High tide today was at midday and midnight, the sun and the moon rose at quarter to seven and set between half past seven and eight in the evening. We had moderate southwest winds, good visibility and moderate seas...it has been blowing hard for several days or they would have been calm. Here in Rye we had three hours of sunshine, a quarter of an inch of rain and an average temperature during the day of 55 Fahrenheit. Beijing, Bogota, Boston and Christchurch in New Zealand had much the same temperature. Interesting hot spots around the globe were Mexico City at 72F, Sydney at 75F, Nairobi at 77F and New Delhi at 81F. The pound was priced at $1.75 and €1.45. Welcome to the thinking man's wire service...Cliff's Edge Signalling Service.

It is not easy being poor. Her Majesty's Government has a policy to dock the benefits of lone parents if they fail to attend a Work Focussed Interview. An internal government report that looked into the impact of these sanctions on the poor victims found that this policy had two principal consequences. Firstly sanctions were often not imposed. And secondly when they were imposed the lone parents either didn't notice or simply believed that their benefit had been reassessed.

Now just think of all the thought, the meetings, the memos, the manpower, the argument, the worry that will have gone into that policy. Imagine the paperwork sent out to all frontline staff. Think of all the meetings missed and the warnings issued before somebody loses a tenner. And in reality it makes not a blind bit of difference.

It is no surprise that frontline staff...being human...do not like docking benefits. But it is a little surprising that the victims don't notice. I don't believe it. I think they do notice but decide it is too much of a hassle to think about it. When your money arrives in the wall you have other things to think about. The fact that there is only £156.20 instead of the £168.45 you were expecting is low on your list of priorities.

Instead all your energy is needed for paying the phone bill, filling the fridge and the larder, buying Laura the designer label shoes she needs to keep up with her friends at school, finding money for the gas meter and for TV licence stamps at the post office and putting petrol in the car. The docked benefit would have given you enough small change to treat yourself to something nice. But not this week. I think people notice...and I think they are beginning to get angry.

This week The Independent has been putting out supplements on Global Warming. Today it was the turn of its readers. There were two things that struck me. Firstly nearly all the letters, while well-meaning and sensible to the writer, were based on much ignorance. Secondly solutions to global warming fell into three categories: world government must do this, our government must do that and each of us must do our bit and turn off the lights.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was on BBC Radio Four the other day being quizzed about Global Warming and he took much the same tack…although it was good to see him insisting that the Anglican Church had a moral duty to address the problem instead of contemplating its collective navel by going on and on and on about women priests and homosexual curates. But Rowan Williams is missing an opportunity to make Her Majesty’s Church relevant again.

Neither the United Nations, nor David Cameron’s Conservatives nor The Man in the Street can solve the problem of Global Warming. It can only be addressed from outside the mindset…and the institutional structure…that created the problem in the first place. District Councils, County Councils, the Westminster Parliament, The City, Whitehall, Brussels, the World Bank, IMF and WTO, multinational companies…none of these can solve the problem.

But in sharp contrast to every other seat of power in the land Rowan Williams is blessed with an institutional structure that can solve the problem. In doing so, the English Church can act as a beacon for the rest of the world. Villages and urban parishes are capable of cleaning up their own local acts in a way governments can’t.

Parishes can reclaim the power to act on Global Warming within their own boundaries and in collaboration with their neighbours. The Anglican Church could lead the charge. The key to success is not global treaties or legislation or exhortation but working together in local communities across the land and across the world…village by village and parish by parish.

In 1989 a Boeing 747 arriving at Heathrow from Brisbane with 255 passengers almost landed on the A4 west of London after the pilot mistook it for the runway. Ryanair have managed to go one better. But then they have pioneered the art of flying passengers to far-flung airfields and telling them they had arrived in one of Europe's loveliest cities.

Yesterday Flight 9884 from Liverpool to Derry landed at a disused army airfield in Ballykelly five miles away. Oops! Steps had to be transported 5 miles by road from Derry to Shackleton Barracks to get the passengers off the jet. How they got the jet off the runway has yet to be explained. Relatives and friends waiting at Derry to pick up passengers were somewhat dismayed when a notice went up telling them that Flight 9884 had been indefinitely delayed. But then Ryanair changed the sign to read: Passengers Arriving By Surface...at which point everybody burst out laughing.

Captain Wilkinson asked me if Vemara was for sale. He has an enthusiast wanting a traditional boat and Vemara is the only classic wooden boat for miles around. So I adopted the Gilbert White approach. Five years ago Gilbert sold Skua 4 for £7 500 and bought Kim II for £30 000. Over the next couple of years he spent £10 000 replacing the engine, adding self-furling gear to the foresails and generally making a good boat better. He has been sailing up and down and across the English Channel and in Rye Bay in his new yacht for four years. Throughout this time his boat has been for sale...for £40 000. ‘Every boat has a price. This is what I will sell for. If somebody offers me £40K I will sell. If they come with an offer I will think about it.’ I told Alan Wilkinson that I would sell Vemara for £36 000.

There was little work going on yesterday. Behind me as I walked into town at eight o’clock there were a million demonstrators getting ready to invade the streets of France... ‘Pardonnez moi monsieur: three million say les unions.’ A third of France’s public sector took part and a fifth of French schools shut down for the day. The largest protest for half a century. In Paris 5000 police turned up for work but train drivers didn’t as half the trains were cancelled.

In Britain a million demonstrators took to the streets...’Excuse me, old chap! Only 400 000 actually. Jolly old Local Government Association says so, eh whatever? Perhaps. But in Manchester nine out of ten council workers came out on strike and 70% of the schools were closed…17 500 in all although it varied a surprising amount from almost none in Hampshire and West Sussex to every school in the North of England. So I suppose we can say we beat the French on school closures by 7-2 but lost 3-1 on demonstrators.

I spent several hours with Heidi on Monday afternoon at The Ship Inn. It was a nice enough. Text messages buzzed across town briefly on Tuesday morning…but reconciliation is not on the cards for the immediate future. Tant pis! Then there was my birthday present to Heidi which like my Christmas present from the Body Shop was not a success. Heidi had seen the film and read the book. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is on order from Ottakar’s. Third time lucky.

Winchelsea Singers are in need of tenor voices for their Spring Concert in Winchelsea Church on 8th April. So as a Journeyman Tenor I have stepped into the breach for the last three rehearsals. Today was the first of them. There are various operatic standards in the first half of the programme…Puccini’s Humming Chorus, a Donizetti drinking song, Wagner’s Chorus of the Pilgrim Slaves from Tannhäuser and Fauré’s Requiem after the interval.

A cloud of gloom descended upon me as I was walking back from town at six o’clock. This happens from time to time…out of the blue…for no apparent reason. Francoise chanced to be passing…back from Hastings Art College…and took me back to her house for a late afternoon tea that became an early evening meal. Today is my ex-wife’s birthday. Later on the boat I got through half a bottle of wine. Thanks Francoise...as my text message said.

Francoise was telling me that her son had advertised for a receptionist for one of his hostels a couple of weeks ago and had received three hundred applications. He interviewed a third of them and reckoned nearly all of them would have been just fine. Francoise was also telling me of the times that she had applied for jobs in the NHS. Normally she would be one of perhaps fifty applicants.

My son decided to change jobs last year. He wanted to move to Gothenburg to be with his fiancée Andrea. He got himself short-listed for several jobs out of dozens of applicants but failed to quite make it into the number one slot. Eventually his present job provider ABB came up with a better offer so he decided to stay in Stockholm commuting every day to Västerås. Despite being very successful by comparison to nearly all the other applicants Nicholas nonetheless found the whole process debilitating and somewhat humiliating.

Ordinary people do not enjoy selling themselves like a commodity on a supermarket shelf. There is something profoundly distasteful about launching yourself onto the job market to tell complete strangers what a jolly good chap you are and how superbly you will do whatever job they throw at you. The hypocrisy is only part of it. There is something else…the sense of contra natura about the whole process. Know thyself. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Such notions seem alien to the World of Jobs. Next week I will take you to Tea in Marshbeck with James Robertson.

Another aspect of this great social underbelly of jobs and appointments are those who never come even close to being short listed. They eventually drift towards the bottom of the heap and the world of welfare hand-outs. I went to court in Swindon with John Papworth five years ago when he refused to fill in his 2001 Census Form. While waiting for his case to come up we sat there as a procession of young single mothers were brought before the magistrates for some trivial benefit mistake or other. Nearly all were lone mothers and none of the options open to the magistrates made the slightest sense. What might have made some sense would have been to give them each a few thousand pounds, send them home and tell them to look after their children.

Simon Barnes is back from India where he had been covering the cricket. Nimbyism is an acronym from the struggles in the seventies and eighties…Not In My Back Yard. Today in his Wild Notebook column in The Times Simon Barnes remarked that one of the great joys of coming home is to have confirmed for you that all the essential processes of life are continuing in the place that matters most to you. The family thrives, the garden grows, and there is a woodpecker in it.

It is an aspect of Nimbyism. It’s supposed to be a Bad Thing. Me, I’ve got a lot of time for Nimbyism. Nimbyism is an attempt to protect a place you love, a place that has meaning for you. There is a difference between ‘don’t destroy this fine place’ and ‘I don’t care if you destroy somewhere else’. I love my backyard, especially after a spell away from it, and I was thrilled that a woodpecker felt the same.

This got me thinking about the Nimbyism motivating my fellow blogger riverbend…female, Iraqi and 24. ‘I survived the war…that’s all you need to know…and it’s all that matters these days anyway’. Her chronicles about life in the new Iraq are a cross between an underground manifesto and a polished cultural history. The weblog was started in September 2003 and is being published in book form by Marion Boyars under the title Baghdad Burning.

I am sceptical about these Radical Consultations and Fourth World Assembly gatherings John Papworth believes in as they seem to me to be perpetuating the attitudes inherent in mass politics and refusing to admit that democracy does not work in opinions, ideas, scholarship and knowledge. Fools seldom differ. Fritz Schumacher a key thinker behind the Human Scale Movement was very conscious of this point…his chapters in Guide for the Perplexed on the meaning of the Latin term adaequatio provide the deeper background to these remarks.

It is in this context that I respond to such initiatives as the Thomas Naylor project for a Second Vermont Republic and to a new project on The Commons proposed by Thomas Greco. The idea seems to have originated in an exchange with John Jopling who works with Richard Douthwaite and the FEASTA people in County Kerry, Ireland. Tom has just returned to Tucson Arizona after a month in India where he talked about exchange alternatives and community economics. Tom now believes that the greatest challenge in regards to privatization and corporatization is to work to restore the commons in all its aspects…including in particular what Tom calls the credit commons.

I entered the debate when Tom copied me on an e-mail to John Jopling that went like this: Would you be open to convening a colloquium to focus on the process of restoring all aspects of the commons…I would envision this to be a week-long (or longer) process involving collaborative research, mutual education, and joint creation of some product such as a blog, a wiki, a website or a parer...[a forum discussion with the word 'parer' in the title]. Some areas of research are how elites succeeded in privatizing the commons? We should do some deep research on this and put on our best Machiavellian thinking caps. Some things that come to mind are enclosures, clearances, genocide, legal privileges of various kinds (corporate charters, franchises, etc.). (2) Exploration of current efforts to commonize in various realms, e.g., the creative commons, open-source software, the identity commons, the credit commons, etc.

I thought Tom was homing in on something important so here is my response. I think this tighter focus on detailed processes behind the end result is what is needed for the next few years...and the disappearance of the commons…as if by magic…is one process that needs to be laid bare. Richard Douthwaite's Schumacher Briefings Number 4 The Ecology of Money is very good and has the best discussion I have yet seen of multiple currencies in his chapter One Country, Four Currencies. I don't go for his ideas about an energy currency but the discussion and the agenda-ing of the issue is important. Douthwaite works behind (or in front of) the FEASTA label…and this is the connection to your e-mail. I will be writing a weblog on Douthwaite's parallel currencies chapter next week and will send you a copy.

Here is the text of The Second Coming by WB Yeats. Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ the falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ the ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ the best lack all convictions, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity/ Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand./ The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out/ when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi/ troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert/ a shape with lion body and the head of a man,/ a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,/ is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / reel shadows of the indignant desert birds./ The darkness drops again; but now I know/ that twenty centuries of stony sleep/ were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle/ and what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Most days I browse the small news items in The Times in the right-hand column of several inside pages. One of them today was headlined Body in Harbour and went like this. The body of a middle-aged woman was found floating in the harbour at Rye Bay in East Sussex yesterday. A spokesman for Sussex Police said the death was being treated as suspicious pending the results of a post-mortem examination. The victim has not been formally identified.

By the end of the day I was aching all over after a second Sunday morning at the swimming pool. I managed a four length starter and then four two length sets...twelve lengths in all. It can only get better. I was already aching when I got up from the day before when I had done my most extravagant Lidls run yet...returning on the train with £20 of loot...including a £2.75 of 13% French red wine which seems to have disappeared inside me on Saturday night.

Yesterday’s Ashford trip was a big disappointment as Starbucks was closed until All Fools Day for a makeover. Fortunately there is a large Ottakar in Ashford with a nice place to sit and relax over a cup of coffee so I spent some time there after buying Heidi a copy of Chocolat by Joanna Harris for her birthday.

Walking into town it was good to feel the breeze on my face coming off the River Brede as this meant the wind had gone round to the South-West bringing with it some rain but also much warmer weather. The daffodils agreed with me and spent the weekend bursting into bloom all over Rye. I did not want to stay on the spot for too long following Kirk Sale’s decision to keep away from the September Conference so I moved in quickly with some diversionary tactics...the Dunkirk Strategy...and declared the defeat to be a great victory. Here is what I had to say.

Any focus on the Real Communities Charter should be on a European basis so the loss of Kirk and the Yank dimension is a blessing in disguise. Don't ask Zac to give the keynote speech. Leave him where he is. If you ask more of him he will smell a rat, think he is backing a loser and pull out of the Thursday event. As Any Real Questions is our fallback position this would be bad news. If we can't get the conference to go we must still make sure that (1) the Any Real Questions Public Meeting takes place; (2) we own the format and (3) we produce a TV quality programme video tape of the meeting for subsequent marketing to TV channels world wide and/or for setting up our own Fourth World Channel. We might need to tweak the format a little to distinguish it from the BBC programmes.

What is needed now is not to ask the first person you pick up on the street to think of a celebrity to give a keynote speech but to work strategically to put together a European coalition with the French and the Germans and the Scandinavians who are much much better organised locally in terms of the Real Communities Charter concerns than the Brits...and I suspect the Italians and the Spanish and the East Europeans can teach us a thing or three too. We can take the view that all our common European concerns centre on the Brussels and NATO agendas...but not the way the Tory Right Wing ranters and the UK Independent Party view it...it is much more insidious and widespread than this.

If anybody had bothered to listen to Tony Pinschof at radcon 1...the only one there with any real working experience of Brussels bureaucrats...he repeatedly tried to get a hearing for his point that national bureaucrats...in our case Whitehall...and the multinationals corporations hide behind and blame and use the European Union as they push through their own global and national agendas. We must take care to attack the right targets instead of being spun off into the weeds...as is happening at the moment.

Personally I would give Anton Pinschof the keynote speech in place of Kirk...if he would agree to do it...and get him to focus on the dynamics of the Local-National-Global-Euro dimensions in Organic Farming and Good Food distribution. Just having a keynote speech available (and delivered?) in English French and German will send out very positive messages about the agenda of the European Peace Parties as we begin thinking strategically about how to tackle the European War Party and set up of local fronts throughout Europe to meet the continents real concerns (good food good governance etc) village by village, town by town.

I spent a hundred minutes on the phone with my daughter in the evening which must be my longest ever phone call to her. And it was just a social chat...although she sneaked in at the end that she thought it was seriously dumb of me to smash her radio aerial...and she wanted £40 to get it replaced. She also reckons I am wasting my time trying to wheedle out the facts behind global warming. I first did some work on this at the end of 2004 with a view to giving John Papworth a review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.

However Crichton’s line about the falsification of the environmentalists’ case...and the convincing evidence he brought to bear in support of his view...meant that I needed to do more delving before publishing a controversial review. I also hoped that a colleague would read State of Fear and give me some moral support but that has not yet happened. Anyway to cut a long story short I am now convinced that my work got lost in one of my dongle and computer collapses so I have been recreating everything from an old draft in hard copy and some scribbled notes.

Glad tidings from Sweden over the weekend. The Spanish translation had been lurking in the bowels of Alan’s in-tray all week. It was a little puzzling receiving an invoice before receiving the finished job. So wearing my Project Manager’s hat I can claim three down...Danish, Finnish and Spanish - and four including the English...and just the Norwegian and the Russian to come through this week. It will be interesting to see how profitable it will all turn out.

I was on call all week project managing the NCAB Project...the client has received the Danish and Finnish translations of their webtext, the Spanish has been lost in translation, the Russian is due in mid-week and completion of the Norwegian has been promised for Friday. A bulletin on our delivery promises and an invoice for 25% of the fee went out to the client.

But today an interesting flurry of e-mails turned my attention to my political pillar...to use Brussels jargon. Kirkpatrick Sale has put me on the spot for his decision not to attend the conference in September...so I anticipate some firecrackers from Purton on this. Here is Kirk to John Papworth.

John. I am indeed grateful for your offer, and flattered, but after much thinking I've decided not to be on the radcon program. The small reasons are that I hate flying intensely, I'm supposed to go to a Nuclear Free Conference in New Mexico then, and I need to prepare for my Secessionist Convention soon after. But the main reason is that, having read William Shepherd's excellent laying out of the radcon agenda in his March 17 posting, and its emphasis on local control, and working from the Real Communities Charter...with the conclusion that people will have to actually go into their neighborhoods with one or another agenda.

I don't think I would have anything really to say or add. It is specifically British, and can best be handled by Brits, and I don't see that I could be of much help, except to cheer you on from the sidelines. What you will need there is someone(s) to get the attendees to commit to neighborhood action, not some Yank talking about secession and scale. I wish you luck with the event, and I trust you understand. And I will be cheering you on from a distance. Thanks, old man. Warm regards, Kirk. My March 17 posting went like this.

I think we should try to keep Any Real Questions focussed on the Real Communities Charter side of our concerns rather than going for the global concerns of our Real Nations Charter as I want to see Local Governance as the principal focus of this year's radcon and the setting up of the Edward Goldsmith Institute is to be the jewel in the crown of the Press Release following the Final Plenary so the questions we arrange to be asked should be communities charter oriented.

I am not quite clear how to bring in Dele's concerns but his thinking is much broader than Nigerian Union vs EUnion...and I think he might welcome the opportunity to talk about local communities charter issues from a Nigerian perspective...besides the principal of cantonisation and managing power seems to me to be something that needs to be developed as much at the local as the international level...perhaps Dele Oguntimoju could give this some thought and prepare a paper that brings Kohr's relative size and cantonisation principles on nation states down to a village scale? The Breakdown of Local Government?

Making Local Government Local is the focus of the conference and the idea was to aim to look for action solutions on a range of issues...hence the list of workshops that went out with Fourth World Review...which were all Real Communities Charter oriented...'Two days of intensive workshops on Food, Health, Police, Money, Environment, Schools, Transport, Employment and Shops' to quote the FWR leaflet. There was an article from Dick Body advocating this sort of direction for FWR around the time of radcon I that I particularly liked...a paper for radcon III perhaps...Chris Wright produced some specifics on healthcare in response that were particularly interesting...they too should be papers for radcon III. I also think my article in this month's Rye's Own entitled Local Power is beginning to push in the right direction by trying to link Kohr to the specific of present local governance.

We should also commission a paper about the Local Government Act 2000...my Rye’s Own article might be complete nonsense in the light of this development...I just don't know...and don’t know nobody who does...has anyone you know read it and understood it?...the 2000 act includes the idea of Local Referendum that Jakob Von Uexkull got excited about...but clearly never read as a cursory look at the small print indicates that existing authorities are given de facto veto power over all stages of the referendum process so it is the reverse of power to the people.

Perhaps we should also add in some of the Ghandi Institute forums from the 1981 Fourth World Assembly which were: 1. Human Scale Economics; 2. Politics and Community Empowerment; 3. Communications; 4. Ecology and Bioregionalism; 5. Urban Life; 6. War, Non-Violence and Community Power; 7. Ethnic People and Decolonisation in Asia and 8. Village Development. I also like the idea of taking your Village Democracy Chapter Five and having a forum look at this in conjunction with the Rowntree Report and a revision of the Real Communities Charter. Incidentally I have persuaded East Sussex County Libraries to download a copy of the 311 page Rowntree Report, print it and make it available in their Reference Libraries...although I had to argue until I was blue (red) in the face.

An e-mail from John Papworth this morning went like this: The Rowntree Trust have refused our application for a grant. Kirk Sale says he will not be able to attend. I am about to go to press with FWR 137. We need to send out a Radcon Programme, which means deciding a new keynote speaker and also deciding the titles and the Chair names of our two main workshops. Any suggestions would be helpful. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. W.B.Yeats.

From 1972 to 1975 I worked for Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners. This firm of engineering consultants had provided years of good service to the colonial authorities of the British Empire but had been forced to leave Salisbury, Rhodesia in some haste after Ian Smith made his Universal Declaration of Independence. They had two hundred professionals working out of their Nairobi office when I called in looking for work after a two months trek by land rover from Europe...my second trans-African journey. These professionals...mostly civil engineers...were there to service Gibb’s new clients in East and South Africa and the Middle East.

While with Gibb I wrote a few lesser reports that took a week or so....a Japanese Tourist Project in Western Kenya, a Commercial Development Project for Port Louis in Mauritius etc...and three proper reports that took many months. One of my proper reports was a regional road development plan for the Sultanate of Oman. The other two were reports on the long-term water needs of Kenya’s Central Rift Valley and Malawi’s commercial capital Blantyre. Sir Alexander Gibb sent the proper reports to the commissioning authorities who passed them on to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) for project funding.

The Sandhurst-based Sultan of Oman…and his economic advisers from the City of London…were a little puzzled about their need for the World Bank as they had rather a lot of oil. But it was suggested that the rebellion on their Southern border might get out of hand so they eventually figured out that a World Bank presence constituted protection. The Sultan’s advisers were also persuaded that to put down the uprising they needed to build a very large macadam road to move guns and soldiers from the hotels of Muscat to and from the battle zone…even though skirmishes in the South had never involved more than half a dozen ‘insurgents’.

Meanwhile further south the Kenyans were persuaded that they needed to dam the Turusha Gorge in the Kenyan Highlands and the Malawians were assured they needed a second water pipeline...and electricity from ESCOM in South Africa...to meet the commercial needs of such vital development projects as the New Carlsberg Brewery shipped out from Copenhagen to Blantyre when the Danes built themselves a new one. I am not sure I learnt much from my foray into the roads business…although counting donkeys and camels and writing a computer programme to turn them into trucks and traffic jams twenty years hence is enlightening.

The two water supply projects taught me a couple of things…things which have escaped the notice of many people throwing up their hands in horror about the Global Water Crisis. Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard have written a book about Large Dams in which they pointed out that most large water projects are driven by civil engineers wanting to construct dams, reservoirs and pipelines but their true purpose is not the supply of water but the supply of World Bank debt-equity money. Nothing in my engineering studies at Cambridge University or my business studies at Stockholm University had prepared me for such wild ideas.

The Blantyre Water Supply Report was interesting for several inter-related reasons …standpipe policy, peak supply and demand characteristics and water pricing policy. The first was central to the Bolivian dispute with Bechtel. To capture the rain landing on your roof all you need is to fashion some guttering and lay hands on a barrel to trap the water. Let this free water run away down the hill and you will need to bore a well, dam a stream or build yourself some pipelines to bring it back again. I wrote an appendix on water catchment tanks which was removed from the final report. Standpipes and water charges were the way forward.

Peak supply and demand characteristics fascinate engineers…and this fascination leads to chronically over-designed engineering systems when First World standards are applied to Third World realities. There are several aspects to this issue including the breakdown of water extraction relations on the water supply side and the perverse effect of water pricing policy on the water demand side. I wrote an appendix about garden watering to address some of these issues…and to my surprise it was not removed from the final report.

When urban water supply systems are developed the first water source is invariably the cheapest...and this has nothing to do with inflation. You tap the nearest water supply first and then go further and further afield for your water supplies as the town grows. Put this together with the anatomy of water demand and social justice requires that drinking water should be priced close to the cost of the first water supply scheme.

Restrict urban water supply policy to clean drinking water for all and many engineering schemes built to meet ‘rising demand'…with their dams and pipelines, pumps and boreholes…become luxury developments. An equitable water pricing policy would price water in terms of a Hierarchy of Needs with water prices increasing dramatically as customer water wants rise…from drinking to washing to toilet flushing to garden watering to washing bottles at the local Coco-Cola Bottling Plant. This policy would bring social justice to the urban poor.

Melvyn Bragg has come out with a list of the top dozen books ever. He kept to English ones and his criteria were a book’s influence on the world. Nine were predictable: Magna Carta (1215); King James Bible (1611); Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623); Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687); Richard Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769); Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776); William Wilberforce’s Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789); Michael Faraday’s Electricity Research (1839) and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). But two surprises: Mary Wollstonecroft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) which demanded women’s equality and Marie Stopes’ Married Love (1918) with its assertion of the right of women to control and enjoy their sex and family lives.

I was in Martyn Channons looking at socks when I heard from a fellow shopper the astonishing news that Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar had gone shortly after lunch. After that India’s second innings collapsed to 100 all out to give England their first test win in India for 20 years and square the three-game series 1-1.

It has been an astonishing few weeks in the Indian sub-continent for the English Cricket Team. England saved their greatest stuff for the times of their greatest misfortune. In Bombay they had only six players from the Ashes winning summer...and three were filling different roles. The team was unrecognisable, desperately short of experience and with an untried captain. Yet this series has been remarkable for Flintoff’s almost complete lack of doubt. My favourite bad birdwatcher Simon Barnes felt moved to wax lyrical today in the sports pages of The Times. Here he is.

In India one thinks of Kipling and today it is particularly appropriate to see to what extent Flintoff passes the If test. One of the hardest requirements of that most exacting poem is the bit about defeat…if you can lose and start again at your beginning. Flintoff captained England to a closely fought draw in Nagpur and then a deeply distressing defeat in Mohali, in which England did many good things but were ultimately outplayed. England gave everything and lost. To come back from that to win in Bombay required copious qualities of the very toughest If virtues. And over the course of the past five days England and Flintoff, having learnt in Mohali that giving everything simply wasn’t enough, proceeded to give more. Flintoff won in Bombay because he gave more than everything.

Later the same day Chelsea ground out another one-goal victory beating Newcastle United 1-0 at Stamford Bridge in the quarter finals of the FA Cup which keeps them in with a chance of a league and cup double. I only gave you eleven of Melvyn Bragg’s top dozen books. The twelfth was released in 1863 by a bunch of upper class English toffs and goes by the name of the Book Of Rules of Association Football. This choice is not as silly as it might seem.

This short book made it possible for everyone everywhere to play the same game. Without this book ‘the beautiful game’...as the great Brazilian footballer Edson Arantes do Nascimento called it...would not have kicked off. Because of this book and the proselytising enthusiasm of British sailors, merchants and adventurers on their expeditions around the globe it is now estimated that this year eight out of ten people in the world will watch something of the World Cup in Germany.

Football is played world-wide by more than one and a half million teams and three hundred thousand clubs…not including the hundreds and thousands of schools and youth cubs. It has become part of the national consciousness of almost every country in the world. It drives television channels, radio stations and newspapers from the local to the national…a form of universal language.

The game has been around a while. Football is complained of regularly in medieval chronicles. In his pamphlet The Anatomy of Abuses in 1583 Philip Stubbs said of the players that ‘sometime their necks are broken, sometime their backs, sometime their legs, sometime their arms; sometime one part is thrust out of joint, sometime another.’

The Times in 1842 reports: ‘The Poor have been dispossessed of their games, their amusements and their mirth.’ Football when played at all became much toned down, the number of players and even the space involved limited.

But help and salvation were at hand…from English public schools like Charterhouse, Rugby and Eton. Here what was once disorder, mayhem and a threat to public peace became a way to train the gilded youth who would lead and expand a nation. My old alma mater Cambridge can take the credit for starting the process that resulted in the book of rules. Here it was agreed that fourteen players from different schools should frame a set of rules.

The Cambridge Rules were superseded only a few days after their formulation on 26th October 1863 at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Lincoln Inn Fields. On that Monday representatives from a dozen London and suburban clubs met to sort it out once and for all.

By the end of the afternoon it was announced that ‘the clubs represented at this meeting now form themselves into an association to be called the Football Association.’ It took another half-dozen meetings to classify and codify what eventually became known as the Football Association Laws.

A cheque from a Good Yacht Guide customer arrived in the post today. Once upon a time there was meaning in the notion of the crossed and uncrossed cheque. You could ‘make the cheque over’ to someone else. My Barclays account is Ryeproduction. My Nationwide cash account is in my own name. My Nationwide Treasurer Account is in the name of Academic Inn Books. My PayPal account is in the name of William Franklin & Sons Limited. Barclays accepted the cheque without blinking…made over to Ryeproduction by a director of William Franklin & Sons.

I have been off message with my weblogs for the past few days so herein my working life this week so far. On Monday I wrote my weblogs from Rye Library and from Tony Payne’s PC Hut next to the Night Club by the Ferry Road level crossing. I also completed several administrative tasks...these are small but take time...and together quite a lot of time. I try to bunch them...a couple of days a month...this way they seem to take less time.

This fortnight’s little tasks included responding to Percy Burt’s worries about his Nationwide account which began as an assumption that I was not paying him £80 a month...but is now an even bigger worry (for him) because he knows I have been; then there was the need to react to the minutes from the Radcon III Planning Group meeting and respond creatively to several e-mails from John Papworth about radcon workshops; next there were checks to be made on my PayPal and Barclays ibank statements...which included the nice surprise of an unexpectedly rapid payment from the States via PayPal...prompting me to withdraw funds and send them to my Barclays business account; and finally there was the NCAB websites project...a flurry of texts and e-mails to keep everybody happy, the go-ahead for the Russian website and dispatch of Invoice 631 (1 of 2) for the 25% upfront payment.

Tuesday was Rye Library Closure Day so 0830 to 1100 was laundry time. There is a laundrette in Rope Walk Arcade that I avoid three weeks out of four...but cannot usually last out much longer. My last laundry session was in Llangolman so this was better than normal as I have now been in Rye for five weeks. I also do small washes on Vemara…adopting Connie’s principle of never wasting any hot water. Otherwise the day was an AWOL Day...as in absent without leave. However, workaholic that I am, by mid-afternoon I was feeling guilty so rushed through a weblog along the lines of 'here is one I prepared earlier'…as the TV chefs say.

And so to Wednesday...PC Hut Closure Day. The normal routine brings me back to the boat around midday and has me lighting the stove five hours earlier than on other days. I leave it simmering away in the evening between seven and ten while I am at Ryesingers choir practice. But my hour of computer time at Rye Library was enough to send the NCAB English text files off to New Zealand…to be translated into Russian..and deal with queries from Pernille in Scotland who is doing the Danish webtext and Leena in Eastbourne who is looking after the Finnish webtext.

However these brief accounts of what I have been doing each day fail to mention my working life as a social gadfly. On Tuesday I was off-station for two hours enjoying a lunch and a coffee with Sandra Cracknell at The Ship...her lunch…my coffee. Sandra and I are regular users of the PC Hut so we spend several waking hours a day a few feet away from each other tapping away at our respective keyboards.

The day before I had spent two hours with Heidi. First at PCHut taking her through the online order processing procedures for the Good Yacht Guide. We have been getting more telephone orders from customers with PayPal accounts than expected and Heidi needed to know how to process them as she usually gets the job of talking to the customers to explain why we need their e-mail address. Afterwards we went to Boswell Café on Cinque Ports Street.

Heidi and I have become semi-estranged since the start of the year without either of us being quite sure why this was happening...or whether it was really what we wanted. So although this was a working session there were undercurrents of reconciliation. It was nice although we nearly managed a row about whether or not we had broken up...which is a first for me. Who’s fault it was. Yes. That’s as old as the hills. But whether you are an item or not. One would have thought that the two partries involved would know this wouldn’t you?

Anyway we talked about the Good Yacht Guide...and to my surprise Heidi would like to carry on with this although I am never far away from deciding to close down the website and put the business in cold storage. Then there was the opportunity that had come up with the lease on the PCHut. Toni wants to get shot of it as he can earn £40 000 a year from his programming and computer skills so finds twiddling his thumbs manning the shop as less and less productive.

The lease comes with an apartment over the PC Hut. Housing Benefit and Working Tax Credit just clears the rent of £570 per month. But the benefits...storage for my stuff and an apartment for me in Rye when I am visiting from Lund...can be better arranged some other way. We agreed that taking on the job of running an internet café or replacing the retail area with some other business…Connie Lindqvist’s Art Reproductions for instance…seemed to be a rather complicated way to get the somewhat limited benefits. We parted good friends. Watch this space.

The front men for the European War Party are gathering in Brussels this week against a backdrop of unrest in France just thirty five miles away from where I write this weblog here in Rye on the English Channel Coast. The reporting in the English press focusses on the new Contrat Première Embauche (CPE)…a new French job contract that allows employers to hire and fire at their leisure. But French unrest is never simple. The French tradition is for unrest to become riots and for riots to become revolutions…or at least force governments to flee the country.

The change of job law…actually an addition to seven hundred different pieces of job legislation…is being seized upon by the unions, students and the left as an ultra-capitalist outrage…an attempt to smuggle wicked globalist Anglo-Saxon attitudes into France by the back door. After a slow-burn for three weeks the revolt has exploded in the last ten days to campus sit-ins, mass demonstrations and some scattered battles with the riot police.

But at the heart of the French unrest is the fact that at each election in the past 25 years voters have clamoured for change, governments have bounced from left to right and plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Governments always get in. There have been one or two faint-hearted attempts at real reform but this has then been opposed by street protest…and street protest in France normally wins the day.

In England the middling classes are the swing voters that the political parties woo for their election victories. Not so in France. Thirty five miles away the middle classes are regarded by the politicians as the obstacle to change. There is a large block of the French electorate…a kind of lumpenbourgeoisie…which benefits from the present system and fears reform. This group includes public sector workers but also many white-collar private sector workers. They see no reason to weaken their job protection and welfare benefits for the sake of vague promises of benefits to come from more economic dynamism. They see such promises as trojan horses for a shift in privileges from Us…the ‘ins’…to Them (whoever they may be)…the ‘outs’.

Meanwhile the students at the heart of the protests straddle the economic and social divide. They understand and support the anti-globalist, anti-markets, anti-American, anti-EU agenda of the European Peace Parties…ideas which helped to win the EU referendum and deliver a resounding ‘non’ vote a year ago…but they are middle class kids: the sons and daughters of middle class parents. Simmering in the wings is a new round of riots in France’s poor multi-racial suburbs. So far there is little sign that anyone in power has much idea what to do…and even less indication that they actually care that much. Expect more rioting in France as the weather gets warmer.

Thames Water has drained seven reservoirs so private houses can be built on them. Last year the directors of Thames Water received bonuses of £ 700 000. This year they are imposing a hosepipe ban...70 000 days is the time a hosepipe ban would have to run to save as much water as Thames Water loses every day from leaks. A company spokesman explained in impeccable English that Thames Water would not have taken out these facilities if they were needed. What he failed to mention is why taking them out was necessary. Thames Water is not who they seem but a subsidiary of the Essen-based German giant RWE. And ever since a series of acquisitions in the United Kingdom a year or two ago the Board of RWE has been desperately searching around for as many ways as possible of generating cash to bolster its balance sheet and bail-out its failed German Nuclear Power programme.

The Ministry of War is giving we the people back some of the land it forgot to return when the Hitler War ended. It’s only 240 000 hectares but it’s a start. And they’re not actually giving it back. They are making it accessible. But let us be thankful for small mercies. From tiny acorns do mighty oak trees grow...click here for full details.

Here is a tale of misalignment. The setting is Sweden…thirty seven years ago…and my first job. In January 1969 Swedish clogs were standard issue on Stockholm building sites. By six in the morning Hallonbergen was bitterly cold and it took an hour for the industrial heaters to get the site warm. My job was to have everything ready by seven when the proper workers arrived. Then breakfast.

Clogs keep feet surprisingly warm but nonetheless I was overjoyed to be sent to Hammakullen for a couple of weeks. Gothenburg winter days vary between grey & wet and black & wet but the Gulf Stream ensures that the climate of Sweden's western capital feels positively tropical compared to its ice-bound Baltic rival in the east.

We were putting the final touches to an estate of factory-built apartments. The factory-built units with their triple-glazing had been supplied on a design & build contract from the company's Växjo factory in Småland several months before. We were tidying up by furnishing the gardens and playgrounds on the roof of an underground car-park. I was given the job of marking out where the lamp posts were to go.

Off I went with the architect's drawings under my arm...chalk, ruler and measuring tape at the ready. Later that day the proper workers came along with their Clipper concrete saws and Hilden hammer drills and busied themselves interpreting with my runic messages.

By clocking off time the next day the six plinths were ready for their lamp posts. We signed off on the job two weeks later. The platschef took his Alsatian dog and his work gang to another site and another employer and I never saw him again. As it turned out this was just as well. I went back to Stockholm to freeze until the first of May and gave the matter no more thought...until later that year when my boss came to my wedding and was persuaded to give an impromptu speech. To the amusement of the assembled company he chose to tell the tale of the Hammarkullen lamp posts. His story went like this.

The lamp posts arrived late and were erected an hour before final site inspection. Skanz the platschef was there; my boss drove from Stockholm to be there; his boss had come from Småland to be there; and assorted local dignitaries from Gothenburg’s planning and housing royalty were there. To my eternal gratitude nobody thought of asking me to be there. As fate would have it the worthy gentleman chose to assemble themselves for the signing off ceremony at the end of the row of six lamp posts.

With pen poised and our firm's final contract instalment of millions of kronor just seconds away, one of the dignitaries chanced to look up, frowned, deftly placed his hand between pen and paper, and pointed in the direction of lamp post number four. It was a half a metre out of line. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions it wasn't all bad. Lamp posts number one, two, three, five and six were in perfect alignment. Five out of six. But four was in the wrong place and this undoubtedly ruined the effect.

Swedes tell a good story and my boss was not one to miss the chance. But the story rings true. Skanz, we were told, went ballistic at this point in the proceedings and swore to do some rather nasty things to various parts of my anatomy. The planning dignitaries spent several minutes calming him down. They were so pleased at their success they signed off anyway on a promise from Scanz to sort it. It was unclear whether Scanz agreed to sort me or the misaligned lamp post.

Our real honeymoon was to be in Mamaia on the Romanian Black Sea Coast after the English wedding guests had gone home several days after the wedding. The wedding night was to be spent at Saltsjöbaden's Grand Hotel...the setting for a famous agreement between the Swedish Social Democratic Government and the Labour Unions. Unfortunately it was less than an hour's drive to Saltsjöbaden so there ws no early retirement. I spent the wedding evening explaining myself endlessly to each guest...one at a time.

My excuse got lamer and lamer with each telling. I couldn't get away for my mini-honeymoon soon enough...for one or two reasons. Here is the case for the defence for the very last time. I should have stretched a length of string like brickies do. Instead I diligently marked off the distance of each lamp post on the architect's plan view, scaled it up and laid it out in situ with my tape. Number Four must have been six millimetres more than the other five. Surprising that I didn't notice. Sod's Law no doubt...the canteen truck arriving with coffee and sandwiches between setting out three and four.

I chanced across my old boss Roger Everett at Västerås airport last year and was invited to his seventieth birthday. He told me the 'remedial work' was easy to spot from inside the garage. I don't think I'll bother to find out.

I am quite skilled at optimising my consumption of coal…the most personal warmness for the least burning. This would be easy if I spent 6pm to 8am on the boat each day. But I sometimes want to work at three o’clock in the morning…and some days I want to return to the boat at midday. Fuel disappears quickly or slowly depending on whether the bottom of the stove is open or closed…a rather crude regulatory device. Stoke up at 10pm and the stove is out by morning. But wake up at 3am and you can stoke up the fire and keep it going.

Today I did just that...although this meant clambering out onto the poop deck in the freezing cold in my pyjamas to tip the ashes from the ash pan into the river. This is the first time I have bothered to do this…so of course it was all I vain. In Llangolman the ashes from the wood-burning stove were recycled and used in the composting toilet so it felt rather extravagant to send them out to sea. But short of putting them in an envelope and posting them off to my daughter there was little else I could do.

One of the reasons I go to Jempsons Coffee House in the mornings is because a cup of coffee and a desk costs only 30p more than a daily newspaper which is offered free to customers. So on a bad day I might get through The Times, Mail, Mirror and Express by the time I leave for my one-hour library session. This week they all had the same photo of Prince Charles in the Royal Box watching the Cheltenham Gold Cup. And they were all agog at the presence in the box of Prince William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton. Here is the picture…that’s her on the far right.

Every bit as interesting to me was seeing Zac Goldsmith up there next to our future king. The only mention I saw of this interesting fact was on the back page of the Sunday Times. None of the other papers thought it worth mentioning.

My day started 'on message' with a swim and a shower at Rye Sports Centre and I was still 'on plan' by mid-morning which meant doing some shopping at Budgens when they opened at ten and then putting two 25kgs sacks of coal on the boat when Sea Cruisers opened for two hours at eleven. But then I got a text message from Francoise de Naillat to let me know she was back from her travels and would love to see me. So much for my planned quiet afternoon on the boat reading The Sunday Times from cover to cover, section to section, glossy magazine to celebrity chatter. A rare treat.

I hadn’t seen Francoise for three weeks and in that time she had spent a week in New York, sold her house in Rye, bought another in St Leonard’s, changed her mind, backed out and bought another one across town...and arranged the delivery of a new kiln for her glass-making. I made myself useful unpacking the kiln and was rewarded with lunch. A friend of Francoise's daughter is doing her medical training at St. George’s Hospital in London. Their Professor of Cancer Angus Dalgleish…a world expert on immunology…was in the papers commenting on the Parexel Disaster mentioned in my Friday weblog.

Dalgleish reckoned that the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should have consulted a specialist before approving the study. ‘I can’t understand it. They are normally super-cautious. I would have told the people doing this trial not to do it because the dangers were so great,’ he said. Apparently the data that should have raised the alarm were presented at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology last May. An engineered antibody developed by a team led at America’s National Cancer Institute and using the same pathway as TGN 1412 had produced severe side effects in about half of a group of patients dying of cancer.

Francoise has taken to calling me Ingrid’s ex-husband since I introduced her in my Monday 16th January weblog as having once run a restaurant in Étaple with her ex-husband Anton. Since Ingrid is now Dr Ingrid Lundell and one of Sweden’s leading microbiologists I have decided that I rather like it.

Another typical day but devoted to web logging. Three were posted…equalling my record. A slight aberration at the end of the day when I went across to The Ship to have a pint of Guinness with Tony Payne…and enjoy an intelligent conversation about life the universe and women. Back at the boat I finished Wycliffe and The Last Rites by W.J.Burley…and went to sleep happy after getting through a bottle of Valencia…£ 3.29 for eleven and a half percent.

The weather is back to normal after eight unusually mild winters. The 30-year average for March is 4.7°C. This year it is presently running at 2.4°C. The 8-year average from 1998 to 2005 was 6.1°C. So it is cold…but not unreasonably so…even though the English countryside seems frozen at the moment.

Along the lanes the glossy yellow stars of lesser celandines should be sparkling in the ditches holding their faces up to the sun but there is no sign of them. In the hedges one would have expected to see the first delicate white flowers of cherry plum with a sprinkling of green leaves on the twigs around them. But with the exception of a cherry tree by the side of the main Rye to Winchelsea road in the grounds of a private house next to the River Haven Hotel there is no sign of cherry blossom. As for the pure white blackthorn flowers the first of those should be out by the end of March but there seems little hope of that. A few sweet violets with their subtle fragrance were out before the recent cold spell struck but they have faded away.

Apparently primroses came out last month in Devon and Cornwall but I saw no sign of them in Wales despite unseasonably warm weather throughout my two and a half month stay. Nor is there any sign of them even now here in the Garden Of England. Normally I would have expected them to be out several weeks ago...on the shortcut across The Ridge to Conquest Hospital and St Leonard’s. In milder springs the first white pink-tinged blossoms of the wood anemone would have been out too. Their fern-like leaves have already pushed up through the woodland floor but like the first shoots of bluebells dotted around them they have stopped growing.

Warmer days and downfalls of rain are expected next weekend and if they come the flowers and trees will quickly respond. In a fortnight we may already have forgotten that we had a chilly start to the spring this year…and the papers will be launching yet more stories about global warming. Global warming is the theory that increased levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere because of the greenhouse effect.

Imagine the composition of the earth’s atmosphere as a 100 yard football field. Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen so starting from the goal line this will get you to the seventy-eight yard line. Nearly all of what is left is oxygen which takes you to the ninety-nine yard line. Most of what remains after that is the inert gas argon which brings you to within three and a half inches of the goal line. That’s pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. How much of the remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That’s how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred yard football field. And do you know how much it has increased on our football field in the last 50 years? Three eighths of an inch…less than the thickness of a pencil.

Carbon dioxide is used by plants to photosynthesise. The plants take in the gas via small openings on the surface of their leaves called stomata that can open and close in response to atmospheric conditions and the plant needs. When the stomata are open some water is lost in a process called plant transpiration…plants sweat. Laboratory experiments have shown plants become more efficient in the presence of greater levels of carbon dioxide so the stomata do not open as often or for as long. More carbon dioxide means less transpiration which means more water stays in the soil.

It seems to be a well-known fact that the flow of many rivers around the world is increasing even though rainfall has changed very little in the last few decades. Aha…you have got there before me. Scientists and propagandists for global warming have their pseudo-scientific link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising sea levels. More water in the soil means more runs off into rivers which explains the increase in river flow and must lead in the fullness of time…and with the right parameters in the computer models…to the inundation of low-lying cities like New Orleans within all our lifetimes.

But sea levels are not rising…the last time I looked at the data a year or so ago there was no discernible shift over the past few decades. Of course sea levels move around. There was a disaster in Queensland over the weekend with sea levels changing by up to twelve feet for instance. And have you heard of tides? My sea level goes up and down like a yo-yo twice a day and the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean swirl around like water in a cooking basin. And do you remember in the days before the invention of global warning all the concern about the increasing run-off all over the world as hills were stripped of their trees and intensive agriculture decimated the natural vegetation cover. Increased run-off? Of course. But caused by plants getting fitter and sweating less in their extra fraction of an inch of carbon dioxide. Pull the other one. What complete and utter baloney.

It was another bitterly cold day and the cold weather is set to last through the weekend. The wind went back round to east on Wednesday night. In its first Greenhouse Gas Bulletin the United Nations World Meteorology Organisation is warning that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached record highs and are still climbing. Carbon dioxide was half a percent higher in 2004 than in 2003. But the agency seemed to be concerned about methane which has risen dramatically over the past two centuries. But for me this was just another typical day.

Up with the sun before seven. To town at eight to warm up in Jempson’s Coffee House. To Rye Public Library at 0930 for an hour of free computer time and internet access. Then to PC Hut for the rest of the working day. Back to the boat by six. Light the fire. Prepare my evening meal. Read by candlelight. Bed at 2200. The only deviation from the norm was fire-lighting by kindling from Rye DIY for £2.15. Aah…the joy of smoke-free fire-lighting…and a non-carcinogenic environment from six to half past six each evening. The wooden window frames I normally saw and chop up seem to be impregnated with something nasty…quite apart from the lead-based white paint sending me ga-ga.

We live in a Golden Age so do not mock my typical day. During the 1990s I worked closely with David Neame. A year ago David was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Every year thirty thousand men in Britain develop the illness and a third of them die. David is very thin and gaunt and no longer comes into Rye. This week he started on yet another round of chemotherapy. The doctors give him three years to live. What he would not give for my typical day!

It is hard to know what to think about cancer and the billions of pounds poured into cancer research. The epidemiology studies seem a complete waste of time and money. How many times can you run statistics through a computer and write about the results? Commercial research by the big drug companies is skewed because of the need to end up with a pill or an injection. There is also the worrying thought that chemotherapy and radiotherapy may be implanting more tumours than they cure. But alternative medicine doesn’t seem to work. So what do you do when you are told you have cancer? And what advice do you give when someone near and dear to you gets cancer?

Recent research at the University of California has found that chillies contain the substance capsaicin which triggers human prostate cancer cells to undergo programmed cell death in culture as well as slowing the development of prostate tumours formed by those human cell lines grown in mouse models. This offers up the hope that capsaicin can be used in drugs targeting prostate cancers. But this sort of announcement from the Cancer Business hits the newspapers several times a month. How should we react? Chris Hiley, head of policy and research at Britain’s Prostate Cancer Charity for instance while welcoming the report remarked that the high intake of chillies has been linked with stomach cancers in the populations of India and Mexico. There go the epidemiologists again.

New chemicals discovered on the laboratory bench have around a 1 in 10000 chance of making it onto the pharmacy shelves…and only then at a cost of well over half a billion pounds. Commercial clinical development is in three stages once it reaches beyond mice and monkeys to people. In Phase One the company developing the drug tries the new product on a dozen or so healthy volunteers. This stage is a million pound gamble and 90% fail to make it through to Phase Two where hundreds of human guinea pigs are brought in for testing. Failure rates are relatively low in Phase Two with three out of four new drugs making it through to the final phase. But Phase Two does not come cheap…allow ten million pounds. And so to the distribution testing phase and more failed products. Industry in general expects only one in fifty product ideas to make it through R & D to market. Pretty lousy odds...but not bad compared with the Drug Companies.

This week reports have been dribbling in about a drug called Parexel which has gone disastrously wrong during Phase One testing. Monoclonal antibodies (MCABs) were discovered at Cambridge University in the 1970s and won Nobel prizes in 1984 for César Milstein and George Köhler. MCABs play merry hell with the immune system. So the theory was that they could cure leukaemia…once ‘we’ learned how to control them.

So in 2000 a group of specialist immunobiologists from the University of Würzburg set up a company called TeGenero to bring the Super MAB drug TGN 1412 to market. They raised six million pounds of venture capital in 2002 from the American investment bank Bear Stearns and from HBM Bioventures founded by Henri Meier, a former Finance Director at Roche Holdings. Everything looked hunky-dory…until this week. Completely unexpectedly the immune systems of the dozen Phase One volunteers started to go crazy. They are not expected to live. Suddenly getting £2000 to take part in the clinical studies no longer seems such a good deal.

I was on call at PC Hut all day on Job 631. There was a slight hiccup in mid-afternoon when the client discovered two hundred lost English words in her bottom drawer. But otherwise everything went smoothly and I will be invoicing the 25% upfront part of our fee on Monday morning once we know whether or not we are doing the Russian website.

On 15th September 2004 I set myself the task of doing an Eric Blair by living at the bottom of the social heap for twelve months. Out of the experience will come the best-selling Diary of A Scrounger…I have a well-thumbed copy of George Orwell’s Down & Out in Paris & London as my style guide…that and Thoreau’s Walden. I am now wondering how reliable my account will be when it is published as things are deteriorating fast judging by a recently published report from the House of Commons Select Committee on Work & Pensions.

While on Job Seeker Allowance I had to travel to St. Leonard’s-on-Sea every fort