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?