All was quiet in the Papworth Mansion as I crept noisily along the creaky corridor and down to the computer room at six thirty. By the time my host emerged for breakfast at eight thirty my work was done and The Idea of the Resurgence Group of Institutes was strutting about in the public domain looking for converts.

I left Purton after breakfast and was home in Llangolman by one o’clock. First thing tomorrow the car has to go into the garage in Crymch. The exhaust is fading fast...or worse still the head gasket is getting ready to blow. This had to happen just as my daughter is coming back.

I stopped off at Glandy Cross for milk. Ten minutes later I staggered out £8 poorer with a WWII film...Head in the Clouds...and the Sunday Telegraph under my arm and red wine and a loaf of bread for company. No these last two items were not for holy communion. We had earlier given half a thought to entering that hotbed of Anglo-Catholic Fundamentalism in Swindon but decided against it. Men choristers wear surplices. Women choristers do not...lest they get ideas above their station and clamour for admission to the Church of England. God forbid! And let him forbid women in particular! It can’t be easy being Rowan Williams.

Some day one member of our Resurgence Group will be in South America. Here is what I wrote to Constanza: ‘I like where you are heading with Pensart. You'll be doing a lot of commuting between Mexico City and Bogota by the sound of it. You might care to think about the 10-year future in terms of the idea of the university embedded in the universities in Catholic Medieval Europe...with particularly attention to how the medieval university model should be scaled for the modern world. Perhaps you should start an institute for their study. This institute should be bilingual from the outset in English and Spanish.

Bogota is as good a place as any. Donate one of Pensart's five rooms at Gimnasio Jose Joaquim Casas...or start from a bench under a cherry tree in the garden. The institute's sacred works will include the writings of great medievalists like Erasmus and Aquinas as well as more recent thinkers like Cardinal Newman. His 19th Century essay on The Idea of The University had a major impact on thinking about schools and universities. And The Idea of a Christian Society by that Anglo-Catholic Yankee T.S.Eliot is well worth a read. If your father were starting out today I think he would be doing what you are doing with Pensart. So the Jaime Leal Institute would be a fitting legacy.

Kohr's Idea of The Academic Inn will also have a vital part to play in any future infrastructure for learning. It is available in English on the Academic Inn website. I would be honoured to be invited to be the first scholar in residence at the Bogota Academic Inn. We should be thinking in terms of a six month term of office from 1st April 2007 to 30th September 2007 and work towards making this happen.

It might also be worth talking to Toni Pinschof about taking on the next stint from 1st October to 31st March 2008. Job sharing. The subject of a proposal for Swedish Euro MPs five years ago. We are gearing up to ask for money for a Kergroaz-Vraz Institute in Bretagne which would complement what you will be doing in Colombia. But more on that another day. It will come out in the weblogs anyway as I need to do some work on the funding proposal for the Goldsmith Foundation next week. We are coming at them from all directions.

I have been in print off and on for 25 years. So I have become pretty blasé about the whole thing. Editors have been known to mess around with my purple prose. But despite this I can always recognise my own writing when I see it. Until now. Above my name and address in the latest issue of Fourth World Review is a letter headlined ‘War!’. ‘I took it from an e-mail,’ exclaimed the editor quite aghast at the implications of this erroneous attribution. ‘Don’t doubt it for one moment, old chap!’ saith I. ‘But the e-mail wasn’t from me!’

So unprecedented is this that I have dreamt up a theory, a motive and a suspect. Kurt Vonnegut sent the letter under an assumed name. Mine. I am the victim of identity theft. Judge for yourself. Here is what I am told I wrote: ‘A brilliant piece by Kirkpatrick Sale. My own view is identical save in one respect. He gives the present US system 15 years - I give it 4. It does seem that Bush & Co are all set to act in some way against Iran within the current presidency. I monitor all Bush’s speeches and he is quite relentless on this point. He refuses to rule out military action - and keeps on saying so. We shall see. More strength to your elbow!’

That last sentence...the strong elbow bit...could have been me. But ‘monitor all Bush’s speeches’? Excuse me. I can waste my time on better things. However Old Man Vonnegut at 84 has time on his hands. Listen to what he’s been saying to a Sunday Telegraph reporter: ‘Civilisation will come to an end when we run out of fossil fuels. I would guess that would be in the next five years. Human beings are pretty hardy so they will probably go on for a bit. But within a hundred years the last one will be gone.’ Five. Four. Forty five minutes. Mere technicalities. I rest my case. Who can I sue? Do all old men in a hurry preach ‘Armageddon in my lifetime!’

I finished the weekend's Three Card Brag tournament only £6 down after sweeping the board and winning £7.50 in one of last night's regional finals at The Angel...second table on the right just along from the round table in the window. The biggest prize of the evening came in the final game of all when there were nine of us around the table playing for a kitty of £13.50.

I got up at six thirty to write my Friday weblog only to discover that John Papworth had locked his computer behind a password since my previous visit. If I had known I would have wheedled it out of him the night before. Never mind. It gave me the chance to read a long supplement from The Independent about the global oil situation...not good...and England's energy future...more promising.

After breakfast I drove John cross-country to the Gloucestshire border and came back with a heavy sack of stone-milled organic flour in the boot of the Peugeot 106. Over the door of the Old Mill were the words: By Appointment to His Royal Highness the Duke of Cornwall. Prince Charles' Highgrove Estate is just a stone's throw away. Until a year ago the mill had been with the same family since the Norman Conquest of 1066.

It was hard to believe that we were just a few miles from a motorway. It felt like rural Wales. Narrow roads, old county signposts... Malmsbury and Purton, Charlton and Mynet. Ladies out for their Saturday morning canters. We missed the county border sign hid among the bushes and drove into an idyllic Cotswold Village before turning back.

John told me that he once timed a trip to London. It took him just an hour and three quarters to get to his meeting from the time the taxi picked him up at the door to take him to Swindon Station for the train to Paddington. No wonder television executives and single mothers with aspirations to be successful novelists choose to live in this part of the world.

John is a serious bread-maker. Claude Aubisson from the Canton of Vaud once explained that good bread needs good flour. His Swiss Patisserie was on Cinque Ports Street in Rye. This seemed rather obvious so I was surprised that he found it so hard getting his flour supplies. John expected his morning haul to keep him going for three months.

The Radcon Planning Group meeting was brief, focussed and productive. These meetings can easily get bogged down...it only takes one to ruin it. I treated the assembled company to a short five minute summary of the Ten-Year Plan that we have been mulling over. It's important to have a sense of continuity so everybody feels part of something that's going somewhere. I started with the Real Nations Charter and the Real Communities Charter from radcon I and said that radcon II focussed on the former while the job of radcon III is to put flesh on the bones of the latter. Call it creative history if you like. But what's new?

As for where we are headed. I took us back to the First Assembly of the Fourth World and the organisational structures some of us wanted to set up 25 years ago. The Middlebury Institute in Vermont is our model. Out of the September conference we want to see a second institute...with the working title of the Edward Goldsmith Institute for Human Scale Ecology. John will be talking with Teddy and Zac on Tuesday and wants a one-page memo from me by Monday evening. We have pencilled in New Zealand where Teddy now spends significant chunks of his time each year.

Eventually we hope to see as many as a dozen members of this Resurgence Group of Institutes around the world...the Dele Oguntimoju RGI Institute for the study of cantonisation in Nigeria and so on. They would be a confederation of working institutes. Local People Challenging Global Power. No reason why these action centres and research bureaux can't be embryonic ecosteries too. This is where the Kergroaz-Vraz Soil and Food Institute enters the picture. It was time to move beyond Small is Beautiful and The Breakdown of Nations to radcon I's Common Sense and radcon III's Village Democracy. These should be our Radical Handbooks as we move from theory to practice.

Fourth World Review would fit into this broader context as the voice of the RGI...and would lend itself to a rotating editorship. We had a go at this briefly in the old days of Fourth World News. Teddy's Human Scale Ecology group puts out the Christmas issue, the January issue comes from the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, Thomas Naylor edits the February issue from the Green Mountains of Vermont and so on.

Meanwhile over in the Dark Continent President Ellen Johnston-Sirleaf of Liberia has sacked the whole of her Finance Ministry. They may reapply for their jobs...but anyone involved in graft was told in no uncertain terms to 'disappear'. I like it. Mind you many of them were never there in the first place. Ghost workers they call them. Nikalai Gogol (1809-1852) preferred the term Dead Souls. Something here for the rest of Africa?