My taxi came to 26 High Street in Purton at 0930 and whisked me away to Swindon Bus Station where I hitched a ride on the ten o‘clock London coach. I was booked on the 1310 and this trick saved me a £2 rebooking fee. We spent the first hour of the trip travelling on the windey ways of Wiltshire and Berkshire as the coach driver tried to avoid a snarl-up on the M4 motorway. The taxi driver who had warned me of the problem told me there had been two long stoppages on the motorway the previous week…one caused by a suicide jumping from a bridge over the motorway.

Fairtrade Fortnight started today. On the face of it this fair trade idea is quite a success story. A typical Fairtrade product is Divine chocolate made by the Kuapa Kokoo co-operative in Abobiri in Ghana. Cocoa bean farmers there set up a firm to market the chocolate in Britain with the help of a £400 000 loan guaranteed by the British government. The price paid to them means money is also being invested in schools and clean water supplies in their community. In 2005 the Ghanaian company earned more than £7 million…a 35 percent increase in one year. The Department for International Development has given more than a million pounds to the Fairtrade Foundation to help it promote and extend the Fairtrade brand, which is now on more than 1500 products on sale in Britain and sold almost two hundred million pounds of product last year.

However to put some perspective on Fairtrade’s figures let’s look at the money and killingry game…they are intimately related. The British have this quaint and ominous concept of ‘bank holidays’ while the rest of Europe has festivals for its saints. But this slippery doubletalk now extends to the idea of a ‘bank reporting season’…and there is no music by Vivaldi to accompany it. The season ended today with HSBC announcing an 11% increase of profits to £11 900 million pounds. HSBC’s net operating income was £57 600 million against operating expenses of £ 29 500 million. Shareholders were delighted as their dividends were up 11% to 73 cents paid out of earnings per share of $1.36. Shares on the London Stock Exchange rose 14½p to 989½p in response.

To date the war in Iraq has cost the British taxpayer £4 000 million and the cost is increasing at a hundred million pounds per month so it is not hard to see how a tithe of ten percent on the profits of just one of the UK high-street banks is sufficient to keep the killing going for as long as there is money in it for bank shareholders and the killingry industry on the receiving end of the commercial banks’ government-maintained monopoly on money creation.

Of course it is true that only a fifth of HSBC’s business is UK business. But HSBC is only one of the banks. Here are the annual profits from the rest of the gang in millions of pounds: Royal Bank of Scotland 7900; Barclays 5300; Halifax Bank of Scotland 4800; Lloyds 3800; Standard Chartered 1500; Alliance 508; Northern Rock 504; Bradford & Bingley 296. That’s probably about 80% of the banking profits from this season’s crop of annual bank company reports.

I got into London's Victoria Coach Station at 1215 and took a stroll across the city in the sunlight before catching the 13.22 train from Charing Cross to Sevenoaks. I had expected to get away after half an hour, but the meeting with my solicitor Brian Walker lasted from 3pm to 5pm. In part this was because he had received a reply from Mr Roud that he wanted to respond to. In part it was because Ilona Price had phoned him up on Friday to inform him that she was not willing to be a trustee of the David Hutchings Trust. He thought the call itself was strange…and much of the conversation.

Walker & Walker will now be sending letters to Vance Harris seeking a formal handover of Vemara and artwork from the executor; and to Mr Roud to agree a set of numbers to haggle over. Meanwhile I am to write to Provident…Connie’s Accident Compensation Insurer…to get the case moving again after three years in a drawer.

Bolivia is different from other countries in South America in that its population of six million is 90% indigenous Indian. It was ten years ago that my daughter met Evo Morales in Cochabamba. At the time Evo was the boss of CEDIB…something in Spanish to do with the Central (or Coca Growers) Educational Development for Indigenous Bolivians. Her memory was of a man who talked slowly and talked straight…very much in the North American Indian style. My daughter tells me that the best history of South America is written by Eduardo Galliano.

One notable success for Evo Morales is reported in the latest issue of Zac Goldsmith’s Ecologist. It concerns not coca but water. Last month saw the end of one of the greatest water battles in history. The peoples of Bolivia successfully reclaimed ownership of their water from the mighty Bechtel Corporation. In 1999 Bechtel made an arrangement with the Bolivian government to take ownership of the water supply and charge citizens for its use. Within weeks of the takeover Bechtel raised water rates by fifty percent and made it illegal to gather rainwater without a permit.

The ensuing citizen revolt forced Bechtel out of the country. Bechtel then sued Bolivia for $50 million for ‘profit losses’. After four years of legal disputes and public pressure the case was dropped. ‘This is the first time a major corporation like Bechtel has had to back down from a major trade case as the result of global citizen pressure,’ said Jim Schultz, executive director of The Democracy Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia.