I had planned my return to England for this weekend. It was complicated as I had agreed to show up for the first conference planning group meeting in Purton on Saturday. The motorway runs right past Purton...so I could walk there in less than an hour if I was dropped on the hard shoulder. But National Express coaches just sail past Swindon en route to the Mighty Wen. So the bussing arrangement for Friday were looking rather messy with waits and changes in Swansea and Bristol and a £15 taxi trip from Swindon Bus Station to Purton.

So it was with some relief that I received a text message from my daughter to let me know she was delaying her return until next Thursday. I rebooked my return ticket for the second time. Now I will take the car to Purton and back this weekend and coach myself to London on Saturday week. This gives me at least one full day with my daughter and allow me to keep my weblogging routine for another week.

There are half a billion cars in the world...a quarter of them in the USA. On average each of us drives 5000 miles a year...350 miles by coach, 350 by train, 200 on foot and 50 miles by bike. In the UK this adds up to 300 million miles of car trips a year and 100 million lorry miles...30 million with empty loads. The carbon dioxide from all this is a fifth of all emissions...a third from lorries. In our lifetime we have a 1 in 17 chance of death or serious injury on the roads.

A third of all children are driven to school...but there is three times as much commuter driving as school runs. Business is the biggest offender...and food transport accounts for a quarter of lorry miles. A fifth of all miles are done on motorways. Cars are indispensable when you live in the country so policymakers have to start with this reality. In Sweden even the Green Party is sympathetic to the motoring needs of rural areas.

I was at my desk at five putting the finishing touches to my article for Rye’s Own on Local Powers. I had decided to sleep on the prescriptive bits of the article...the what to dos. Interesting how this works. I have a deliberate policy of loading my mental data bases with the facts of a problem before retiring for the evening. It invariably does the trick. In the morning I wake up knowing exactly what is called for. Try it.

Another puncture when I went to start the car at one o’clock but quite painless. I changed the wheel in ten minutes before setting off, dropped it off at GT Tyres in Castle Street just before the old bridge on my way in and picked it up after the film at five. £7 out of pocket. Picked up my first hitchhiker. Couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Another war film...the Hitler War this time. Mrs Henderson Presents. Marvellous performances from Judie Dench and Bob Hoskyns. A very well-scripted true story about the Windmill Theatre. I presume that the Noel Coward song Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage Mrs Henderson is a reference to this fine lady.

The Rye Harbour Road is extremely dangerous. A cycle path has been promised by March this year. We’ll see. After a cyclist was run down I wrote a couple of articles in Rye’s Own about this. The woman who killed the cyclist blamed the sun...and it certainly is a real driving hazard. Coming back from Cardigan in the late afternoon the sun hangs low on the horizon and can suddenly blind you as you come round a bend. Any dirt on the windscreen and you have to slow right down to red flag pace to proceed safely.

Apart from this it is nice driving on these small Welsh roads. They are not always wide enough so you pull into passing points or back up. Somehow it makes the whole driving experience much more friendly. Cheery waves afterwards. A problem shared and solved together. You feel good as you go on your way.

Another couple of Good Yacht Guide orders via PayPal went off to Heidi. That makes four this week. Back in 2003 before Connie died we were advertising heavily in the boating press and selling thirty a week...but at a loss. I am still in two minds about this publishing property. I am keeping it ticking over at a profit but it’s only making me a few hundred pounds a year...and the yacht prices need updating in the next few months.

I had a 31st of January deadline to meet. No, not tax returns...they went off back in August. Lund University is organising a two-day get-together on innovation dynamics at the end of April with Oslo University. I thought I would show up. The 1/31 deadline was for ‘submission of extended abstracts’. I sent off a 2-page essay on Structural Sociology, a 4-page piece on Large Organisations and my interim report from 1999 on IT Firms in Sweden. I will know by the end of next month if Lund wants me to present a paper. I might write one anyway. I put the documents together after six glasses of red wine so they could be interesting.

The medieval ambition was to build a country where a maiden could walk the length of the kingdom unmolested carrying a bag of gold. Any maiden trying that today would be five times as likely to be run over and killed as murdered. But at least her demise would be captured on closed circuit television. The gold would meet her funeral expenses and pay off her credit cards.