By the end of the day I was aching all over after a second Sunday morning at the swimming pool. I managed a four length starter and then four two length sets...twelve lengths in all. It can only get better. I was already aching when I got up from the day before when I had done my most extravagant Lidls run yet...returning on the train with £20 of loot...including a £2.75 of 13% French red wine which seems to have disappeared inside me on Saturday night.

Yesterday’s Ashford trip was a big disappointment as Starbucks was closed until All Fools Day for a makeover. Fortunately there is a large Ottakar in Ashford with a nice place to sit and relax over a cup of coffee so I spent some time there after buying Heidi a copy of Chocolat by Joanna Harris for her birthday.

Walking into town it was good to feel the breeze on my face coming off the River Brede as this meant the wind had gone round to the South-West bringing with it some rain but also much warmer weather. The daffodils agreed with me and spent the weekend bursting into bloom all over Rye. I did not want to stay on the spot for too long following Kirk Sale’s decision to keep away from the September Conference so I moved in quickly with some diversionary tactics...the Dunkirk Strategy...and declared the defeat to be a great victory. Here is what I had to say.

Any focus on the Real Communities Charter should be on a European basis so the loss of Kirk and the Yank dimension is a blessing in disguise. Don't ask Zac to give the keynote speech. Leave him where he is. If you ask more of him he will smell a rat, think he is backing a loser and pull out of the Thursday event. As Any Real Questions is our fallback position this would be bad news. If we can't get the conference to go we must still make sure that (1) the Any Real Questions Public Meeting takes place; (2) we own the format and (3) we produce a TV quality programme video tape of the meeting for subsequent marketing to TV channels world wide and/or for setting up our own Fourth World Channel. We might need to tweak the format a little to distinguish it from the BBC programmes.

What is needed now is not to ask the first person you pick up on the street to think of a celebrity to give a keynote speech but to work strategically to put together a European coalition with the French and the Germans and the Scandinavians who are much much better organised locally in terms of the Real Communities Charter concerns than the Brits...and I suspect the Italians and the Spanish and the East Europeans can teach us a thing or three too. We can take the view that all our common European concerns centre on the Brussels and NATO agendas...but not the way the Tory Right Wing ranters and the UK Independent Party view it...it is much more insidious and widespread than this.

If anybody had bothered to listen to Tony Pinschof at radcon 1...the only one there with any real working experience of Brussels bureaucrats...he repeatedly tried to get a hearing for his point that national bureaucrats...in our case Whitehall...and the multinationals corporations hide behind and blame and use the European Union as they push through their own global and national agendas. We must take care to attack the right targets instead of being spun off into the weeds...as is happening at the moment.

Personally I would give Anton Pinschof the keynote speech in place of Kirk...if he would agree to do it...and get him to focus on the dynamics of the Local-National-Global-Euro dimensions in Organic Farming and Good Food distribution. Just having a keynote speech available (and delivered?) in English French and German will send out very positive messages about the agenda of the European Peace Parties as we begin thinking strategically about how to tackle the European War Party and set up of local fronts throughout Europe to meet the continents real concerns (good food good governance etc) village by village, town by town.

I spent a hundred minutes on the phone with my daughter in the evening which must be my longest ever phone call to her. And it was just a social chat...although she sneaked in at the end that she thought it was seriously dumb of me to smash her radio aerial...and she wanted £40 to get it replaced. She also reckons I am wasting my time trying to wheedle out the facts behind global warming. I first did some work on this at the end of 2004 with a view to giving John Papworth a review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.

However Crichton’s line about the falsification of the environmentalists’ case...and the convincing evidence he brought to bear in support of his view...meant that I needed to do more delving before publishing a controversial review. I also hoped that a colleague would read State of Fear and give me some moral support but that has not yet happened. Anyway to cut a long story short I am now convinced that my work got lost in one of my dongle and computer collapses so I have been recreating everything from an old draft in hard copy and some scribbled notes.

Glad tidings from Sweden over the weekend. The Spanish translation had been lurking in the bowels of Alan’s in-tray all week. It was a little puzzling receiving an invoice before receiving the finished job. So wearing my Project Manager’s hat I can claim three down...Danish, Finnish and Spanish - and four including the English...and just the Norwegian and the Russian to come through this week. It will be interesting to see how profitable it will all turn out.