I was up with the light just before seven and walked into Rye to enjoy a cup of coffee at Jempsons Coffee House before getting down to the business of the day. My Working Tax Credit was in the Nationwide so at nine o'clock I got them to cut a £50 cheque for the Good Yacht Guide printing account and then moved £160 across to my business account so I could transfer £100 over the internet to my daughter and book my Swindon coach tickets with National Express over the phone.

The official academic theory of money has this theoretical construct of the velocity of money. The more you get into it the sillier the idea becomes but superficially it has meaning. I know of nobody with a higher money velocity than myself. Any money coming into any of my accounts is dispatched within hours. The same economic formula includes another strange theoretical construct...price. Quite apart from the old adage about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing the idea of price itself is very woolly. Despite this 'price' is central to the theory of markets...and of capitalist propaganda about them. Economics make claims to be scientific so it is not enough to know what a term in an equation means...you must be able to define it as well. The prices of products and services can be likened to the electron in modern physics...a cloud of probabilities. Prices are probabilities. There may also be an economic equivalent of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle along the lines that you can't simultaneously know the price of a good and the time it was delivered...price and delivery being the two things ordinary people want to know about a purchase.

Good news when I went to collect my post. A letter went off yesterday from Walker & Walker to Mr and Mrs Roud that included a demand to switch Vemara's electricity back on and mentioned the £25 per day it was costing this happily married couple as long as they failed to do so. Another piece of good news was that Jim Hollands the editor and publisher of Rye's Own had published my long article on Local Power without any amendments or alterations. I was pleased to see that he had used my graphic of Rye and her surrounding parishes. I had laboured long and hard over this after discovering that no such map existed anywhere in the county.

Betty Sayer is coming up to her fiftieth wedding anniversary next year. Those of us who have been through several marriages and/or long partnerships behold such couples with awe and admiration. How we wish that we had managed to last this long too. Betty was one of Connie's oldest friends...friends for the longest time...so I devoted a good twenty minutes to filling her in on everything going on around Connie's Estate and the David Hutchings and Connie Lindqvist Trusts. Betty is one of the more effective ways of feeding facts rather than incorrect hearsay and malicious gossip into the local rumour mills...something I feel the need to do to counteract some of the slanderous assertions currently doing the rounds. Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel called Main Street. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.

One urgent item on my agenda was to bring the Good Yacht Guide accounts up to date. I owed Heidi money for looking after this microbusiness while I was away in Wales. I broke the back of the task over egg and chips at Strand Cafe and then took myself off round the corner along Cyprus Place to PC Hut to draw up a clean typed copy.

My normal weekly purchase at Rye Market is a bag of apples and a bag of oranges. The apples are parachuted in from all over the world...New Zealand, South Africa and so on...while the apples in our local orchards are left to rot on the ground. The oranges always look nice but are of variable quality...and it is difficult to tell until you try one. Quantities vary for no rational reason...like the weather or the season...from about half a dozen to a dozen for a pound of money. This week both apples and oranges were eight for a quid.

I was a little flattered to receive a call from Pippa Gausden while I was buying my fruit in the market. We had exchanged a few words and phone numbers when I was a little the worse for wear at our Iolanthe Party on Saturday. It turned out to be her birthday so it would have been ungracious to do anything other than accept her suggestion that we took ourselves out to Camber Sands for a long walk in a brisk cold breeze. We survived and had a coffee in The Ship afterwards. Then back to Biddenden and a birthday dinner organised by her children for her. And back to the boat for me.

Clive Ogden distributed assorted party leftovers in my direction on Tuesday evening. I had drunk most of them by today but still had the chives awaiting a larder full of eggs...scrambled eggs with chives being one of my favourite light bachelor dishes. Gilbert & Sullivan was still buzzing around in my head...it takes six weeks for this to disappear...as I lit the coal and gas stoves...for different reasons. Thursday is bellringer practice evening in Rye so the strains of the bells of St Mary's atop The Citadel wafted over my cabin roof and mixed somewhat inharmoniously with Young Stephon is the kind of rogue...etc. Continued reading The Geographers Library until bedtime at ten.