William Shepherd

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.