High tide today was at midday and midnight, the sun and the moon rose at quarter to seven and set between half past seven and eight in the evening. We had moderate southwest winds, good visibility and moderate seas...it has been blowing hard for several days or they would have been calm. Here in Rye we had three hours of sunshine, a quarter of an inch of rain and an average temperature during the day of 55 Fahrenheit. Beijing, Bogota, Boston and Christchurch in New Zealand had much the same temperature. Interesting hot spots around the globe were Mexico City at 72F, Sydney at 75F, Nairobi at 77F and New Delhi at 81F. The pound was priced at $1.75 and €1.45. Welcome to the thinking man's wire service...Cliff's Edge Signalling Service.

It is not easy being poor. Her Majesty's Government has a policy to dock the benefits of lone parents if they fail to attend a Work Focussed Interview. An internal government report that looked into the impact of these sanctions on the poor victims found that this policy had two principal consequences. Firstly sanctions were often not imposed. And secondly when they were imposed the lone parents either didn't notice or simply believed that their benefit had been reassessed.

Now just think of all the thought, the meetings, the memos, the manpower, the argument, the worry that will have gone into that policy. Imagine the paperwork sent out to all frontline staff. Think of all the meetings missed and the warnings issued before somebody loses a tenner. And in reality it makes not a blind bit of difference.

It is no surprise that frontline staff...being human...do not like docking benefits. But it is a little surprising that the victims don't notice. I don't believe it. I think they do notice but decide it is too much of a hassle to think about it. When your money arrives in the wall you have other things to think about. The fact that there is only £156.20 instead of the £168.45 you were expecting is low on your list of priorities.

Instead all your energy is needed for paying the phone bill, filling the fridge and the larder, buying Laura the designer label shoes she needs to keep up with her friends at school, finding money for the gas meter and for TV licence stamps at the post office and putting petrol in the car. The docked benefit would have given you enough small change to treat yourself to something nice. But not this week. I think people notice...and I think they are beginning to get angry.

This week The Independent has been putting out supplements on Global Warming. Today it was the turn of its readers. There were two things that struck me. Firstly nearly all the letters, while well-meaning and sensible to the writer, were based on much ignorance. Secondly solutions to global warming fell into three categories: world government must do this, our government must do that and each of us must do our bit and turn off the lights.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was on BBC Radio Four the other day being quizzed about Global Warming and he took much the same tack…although it was good to see him insisting that the Anglican Church had a moral duty to address the problem instead of contemplating its collective navel by going on and on and on about women priests and homosexual curates. But Rowan Williams is missing an opportunity to make Her Majesty’s Church relevant again.

Neither the United Nations, nor David Cameron’s Conservatives nor The Man in the Street can solve the problem of Global Warming. It can only be addressed from outside the mindset…and the institutional structure…that created the problem in the first place. District Councils, County Councils, the Westminster Parliament, The City, Whitehall, Brussels, the World Bank, IMF and WTO, multinational companies…none of these can solve the problem.

But in sharp contrast to every other seat of power in the land Rowan Williams is blessed with an institutional structure that can solve the problem. In doing so, the English Church can act as a beacon for the rest of the world. Villages and urban parishes are capable of cleaning up their own local acts in a way governments can’t.

Parishes can reclaim the power to act on Global Warming within their own boundaries and in collaboration with their neighbours. The Anglican Church could lead the charge. The key to success is not global treaties or legislation or exhortation but working together in local communities across the land and across the world…village by village and parish by parish.

In 1989 a Boeing 747 arriving at Heathrow from Brisbane with 255 passengers almost landed on the A4 west of London after the pilot mistook it for the runway. Ryanair have managed to go one better. But then they have pioneered the art of flying passengers to far-flung airfields and telling them they had arrived in one of Europe's loveliest cities.

Yesterday Flight 9884 from Liverpool to Derry landed at a disused army airfield in Ballykelly five miles away. Oops! Steps had to be transported 5 miles by road from Derry to Shackleton Barracks to get the passengers off the jet. How they got the jet off the runway has yet to be explained. Relatives and friends waiting at Derry to pick up passengers were somewhat dismayed when a notice went up telling them that Flight 9884 had been indefinitely delayed. But then Ryanair changed the sign to read: Passengers Arriving By Surface...at which point everybody burst out laughing.