Seamless move back to Rye. Got my Apple Mac Mini up and running on Vemara in a couple of minutes this morning. But it may be too good to last. I bumped into Peter Butler at the supermarket. Steve’s electricity was cut off the other day. Steve’s boat runs off meter one while my boat is hooked onto meter two. But it is illogical and unless you know this, because of the positions of the four boats running off the four meters, you would assume I was hooked up to number one. So paranoia suggests a failed attempt to turn off my power.

Vemara is a 30-foot gaff-cutter. In Connie’s will it passes to me. But there is a caveat. If I sell the boat two-thirds of the proceeds goes to Connie’s son David...in line with the general disbursement of liquid assets...one third to me and two thirds to her son. However Connie was anxious that David should not get his hands on any bequests until he was 25...she had started with 30 but was persuaded that 25 was more reasonable. Also Connie did not trust her ex-husband as far as she could throw him. So David’s share of her estate was entrusted to me until his 25th birthday on 16th October 2011. So far so good. Now for the complications.

My principal concern was to avoid disruption to my Academic Inn Books’ publishing business as Connie owned between a third and a quarter of the business. My thinking was that in the event of Connie’s death I would set up her ownership in a Connie Lindqvist Trust. I figured that as both owner and artistic executor I could call the shots and dictate the purpose and conditions of the trust. Here's the exact wording: ‘I give and bequeath into the sole custody of my partner William Norris Shepherd all possessions of possible artistic value. In particular I give and bequeath all framed and unframed artwork, paintings, sketches and the like and any interests or copyrights of any sort that I might have or might some day have relating to my work as an artist into his safe keeping to administer entirely at his own discretion as the sole executor of my artistic estate or to preserve or dispose of as he may see fit’. That seemed about as tight as we could make it.

At no time in her life did Connie earn more than £ 6000 a year. But she kept up a life insurance. This was designed to clear her estate. But there were two things going on at the time she died. Firstly she was with Equitable Life. The insurance yielded £ 8000 and not £ 12000. Secondly we were setting up to buy Connie a house in Rye. Connie’s house purchase would be a ‘buy to rent’ deal. The mortgage application was to include a three year lease signed by REB Limited one of my two UK companies.

In July 2002 we took on the Good Yacht Guide. From a financial point of view this meant we could boost Connie’s income to whatever we needed it to be and focus our attention on ensuring that we had the cash flow to meet the monthly mortgage payments. We were also in the middle of moving Connie’s bank and credit card debts over to me when she died to cut back her monthly payments when applying for her mortgage.

Connie died in November 2002. Her last loan repayment was due in February 2003. By the summer of 2003 she would have been debt-free with just a mortgage to her name. Her income would service the loan and provide her with a private income of five thousand a year. s Connie would have been in seventh heaven. Instead she went there by another route...and a few months early...leaving me to pick up the pieces of both lives while firing on only one of my four cylinders. Frankly it has been a nightmare that I would not wish on anyone else.

I was quite comfortable to sit it out until the end of 2004 because then David would be 18 and his parental guardian would be out of the picture. I indicated as such to the executor and the solicitors he brought in to look after the estate. A note of discord had entered at this point. I objected. It seemed insulting to Connie to bringing in lawyers at £ 100 an hour to pick over bones that had slaved away for 35 years at under £ 5 an hour.

Come the Spring of 2005 I started agitating but found myself talking...Shirley Valentine fashion...to a brick wall. My letters were ignored. So in August 2005 I got in touch with Brian Walker...an old friend from primary school days...who works with his wife from chambers on Sevenoaks High Street. Vance Harris can ignore lesser mortals but will get struck off if they refuse to respond to Walker & Walker. This cunning plan maintains the legal profession’s closed shop. Painfully...like pulling teeth...answers started to dribble through.

By the end of October Walker & Walker had dragged some accounts out of Vance Harris. These showed that Mr Roud who runs Brede Moorings had been playing both ends against the middle by taking mooring fees from myself and Vance Harris. Back in the summer Mr Roud set up a piece of theatre to order me off the moorings. I smelt a rat and refused to budge. He figured I should quit while he was £1000 ahead. So far Brian Walker has managed to keep his costs down to £400. But my daughter does two days a week at the Citizens Advice Bureau in Cardigan and is advising me to look into legal aid. Perhaps Cherie Booth will represent me?

There is a growing global trend for recently retired politicians to set themselves up in business as statesmen on call. The rot began in 1982 when the Nobel Laureate Henry Kissinger linked up with the disgraced Thatcher Defence Minister Peter Carrington to form Kissinger Associates. Since then these groups have slithered into the public-private domain of the Military Industrial Government Complex like a plague of poisonous snakes.

One of the more recent arrivals is George Robertson a small-town Scottish Labour Party politician who has been on the make ever since he gave up his £ 140 000 tax-free term of crime as the Secretary-General of NATO two years ago. ’I am not a lobbyist,’ he declared. Of course not. God forbid the thought! He merely suggested to his old pal the trade minister Ian Pearson that it would be nice if some active government support was arranged for the international ventures of his paymasters Cable and Wireless.

I would like a few million pounds of tax payers’ money too. Perhaps I should call up my old Churchill College neighbour Gordon Campbell at British Nuclear Death Industry to see what he can organise? He played scrum-half for the college when I was keeping goal for the all-conquering Churchill College soccer team. What I enjoyed most was playing midfield for the second team alongside Johnny Kingsley Watson. But the first choice goalkeeper Norman Wilson won his way into the university side so I doubled up with the first team...as well as turning out for the rugby team. Fixture clashes were fewer than I would have expected with hindsight. Perhaps they were so desperate for players that they adjusted fixtures to my sporting schedules.

Cricket was my best sport. I did trials for Kent Young Amateurs in 1964 and Cambridge University in 1965 and formed the backbone of Christ’s Hospital’s old boys batting side between 1965 and 1968 when available with Doug Smith, Geoff Shelley and John Edmonds as company in Douglas Gowan’s Old Blues Cricket Team. But my finest hour was the day that I opened the batting for Churchill College against the full might of the professionals of Essex County Cricket Club. I am probably the only person to have ever carried his bat against Essex. But it was not altogether unrelated to the rapidity with which everyone else departed the crease.

The whole thing was a cock-up. Essex turned up with an almost full-strength First Eleven instead of a Second Eleven following some misunderstanding over the standard of Cambridge college sides. Ken Boyce was seriously quick. Our skipper Jim Fitzgerald won the toss and put us in. We made about fifty two runs and I got thirty of them after a charmed life that left me battered but unbowed ten wickets later. Essex won by eight wickets.

When I returned to my old college ten years ago and had dinner at high table with my Director of Studies Dick Tizard he remarked that all he could remember about me was that I was always playing something or other for the college. I feigned shock and horror at the unfairness of it all and reminded him that in my day there were only two prizes awarded to Cambridge University engineering students. One of them went to the nerd who came top in exams each year. The other was awarded by the Cambridge University Engineering Society to the winner of their annual Engineering Essay Competition. I won that one in 1966. And it wasn’t just a paper.

Three finalists were chosen by the committee. Now it just so happened that this particular year there was a de facto committee of one...and this was my rally navigator Chris Singleton who subsequently continued similar duties as Best Man at my wedding. But nonetheless we still had to endure our Big Brother Moment. The essay was just a start. We had to present it in the Engineering Department’s lecture hall on The Fenway before the assembled dignatories of the Engineering Society whereupon a vote was taken and the prize awarded. Think Eurovision Song Contest. It must be the only democratic vote I have ever won...and ever likely to win...in my life. I took the 1966 prize and my essay on The Practicability of A Fixed Channel Link has pride of place at the head of my bibliography as my first published article. Search the archives of the Cambridge University Engineering Society for confirmation.

At the peak of their earning power John Major and Margaret Thatcher are reported to have earned more than a million pounds a year after leaving Number Ten. Major is on the board of the US-based Carlyle Group currently reaping huge profits from the privatisation of QinetiQ the UK government’s defence and security technology agency. Appropriately John Cleese once played its head of department. The Carlyle Group operates as a merchant bank using its political connections to ‘generate extraordinary returns’. Here are five others to cultivate or shun depending on your political persuasion as Peace Parties or War Party activists: Stonebridge International, The Scowcroft Group, The Cohen Group, Hills & Company and The Albright Group.

My boat is moored a few yards from the Rye Harbour Road. There was a large sign on the railings facing oncoming traffic when I clambered onboard at eight in the evening. It had not been there when I left Rye for Llangolman ten weeks ago. I feared it would read ‘Boat For Sale’ so was much relieved to discover that instead it read ‘Danger Lorries Turning’. Is it possible that work has started on the Rye Harbour Road Cycle Path?

I am delighted that my daughter has succeeded in giving up smoking while away in work and personal retreat at Gaia House...not for the first time but she now understands the nature of her addiction and I think it will stick. I have never smoked and never got myself addicted to nicotine. I am very fortunate. But ironically, given David Cameron’s trial by media on his youthful drug-taking, I am less suitable for public office as a result. So much for the humbug of tabloid patriotism and their hypocrisy as they snort their way through the late editions.

The idea of Animal Liberation Fronts is relatively new to western consciousness. A hundred years ago heaven was animal-free and the churches of Jesus were wrestling with the ‘do they-don’t they’ of animal souls. Reincarnation was once on the agenda too until a synod dropped it from the export version of their neo-judaic religion a millennium and a half ago. How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?’ as the great 20th Century Troubadour John Lennon of Liverpool put it.

In 1898 more than a century after Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp and Josiah Wedgwood had set up the Society to Abolish the Slave Trade the idea of freeing people was still in vogue. And with good cause. Because when Heinrich Dreser invented a new substance there was no Huntingdon Life Sciences to test it for him. There must be no bars to the progress of science and so he tested it on the Bayer workforce. They said it made them feel heroisch so he named it heroin.

The heroin brand has prospered in the past hundred years and its raw material opium now constitutes virtually all of Afghanistan’s recordable exports. Everyone is involved...from warlords to the resurgent Taliban to members of the puppet government. Since the two ugly sisters of international lawlessness invaded officially in 2001 Afghanistan has accounted for 87% of world trade in opium.

Writing about the heroin business in The Guardian, Simon Jenkins...my next favourite columnist after Matthew Parris (and Alistair Cooke who died last year)...wrote: ‘Iraq since its occupation has yet to produce as much oil as it did under Saddam Hussein. The US cannot find petrol even for Iraq's cars. By contrast Afghanistan's opium output is breaking all records’. This year's crop will beat the 1999 record of 4500 tonnes. Britain's Department for International Development is ‘in the lead’ on Kabul's drugs policy. The policy has enriched tens of thousands of Afghans tax-free...the victims are on Glasgow housing estates.

When the Taliban were in charge things were different. The regime stopped virtually all poppy cultivation in 2001. Output that year was negligible. Simon Jenkins again: ‘The Taliban's Mullah Amir Mohammed Haqqani pleaded at the time for western aid for distressed farmers, whose income from substituted wheat and vegetables was a quarter that from poppies. But he declared that ‘whether we get assistance or not, poppy growing will never be allowed again in our country’. There is no evidence that this ascetic policy was not sincere’.

Indeed the policy of the Taliban was effective. The price of opium in dealers' warehouses promptly rose tenfold. Had Afghan supply collapsed, production would have shifted elsewhere, assuming demand remained high. But had demand been attacked at just that moment there was a brief window of opportunity to curb the heroin pandemic. There was talk of legalising an Afghan crop for medicinal morphine as with crops in Turkey and India. Instead British and US policy towards Afghan opium after the 2001 invasion was totally cynical.

As part of their dodgy deal with the warlords the invaders turned a blind eye to the 2002 replanting. Since the market for any unregulated global product tends to be near perfect, the prospect of rocketing profits brought an unprecedented acreage of Afghanistan into production. 28 of 32 provinces were instantly under cultivation and refining factories were set up. Europe was soon swamped with cheap heroin. A Glasgow 11-year-old could buy it for £10 a packet. The policy was deliberate.

Meanwhile across the world the Cinderella of international statemanship Bolivia’s Evo Morales is pursuing the policy that the Ugly Sisters refused the Afghans. He is saying ‘No to zero coca, but yes to zero cocaine.’ He is fortunate that the Neocons have no policy for South America. Support Evo Morales and buy his sweater.

My daughter made salad...and salad her way is heaven itself and bears very little resemblance to the collection of vegetables that I put together. I contributed the elixir distilled from the down-trodden grape vines of Southern France. We achieved that elusive delight...quality time and a meeting of informed minds before a roaring wood fire. Professor Leopold Kohr would have been proud of us. We made our own Academic Inn.

Britain’s prison population halved after the Kaiser War and stayed steady at ten thousand until the start of the Hitler War. After that internment has become a habit for the English ruling class. The number incarcerated has risen steadily ever since and now stands at eighty thousand. Throwing open the gates of our prisons will be one of the first things to do after the revolution.