and harbour dues of £16.82 per week could no longer be paid. My housing benefit entitlement was zero. At times like this one thinks of dolls and pins. It does not take much to switch on the paranoia. But Mr Ridge rang me back just as he promised. And he apologised nicely, assured me that it was just an arithmetic error and was quite certain that Rother District Council would get back to me with a reassessment of their reassessment. When they do I will reassess my paranoia alert level.

That sorted I took a taxi out to the far flung suburbs of Bexhill to collect the computer monitor I had purchased over the telephone through the good services of the Friday Ad. Monitor, speakers, taxi and train fare came to £30 so I can now state with confidence and precision that second-hand monitors in Wales are half the price of monitors in England.

In Spain they call them bin Ladens because everyone knows that these € 500 banknotes exist but they are rarely seen. There are € 185 billion in circulation. Next comes € 181 billion of fifty euro notes. A briefcase filled with € 500 notes is six times as valuable as one filled with $ 100 bills so the five hundred euro bills are increasingly the currency of choice for drug-traffickers and stupidity service operatives. There are now € 565 billion euro-notes in circulation and € 17 billions-worth of coins. This compares with $ 700 billions-worth of dollar denominated notes and coins…half of them outside the United States.

This accounts for about a twentieth of the dollars and euros sloshing around the globe. The rest is written into the bank accounts of the most favoured clients of the commercial banks by the central bankers’ double Dutch book-keeping and the debt-usury money system they dis-manage.

Give the banks a euro of your hard-gotten gains and they will deposit twelve euros in the specially privileged accounts of their most favoured clients. It is called fractional banking. This is how the Capital Adequacy Ratio works. The French once wielded this financial tool to manage their money supply. The British and the Americans prefer to control dis-patronage directly. After the revolution banking will become a department of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and a Freedom of Money Creation and Destruction Information Act will ensure that ordinary people know who gives money to whom.

Richard Douthwaite has written a Schumacher Briefing entitled The Ecology of Money. ‘Young journalists,’ he tells us, ‘are taught to ensure they answer six questions in every story they write: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?’ He suggests we get in the habit of asking these same questions of every type of money we encounter: commercially produced money; people-produced money and government-produced money.

George Bernard Shaw never allowed his detractors to get away with false dichotomies. Pubic Property vs. Private Property was one straw man he was particularly fond of demolishing. There are three categories of property: personal possessions, private property and common wealth. Professor R.H. Tawney took this further and discriminated between working property and idle property. A similar analysis is called for as far as our money systems are concerned. Perhaps then Socialism would become what Shaw always insisted it should be…equal money.

It was a cold night but I kept warm enough. Besides I have company...a mouse. This is not the first time. But this is the first time that I have had a clean mouse onboard. There are no signs of his droppings anywhere. Connie was the official ratcatcher aboard Vemara. I never had a clue what to do. I remember on one occasion Connie had caught a mouse by his tail in one of the overhead nets. She had a carving knife in her hand and was using this to trap the tail against the side of the cabin.

It was three o'clock in the morning. 'I can hold him! You kill him!' she whispered at me. Goodness knows why she was whispering. Perhaps she wanted to catch the mouse unawares and thought it best if he did not know our plans. Connie was a country girl. I'm a townie. She could do things like this. I didn't know where to start.

But I can follow orders. So following instructions I went to fetch a saucepan. Then I did something wrong and he got away. We got him a few nights later...in a mousetrap. We had been recommended all sorts of exotic bait like chocolate...and had tried them all. But in the end it was cheese that worked best.

After booking a rental car from Practical Car Rental in Fairlight for the next Radcon Planning Committee meeting in a couple of weeks time and leaving a message about a computer monitor for sale in the Friday Ad I started into town for the Ashford train. I got a lift from the moorings with Chay Cole who features in one of the more dramatic episodes of Creaky Tales. As the train was pulling into Ashford International railway station Heidi called in a new Good Yacht Guide order. She was on her way to London and we needed to get approval for the credit card payment.

I was in Ashford all day, spending seven pounds for two hours of internet access and also doing an hour at the library typing up letters for posting recorded delivery to Mr and Mrs Roud. The rest of the day was spent at Starbucks, planning weblogs 45 to 50.

The alternative movement has trouble with Starbucks. The problem is their development strategy. They smother a limited geographic area with Starbuck Coffee Houses, eliminate the competition by increasing market share in total while reducing market share per coffee outlet. Then once everyone else has gone bust they send in the accountants to rationalise their monopoly coffee shops operation. Wal-Mart operates in much the same way. But they are ideal for people like me who want to hire a desk or an armchair for a couple of hours. The rate is £1.45 and for that you get an enormous mug of excellent Fairtrade coffee.

A new innovation in the Ashford Starbucks was Poetry Reading on the first Saturday of each month at 7pm. Admission £2. The 3rd edition of Starbuck's Poems to Drink Coffee By was lying on one of the tables. Here are some of the titles: Because of Love; Footfall to Heaven; The Wall; Under the Bonnet; A Musical Dream; A Moment; Scales: Obsession; Kent Rain; Hands; New Life; Dragonfly and Ode to Bureaucracy. It made me think of Nicholas Albery.

Nicholas was an amazing person who died tragically in a car accident a few months before he was due to join us for the first Radical Consultation in September 2001. He had agreed to chair the Radcon Any Questions public meeting that opened the conference on the Thursday evening. His achievements are legendary and there is a webpage devoted to them on the www.cesc.net website…just put “Nicholas Albery” into the search engine. I had another reminder when my daughter and I were having a farewell drink with Ellie Clegg the night before I left Llangolman. It turned out that Ellie had been there in Frestonia in those heady days when this area in West Kensington made its unilateral declaration of independence. Nicholas Albery was the driving force behind this creative alternative political stunt.

I had a call from my daughter as I arrived at Rye Station. She had received calls from a car rental firm and somebody selling a computer monitor. After a few moments' thought I realised that the diversion must still be on my mobile phone. Sure enough my incoming calls were being diverted to the Llangolman landline answering machine if I failed to answer my mobile. I altered the settings and arranged to pick up the computer monitor from Bexhill the following day.

It was after dark when I got back to the boat...I have put a lock on the cabin door now. Tonight I lit the fire. But with no radio or CD Player there was little to do so I went to bed at nine and read for a while by candlelight...a John Grisham from Rye Library.

A road sign outside the Yarm Preparatory School up in the wilds of the Anglo-Scotch border country has been causing much amusement as it read Grammer School Lane. Eventually it was replaced by a new sign that read Grammar School Lane. Headteacher Gillian Taylor remarked that if the council wanted any help in spelling she was sure the children could help. The council blamed the sign manufacturer Select Marketing: 'Our order for the sign was correct.' So that's alright then. Craig Atkinson the marketing director of the sign makers put out an official statement: 'This has never happened before. We apologise to all concerned and are putting procedures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again.' Like what? Schooling? Lynn Truss the author of Eats Shoots & Leaves will be delighted by the furore.

Connie used to plan her life around her summer cruises in Vemara. When her son David got to school age she had to modify this annual scheme but the principle remained intact. This made it easy for her to slot back into the old routine after she divorced and her son was living with his father. Dad looked after the school runs during term time and David stayed with Connie on her boat in Rye or Boulogne at weekends…or flew out to exotic places like Gotland, Brittany or the Channel Islands to join Vemara in the summer holidays.

Up until last year my daughter planned her annual life around summer music festivals. She was running a stall selling Indian silks. A friend of mine who was seventy earlier this year suffers from rheumatism. He plans in terms of the winter months…November, December, January and February. The last place he wants to be during the English winter is in England. This year he has been living in Vietnam. Other winters he has been in New Zealand. He seeks out warmer climes in the winter but for the rest of the year he likes to be in England.

Heidi works part-time for East Sussex County Council. She plans in terms and school holidays. In term time her life revolves around Rye Harbour. But with her schooling duties taking up just two days a week she has the flexibility to drive over to Robertsbridge and takes the train to Lewisham where she lived up until the end of 2004. Here she meets old friends, goes to the theatre, art galleries, restaurants and so on. She has a couple of places she stays over. Half term and the Christmas, Easter and Summer holidays are seen as opportunities to get away and do something more adventurous. Before Christmas Heidi was working on her project with villagers in Lwala on the shores of Lake Victoria for ten days.

Temperatures on Planet Earth have been static over the past eight years according to Professor Bob Carter.

When two people become a couple one of the first problems to deal with are conflicting calendars. Our problem is conflicting planning paradigms. This is something else. I do indicative planning...see weblog for 29/1. My paradigm does not mesh easily with Heidi’s. To me the answer is obvious. Heidi should give up her two-day a week job and set herself up as an ownworker. So I have pushed a number of opportunities into her path during the past nine months. But so far only the Good Yacht Guide has looked promising. Heidi also thinks the answer is obvious. I should behave like a normal person, get myself an apartment in Rye and reorganise myself into her paradigm. Unfortunately this to me is the wrong solution to the wrong problem...and would breed new conflicts.

This morning we agreed we had reached an impasse and were just making each other’s lives a misery and decided to break up. I think there are a couple of other things going on...one of which is the mismatching of our material situation. Heidi has a house while I have had little interest in acquisition over the past twenty years. Been there, done it...and given it all away to my ex-wife. This has changed now I have a chance of winning Heidi’s hand. Anyway the die is cast...at least until the next text exchange.

So the day started with the break-up of my marriage...long before the wedding...and then got worse. The curse was working itself out. In mid-afternoon matters were brought to a head with Mr. Roud when he turned off the electricity to the boat. There was an altercation. He told me to get myself and the boat off his moorings. I refused and told him there was something called due process and he had better follow it...adding for good measure that freezing a tenant whose rent and electricity was paid up until the end of the year not only constituted harassment but also attempted manslaughter.

At Ryesingers practice in the evening I was welcomed back like the long-lost prodigal son...a nice change after having been called everything under the sun earlier in the day. It was not worth lighting the coal stove when I got back to Vemara at ten so I got into my pyjamas, put on my dressing gown and crept into my sleeping bag. The boat looks nice by candlelight. It was a cold night outside.

Disaster has struck. My monitor has given up the ghost. The timing was interesting. At the end of 2004 I started working on a long essay against global warming...or rather against the conventional wisdom surrounding the hype about global warming. I got up at four this morning intent on revisiting my last draft and spending a day or two preparing my long essay for restricted distribution.

It was at this point that my monitor refused to crank up. It has now gone to the skip. I spent the day vainly trying to locate a ten pound replacement to tide me over for a couple of weeks until I have the money to splash out £109 at KC Computers in St. Leonard’s on the flat screen I have had my eye on since I bought my Apple Mac Mini in May last year. To add insult to injury Tony, the owner of PC Hut on Ferry Road where I pay ten pounds for five hours on the net...had to choose this week to take his annual holiday. The Internet Cafe is closed until next Monday.

I purchased a train ticket from Rye to Bexhill and back and got the most out of it by breaking my journey in Hastings for a free internet hour at the Public Library and in St. Leonard’s to buy a replacement for my 128 Mb USB dongle. My circuit then takes me along Bohemia Road to Lidl’s for restocking and then laden with shopping bags down the road into Hastings City Centre. At Rother District Council’s offices there were promises that all the calculations ever made about my housing benefit would be posted to me next day so I could scrutinise and plead for more.

Disasters come in threes. The second one started yesterday when Heidi and I were at Jempsons and then went to East Street Antiques (which was closed) so we went upstairs at the coffee house in the Custom House a few feet from where I spent ten years of my life between 1990 and 2000. The row erupted over the subject of Valentines Day.

I had arrived back in Rye on the Saturday evening five weeks after we had parted at Narberth Station. I had really enjoyed the ten day living together and I thought Heidi had enjoyed her time in Wales too. So I was already irritated that Heidi had not met me on my return. Her reason…that her daughter Ruth and her two grandchildren were staying with her for the weekend…just made matters worse. I know her family. They like me and I like them.

So for me the decision to exclude me and make sure I didn’t meet them was intentional and sent a pretty clear message that Heidi was retreating from the relationship. This might not have been true and Heidi often accuses me of thinking the worst of her…one of the accusations I accept…but one can’t block out these feelings. They well up from below and are driven by any insecurities in the relationship. I was very insecure after a six weeks barrage of criticism that would have destroyed most men’s self-esteem.

Anyway Heidi then got up to go in somewhat of a rush without attempting to arrange a next get-together or to discuss what we would do the next day which was Valentine’s Day…quite important to both of us. The next day Heidi explained that she suddenly realised her car parking was running out. Fair enough. But all she needed to say to me was: ‘Goodness! Is that the time! My parking! I’ll phone this evening.’ That is what anyone else would have done. It would have completely transformed the situation and the mood that followed.

Instead, quite angry now after the emotional ambush of Heidi suddenly disappearing when I was hoping to be invited back to spend the evening together so that we could then wake up together the next morning for a Valentines Day breakfast, I was in no fit emotional state to respond well to Heidi’s suggestion that we go out together on the evening of Valentine’s Day. So I hesitated for a long time and was clearly rather reluctant as I tried to regain some sort of emotional equilibrium.

Into this emotional brew Heidi threw in a remark that she had expected me to ask her out and that this is what normal people do. At this I exploded and told her (in my ugliest tone of voice) that normal girlfriends would have met me, asked me round to dinner with the family on Sunday or after they had left and asked me back on Valentine Eve…adding for good measure that this…and not what she had proposed…was actually normal.

We were both furious by this stage. As Heidi disappeared down the stairs my parting shot. ‘What’s more you’re on probation after your behaviour towards me ever since you left Wales. Every letter email and text from you contained some nasty remark. Instead of a nice thank you letter all I got from you was five weeks or unremitting personal criticism. None of it justified. And all of it well-nigh impossible to respond to because it so misrepresented or exaggerated my view or my actions.’

There was no contact on Valentine’s Day. A dialogue started up today when Heidi thanked me for the Valentine Day card…brought in by a neighbour. ‘I understand that it’s hard to stop you feeling jerked around,’ she told me, ‘But I can’t be what you want me to be and I fear we are being destructive to each other and that is not good.’ Oy vey!