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%.