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.