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 fortnight to sign on. In the beginning I got my train fare reimbursed. But halfway through my term of vagrancy this was stopped…a de facto pay cut of five percent. But this it seems is nothing compared to the welfare recipients in Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria who have to make a 90-mile round trip to Carlisle every two weeks to collect their entitlement of £56 per week.

However the report’s most damning condemnation was reserved for outsourcing of telephone answering to call centres. Here are two of the harrowing tales from the report’s small print. A woman went to a Jobcentre to make a claim for Job Seekers Allowance and was told to apply by telephone. She returned some days later to complain that she could not get through but was turned away again and told to ‘keep on trying’. She did.

After ten days she ran out of money and went back to the Jobcentre cap-in-hand and at her wit’s end to beg for a Crisis Loan to keep her going until she had spoken to the Jobcentre. ‘No problem, Madam. You can make your application at the phones in the corner!’ Franz Kafka was born before his time. Another woman whose husband had left her and their two children tried for a week to get through to a Call Centre to make a claim for income support. When her money had run out she went ‘stressed and anxious’ to the Citizens Advice Bureau for help. Their advisers ain’t seen nothing yet.

This depressing report from the House of Communities got me thinking about poor Lord Browne of Madingly of British Petroleum…formerly known to its fellow seven sisters as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. His pay was only £3.3 million in 2005…down £ 453 000 from 2004 because of disasters like the Texas City Refinery Explosion and the near sinking of the Thunder Horse Oil Platform. It’s enough to make him join Goldman Sachs who have just reported the highest quarterly revenue and profit figures ever for a Wall Street Bank…equivalent to ten billion dollars of income a year…a fifth of it from insider trading - or equities trading as they like to call it on Threadneedle Street.

A study by the Danish UNICEF Committee showed that in 1979 a net sum of $4 billion flowed from the rich North to the South. That flow was reversed in 1983 when the developing world sent $6 billion to the industrialised North. Since then the amount has risen to £30 billion a year. But if the transfer of resources due to falling raw material prices throughout the 1980s is taken into account the transfer of capital from the under-developed countries to the over-developed countries is closer to $60 billion a year…and that is before counting capital flight and black money.

This study by Hans Rasmussen pointed out that since the early 1980s there has been a wealth transfer from the capital-starved Third World primarily into financing of deficits in the United States and to a lesser degree Britain. Rasmussen estimated that during the 1980s the developing sector transferred a total of $400 billion into the United States alone. This allowed the Reagan administration to finance the largest peacetime deficits in world history whilst claming credit for the world’s longest peacetime recovery. Put another way the Third World defeated Communism and destroyed The Evil Empire. Even Karl Marx would have been struck by the irony.

A good friend of Francoise de Naillat has two grown-up children. Her daughter spent her formative years at Benenden School just across the county line from us here in Rye and is now living in London and training as a doctor. Her son meanwhile is doing entrepreneurial things with property development all over Europe. But before setting out on his own he worked as a whiz-kid in the City of London. He was recommended for his job as a high-flyer by his university tutor Patrick Minford.

Patrick Minford was in the news last week after recommending a simpler tax system. He calculated that anyone on £30 000 a year pays half their salary in tax. For every £1000 earned £314 goes on Income Tax and National Insurance contributions and £123 on indirect taxes like value added tax and duties on fuel & alcohol. Margrit Kennedy reckons it’s worse than this because prices include a Usury Surcharge. This could be eliminated if money were not issued as debt. The higher the capital element in a product’s cost the higher the usury in the price.

Christopher Strangeways is standing as a candidate for the Rye Town Council. Opposing him for the only place up for grabs this year is Jessica Neame, the 24-year old Mayoress of Rye. It should be no-contest…but it’ll be close. Christopher runs the Rother Environmental Group and was responsible for getting Rye Farmer’s Market set up. Next year will be the big push though when all sixteen places on Rye Town Council come up. Plotting has begun.

A few weeks ago I received a computer generated demand threatening to knee-cap me if I didn’t cough up £142. The alledged reason was money owing to British Telecommunications by William Franklin & Sons Limited. As the demand had been sent to the company’s registered address at Landgate Chambers in Rye…a neat trick this…I dealt with it straight away. But I had a problem. The last time ME & BT were in business was two years ago and the only contact since then was six months after I closed down my Rye office when I asked BT to make sure they had switched off all the phones as I had been told that a BT answering machine was accepting calls on the old numbers.

So I wrote to BT…not to Sue, Grabbit & Run…explained all this and settled down for a twelve month siege. Imagine my amazement when today I received a letter letting me know the debt was cancelled and the rottweilers chained. I will frame the letter…up on the wall in my next office. But after the euphoria faded I wondered whether my version of events was actually correct…which got me thinking of Tony Blair...not something I do too often.

I used to believe that at the moment of saying anything our Prime Minister thought what he said was true. But my favourite journalist Matthew Parris has moved a step ahead of me. He now believes that Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is ‘an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged.’ It gets worse - Matthew Parris again. ‘I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he ever believes what he says he is delusioned. To the extent that he does not he is an actor whose first invention - himself - has been his only interesting role.’ Tony Blair’s minders try to avoid encounters with searching interviewers…preferring the photo opportunities… but that wily old Yorkshireman Michael Parkinson got him.

Here is Blair’s God exchange about sending our boys to death in Iraq: ‘That decision had to be taken and has to be lived with and in the end there is a judgement that well I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other people’…’by other people if you believe in God its made by God as well and that judgement in the end has to be you know you have to do the right thing according to your conscience.’ God help us all! I think I’ll send Our Great Leader a copy of Shaw’s St Joan and suggest he read the Grand Inquisitor’s speech.

I got to know Dr Aidan Rankin quite well a few years back when he was lecturing on Government at the London School of Economics. I reviewed favourably his book on political correctness and worked with him on the committee of the London Academic Inn for a few years. One of my many unnoticed little internet pieces is a questionnaire on political correctness on the cesc website. The Spectator should have offered Aidan and I a pot of gold for the rights to publish it but now they have lost their chance and it will go out to the world hidden away in the corner of an obscure little thousand word a day weblog by the unknown political commentator William Shepherd.

My PC Questionnaire is based on a hundred one-liners in Aidan’s Politics of The Forked Tongue and asks the reader to rate them. After spending a few days putting the thing together I decided I was an expert on the subject. Hence my curiosity when the tabloids recycled the Baa Baa Black Sheep story last week. They all had the story...the Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Mirror and the Times. It was the same story as twenty years ago. It was wrong then...and I suspected it was wrong now. So I checked it out. I was right. It was humbug...but it made a good story, the gist of it being that a politically correct administrator had commanded the removal of all racist references from Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Our intrepid Fourth Estate clearly never stepped outside the pub. Had they gone to the bother of talking to the teachers at the centre of this PC outbreak they might have come away with a different point of view because it turns out that we are talking about an Action Rhyme. To turn a nursery rhyme into an action rhyme the children replace the word black with a variety of other descriptive words dancing around the room singing about happy sheep and sad sheep, bouncing, hopping and jumping sheep...as well as black, white, blue and even pink sheep. Children love this sort of wordplay which encourages them to extend their vocabulary and enjoy words.

The wind went round to the west during the night so it was much warmer. Often this means rain but not today. A beautiful day. Blue sky. Sun shining. I returned to the boat in early afternoon by way of Rye Harbour along the old tramway through fields of sheep and past Castle Waters. Today there were only ducks and swans on display...normally there are rather more exotic species. I picked a few daffodils and put them in a vase on my cabin table. Next time I walk to Castle Waters I expect it to be a blaze of colour.

Ryesingers practice in the evening. After last week’s rehearsal I was a little disappointed as the pieces that Lesley Brownbill had chosen for our Mozart Magic Concert on 17th June seemed rather lightweight. Flanders & Swann’s Ill Wind is fine in its place but I prefer the Mozart Requiem and his Magic Flute. So today was good news as we spent the two-hour rehearsal note-bashing Lachrymosa…and Dies Irae.