Jane Jacobs died last week a few days short of her ninetieth birthday. She was the subject of one of my first ever published pieces in Fourth World Review…a review of the three best books in America in 1986. In her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations I found a kindred spirit…and somebody talking seriously about city regions replete with their own city currencies. For Jane Jacobs cities were best understood as organic systems…complex, evolving live beings…that take precedence over nations, set moral codes, and die when they stagnate. Jane Jacobs was also one of the first career dissidents to realise and resent the power of the military-industrial complex in the Cold War years.

Her last book Dark Age Ahead was published in 2004. She foresees the collapse of American culture as fecklessness weakens social bonds and dissolves public responsibility and the collective memory of history. Had she been born in 1936 instead of 1916 she might well have gone further and been one of the first to realise that the power of the military-industrial complex was waning after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the politico-legal-media complex (PLM). I had occasion to discuss this in an exchange of e-mails with Tom Greco earlier this week about my intention to go public with my misgivings about the Global Warming bandwagon. The exchange went like this.

Tom Greco had written in response to my e-mail on Global Warming that it seemed to him there were far better uses for 'my considerable talents' (Hmm!). ‘Why not focus on what we can do something about rather than idle debates about matters that may or may not eventuate? Time will tell about that.’ I begun my reply by writing that I though we might be at cross-purposes on this. This is how I continued.

I have absolutely no intention of getting involved in the Global Warming Issue and will not be taking sides as an activist for or against... if this is what you fear. But I have some deep generic concerns about where this whole Global Warming issue has come from and it is these that I will be highlighting once a week in my Sunday weblogs over the next few weeks...in the second volume of my three volumes in 2006. Let me try to give some sort of overarching paradigm for this.

The military-industrial complex is not the primary driver of society. It all changed when the Berlin Wall came down. For the past two decades we have been under the control of an entirely new complex...the politico-legal-media complex (PLM)...which is far more powerful and far more pervasive and is dedicated to promoting fear under the guise of promoting security.

Western nations are actually really safe and secure by any objective standards yet people are being made to feel insecure by the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population; lawyers need dangers to litigate and make money; the media need scare stories to capture an audience and so on. These three estates are where power is being exercised...the tail that is wagging the dog...and the place where much funding is going...to such an extent that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless.

And then there's academia. Global Warming facts are coming out of the ivory towers’ computer models…and there is no longer any disinterested Public Science Forum to verify the data and adjudicate between rival scientific claims. The universities have invented a new role for themselves as the factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties; all the new restrictive codes; the words you can't say; the thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers and reporters. Foods that are bad for you; behaviours that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't think etc. Dr Aidan Rankin was getting close in his focus on political correctness...but this is just one part of a much larger complex.

In the course of pulling together my Global Warming research to write my Sunday weblogs...I will be trying to clarify why I believe the issues behind the emergence of Global Warming are very pertinent to concerns such as reclaiming the commons, evolving strategies for our peace parties to outwit their War Party etc. I see it as a brief but necessary diversion to make sure radical politics does not get spun off into the weeds and lose sight of the ball.

Once I have had my say about this I think we can start looking at how the money boys keep the whole of the PLM show on the road…because there may be some way to cut off the funding at the pass…once we find out where we should be setting up our ambush.

One final little remark...at the personal psychological level, fear and love are directly opposed to each other...so if there is an axis of evil anywhere then this is where it is...and this is where the battle between Good and Evil may need to take place. i.e. the personal response to all this is to refuse to be made insecure and Make Love Not War...which brings us full circle to the sixties and the hippies where we all grew up. We were actually right all along. That at least is probably what this Sunday's weblog will say. And that is what it said.

The boat goes down at a bit of an angle…and the bow line needs doubling up as it’s taking a lot of strain stopping Vemara slipping back and falling off the mud cliff at the stern into the river. But otherwise we have settled in at our new mooring on the River Rother just along from the newly constructed two million pounds Rye Fish Market Quay. Heidi came for a celebratory wine and cheese lunch yesterday and declared the moorings an improvement.

I have a new walk into town each day. Along by the side of the football pitch on The Salts, up the Ypres Steps, past John Ryan’s house by the Gungardens and through St Mary’s Churchyard. The cherry tree was in full bloom and reminded me of a painting Priscilla Ryan did a few years back of the self-same tree…made up into postcards.

On Wednesday 12th April I suggested that London’s Mayor…Man of The People Ken Livingstone…should start eyeing up the City of London for controlled demolition as his personal contribution to Socialism and Global Justice. The Lord Major of this English Province has long been a private fiefdom for my old school. I have pedigree.

The genesis of Christ’s Hospital was the dissolution of the monasteries and the resultant overflow onto London’s streets of the poor and destitute. Encouraged by a sermon from Nicholas Ridley…exhorting mercy to the poor…the king wrote to Sir Richard Dobbs, Lord Mayor of the City encouraging him to act. He set up a committee of merchants to sort it out. Had this been 21st century Bogotá…instead of 16th Century London…these street children would have been rounded up and forced to endure a life of hunger, harassment, sexual abuse and death…and we talk of progress?

Henry VIII had already granted the use of Greyfriars to the City for the relief of the poor and the boy king Edward VI granted The Palace of Bridewell, his lands of the Savoy and rents and other chattels to create three Royal Hospitals - Bridewell, St Thomas and Christ’s, which was for the education of poor children. The first boys and girls entered the school in Newgate in 1552 and the Royal Charter was granted and signed by its founder Edward VI the following year.

Christ’s Hospital occupied a site in Newgate for 350 years. From time to time children were farmed out around the country…after the Great Fire of 1666 made parts of the school uninhabitable for instance. Eventually the girls settled at Hertford and in 1897 the boys were relocated from Newgate to the purpose built site in Horsham. The foundation stone was laid by Edward, Prince of Wales on 23 October 1897 on behalf of the Sovereign, the date being the anniversary of the birthday of Edward VI. A decade ago Hertford was shut down and the girls moved to Horsham.

Christ’s Hospital was given a second Royal Charter by Charles II in 1673. This charter created the Royal Mathematical School to train navigators for careers as naval officers or merchant seafarers. Samuel Pepys Secretary to His Majesty’s Navy…and later Vice President of Christ’s Hospital…features strongly in Christ’s Hospital history.

HRH the Duke of Cambridge started a tradition of Royal Presidents in 1854. In 1919 George V became the first Royal Patron followed by George VI in 1937 and Her Majesty the Queen in 1953. The support of the City of London Corporation and Livery Companies of the City has carried on uninterrupted. Each year on St Matthews Day hundreds of boys march through London for lunch with the Lord Mayor at his Mansion House residence. Christ’s Hospital’s founding principles were to support disadvantaged children and to remain a school for the general public.

The more enlightened radical Old Blues…there will not be many…might like to help Our Ken by chiselling away at the monolithic horrors of the London-based imperial mismanagement from inside the crumbling edifice. We are the school of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb and not just the purveyors of cannon fodder for the English Imperial Navy and providers of clever clerks to speculate in overseas adventures with the people’s savings…and the billions of pounds of ill-gotten imperial gains…under The City of London’s fiduciary control.

It really is time for the common people of this green and pleasant land to get rid of all this imperial nonsense once and for all by withdrawing from The Killingry Business. Shutting down the arms factories in Mercia is one place to start. Another is to cut off the political need…oil for fighter jets…and the money supply from the Global Policeman Business…much of it orchestrated from The Square Mile…with little concern for the collateral damage.

In the 1990s there were worries that Frankfurt would replace London as the capital of European Global Capitalism. It never stood a chance as anyone who has passed through that charmless German city realised. But Gordon Brown was sufficiently concerned that he made it a separate test in HM Treasury’s assessment of whether to abolish the English Pound. No other part of the economy was singled out for such special treatment.

London is the most European place on the planet and the most cosmopolitan city in the European Union. It is also the driving force for integration across the entire continent. It is not Brussels but London that is the evil in our midst. It must be treated as the Roman Senate treated Carthage. But serious talk about dismantling The City of London and getting out of the Imperial Killingry Game will arouse the wrath of some awfully powerful enemies…and not very nice ones either.

For many years I have kept a hand-written journal and I am now on Journal XLI started in September last year. I have evolved a fairly rigid format of one A5 page per journal entry but my writing is small so I cram 15 words onto a line and 40 lines onto a page…600 words in all. This compares with the 900 words in my typewritten weblogs. So far this year I have made twenty-eight journal entries…about eight a month. To give you the flavour of this little corner of my regular literary output here is the journal entry I wrote at The Ship Inn yesterday afternoon at five o’clock.

‘Three more weblogs and the first volume is ready for posting on my website as a pdf file costing £6.99. It will be interesting to see if there are any takers. Several little pockets of good news. Vemara is now on Lochins Moorings so it is convenient for Martin and David who live on Fishmarket Road [just across The Salts a few hundred yards away].

When the crane comes I was promised a lift-out for my mast if I wanted it…for a tenner. It certainly needs to be worked on but I’m pretty worried about getting it all back again in the right order…and there is also several hundred pounds worth of rigging replacement. Today I declared the boat to be 27-foot long and paid two months mooring fees to The Rye Partnership. The cost is £71 per month and should be recoverable from Rother District Council. The figure they need is £213.40 per quarter plus harbour dues.

The other piece of good news is that I had Marie Appelquist on the phone and she is happy to go ahead with the JAK Blancolån without a guarantor but needs a temporary Swedish address…to be swapped out for my Lund address once I have registered and am resident in Sweden. I may still have to explain about my dispute with CSN [Sweden’s Student Loans Agency] so we are not home and dry yet but this is a significant concession that brings me closer.

Roud couldn’t resist some more nastiness even when he was getting rid of me…as he wanted. To me he said, ‘Berni was here this morning. She said you owe her £ 2000. Pay your debts!’ It then transpired that he had also successfully persuaded Peter Butler to muck me about by telling him that I had told Taxi Man John he had been ‘inside for arson’. As it happened it didn’t work as Kevin…who has also been on the receiving end of Roud’s wicked ways…volunteered to come with me when I moved the boat. Peter had decided he didn’t want to walk back from Lochins so went off to get his bike…but then didn’t come back when Roud sabotaged things. I phoned Peter when I got round to Lochins and got no answer and then tried later and found out why he had not returned.

In the river opposite Derek Phillips Boatyard there was a sailing boat keeping right over on my side of the river. I assumed he was going to turn right into a mooring and cut across in front of me. But he held his course as I attempted to go past him on the inside…my port to his port. For a few moments he turned one way to avoid a collision and I turned the same way. Then I made a sharp sixty-degree turn to port across his bow so we passed starboard to starboard. It was close. Indeed Kevin told me afterwards he thought we were going to hit.

Anyway as we passed I saw it was a French visitor with four young lads aboard and a very frightened lad on the tiller. It was only afterwards that the thought struck me that they might have been under sail…in which case I was at fault. It is almost unheard of for anybody to sail up Rock Channel nowadays so the thought had never crossed my mind. Gilbert used to do it as a party piece if the wind was right and Alec Bradley did it because he had no engine. But the French don’t have inboard engines like the English…for tax reasons…and only have little outboards.’

And there my journal entry ended. But I was curious to find out what had happened. So on leaving The Ship Inn I went along to The Strand to have a word with the young French mariners. I met them just coming off their boat. I apologised profusely and told them how embarrassed I was to have greeted them in so rude a manner when they were visitors to my town and my country. They were much relieved and we shook hands and chatted happily away in our respective bad French (me) and poor English (them). At least now they will go off with a good impression of England and the English. But it was something of a ploy to find out what I wanted to know…and I did.

It turned out that they had been under engine and were indeed at fault. But worse than this was the fact that none of them had any idea about the rules of the road. They thought…quite reasonably unless you think it through…that because the English drive their cars on the left they must also drive their boats on the left. Whoops! I explained to them that this is not the case. Even the Aussies and the South Africans follow international rules of the sea and pass port to port as if driving on the right-hand side of the water road.

Of course racing under sail is a different kettle of fish with its own rules. But for ordinary folks out for a jolly the only exception to the right-side rule is that Steam gives way to Sail. But this can be hard to ascertain until you are close enough to crash into each other...and that is a little too late. So the de facto rule is that you get out of the way of anything…and particularly anything that is bigger than you. Vemara’s nine tons would have made a very nasty mess of their 24-foot fibreglass yacht. So on all counts the French were in the wrong.

In Chernobyl the engineers now have plans to build a gigantic hangar to prevent a second disaster. The Ark…an arch-shaped tubular structure…is 360 feet high and 900 feet across. An estimated 200 tons of radioactive matter lies within the temporary structure and everything inside is contaminated. The European Union has spent tens of millions of pounds trying to stabilise the structure but many still fear a collapse and another catastrophe.

The £600 million Ark Project will contain the radioactive remains for the next 100 years while remote-controlled devices or specially trained teams try to dismantle the reactors and store the lethal material. David Sycamore, a Brit working for the EU in Kiev commented: ‘The new shelter is going to be the eighth wonder of the world – it’s an amazing piece of engineering which is on the scale of the Egyptians building the pyramids.’

The engineers may be coming to grips with the scale of the catastrophe but they represent a world of sanity in the smoke and mirrors world of Chernobyl as officials seek to play down the casualty figures. Here is Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine.

‘At least 500 000 people have already died out of the two million people officially classed as victims of Chernobyl. 34 499 people who took part in the clean up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The death of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population. We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident.’

The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organisation are ignoring this information according to Omelyanets. Yesterday The Independent quoted figures from The Chernobyl Forum…a group of a hundred scientists drawn together by the UN. They estimate the final death toll at four thousand from the fall-out with an additional five thousand radiation-related deaths in the heavily contaminated regions. The response of the Nuclear Industry is to insist that Chernobyl couldn’t happen in Western Europe because the Chernobyl Reactors had no strengthened containment shell, which are standard in the design of our nuclear reactors. So how safe are our sites?

Sellafield is one of the biggest nuclear sites in Europe, employing more than 10 000 people and is far more complex than sites like Chernobyl that tend to house only power plants. The Sellafield site is home to Calder Hall, the first British civil nuclear station and an array of other operations including Thorp, the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, and SMP, which was built to produce Mixed Oxide Fuel for overseas customers using plutonium and uranium.

Formerly known as Windscale, it is the site where plutonium was produced for nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority believes that the Sellafield clean up will take at least 75 years. Legacy issues there include the continuing clean-up resulting from the 1957 shutdown as a result of a fire, and dealing with a number of ‘ponds’ where waste was dumped fairly indiscriminately.

The scale of the problems at the 770-acre site near Whitehaven is spelled out in the decommissioning authority’s draft strategy. ‘At Sellafield it has been estimated that there may be as much as 20 million cubic metres of contaminated land, some of which is deep underground, resulting largely from leakages from legacy sites,’ it says. At the B30 storage pond the European Commission has complained that it has not been possible to carry out checks to ensure that fissile materials intended for the civil nuclear programme have not been diverted to the military.

The Blair government denies this but the decommissioning authority admits: 'Delays in spent fuel retrieval have resulted in serious degradation of the fuel.’ Dave Skilbeck who is in charge of the B41 solid waste storage ‘silo’ at Sellafield, admits that there is only a partial inventory of what was thrown into the facility he is decommissioning. According to managers at the site, some of the problems stem from when the plant was asked to work flat out during the Miners’ Strike of 1984 - 5 to keep the lights on. Waste problems were rather pushed to one side with no thought of how you dealt with this later.

Meanwhile across the frozen North Slopes of Alaska the region’s largest oil accident on record has been sending hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil pouring into the Arctic Ocean after a badly corroded BP Pipeline ruptured. As oil is increasingly transported through environmentally sensitive areas by pipeline the dangers posed by poorly maintained rotting pipes has become increasingly clear. To quote a BP oilman: ‘Something happened to the corrosion rates in that line between September 2005 and the time of the spill that we don’t yet fully understand.’ At the last count clean-up crews had removed 40 000 gallons of crude oil and melted snow off the frozen tundra but indications are that this is the second largest crude oil spill in Alaska…second only to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

The publicity caused by the leak in the 30-year-old pipeline is set to seriously damage BP’s image, which has been carefully crafted to show it as a company concerned about the environment. BP boasts that it is fully signed up to the dangers of Global Warming and makes a conspicuous effort to flaunt its green credentials. BP has even been erecting wind turbines above its petrol stations. Now they are all doing it…with Tescos the latest to announce Rooftop Turbines.

It was twenty years ago today that the worst nuclear accident in history took place when one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl complex 80 miles north of Kiev in Ukraine exploded. Here is the official version of events. Prior to a routine shutdown, the reactor crew prepared for a test to determine how long turbines would supply power following a loss of power, by deliberately disabling a safety mechanism that shut down the reactor automatically.

When the crew tried to shut down the reactor manually there was a dramatic power surge which caused the fuel elements to rupture. A steam explosion lifted off the cover plate of the reactor releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. A second explosion blew out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the reactor’s core, air rushed in and the reactor’s hot graphite core burst into flames. Fire fighters took nine days to put it out. Huge amounts of radioactive material were released…hundreds of times the fallout from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.

Belarus took the brunt of the uranium dioxide in the plant that escaped. Ukraine was also contaminated. In total five million people were exposed to radiation including the 600 000 workers who volunteered for the clean-up operations.

The disaster occurred in the early hours of 26th April 1986. My two children were living with their mother in Uppsala 800 miles north of Chernobyl and first heard of the disaster a couple of days later when a nuclear power station in Sweden raised the alarm as a radioactive plume passed overhead and drifted north putting Sweden at the mercy of the weather. Had it rained at the wrong time my children would have been covered with radioactive fall-out.

After the disaster the city of Pripyat was emptied of inhabitants. Today it has a chilling, post-apocalyptic look to it. Ragged curtains blow through the broken windows of apartments in deserted and crumbling high-rise blocks. The streets with their Lenin statues and fading posters exhorting a march towards a communist paradise are being reclaimed by vegetation. The four dozen villages in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl were also evacuated but scores of mainly elderly people who could not adapt to the cramped city apartments they were offered have returned surreptitiously. Eventually the authorities were forced tacitly to accept their presence.

The zone’s inhabitants can collect their pensions and once every two weeks a policeman calls by to check that everyone is still alive. Adam Lahovsky, an 82-year old war veteran who lives in a small single-storey timber cottage said: ‘I was not going to allow the Chernobyl disaster to drive me out.’ His wife Nina said that a van selling bread and other staples visited once a week and they spend their pension on food and medicine.

They keep chickens and supplement their diet with berries and wild mushrooms…which have five times the permitted limit for caesium-137. Their son visits regularly to help out. Herds of boars are among the wildlife now thriving in the exclusion zone despite the radiation. Free of human predators the area provides sanctuary for moose, rare Przewalski horses and even wolves.

Evgenia Stepanova of the Ukrainian Scientific Centre for Radiation Medicine said ‘We’re overwhelmed by thyroid cancers, leukaemias and genetic mutations that are not recorded in the World Health Organisation data and which were practically unknown 20 years ago.’

In the Rivne region of Ukraine, 300 miles west of Chernobyl doctors say they are coming across an unusual rate of cancers and mutations. ‘In the 30 hospitals of our region we find that up to 30% of people who were in highly radiated areas have physical disorders including heart and blood diseases, cancers and respiratory diseases. Nearly one in three of all newborn babies have deformities, mostly internal,’ said Alexander Vewremchuk of the Special Hospital for the Radiological Protection of the Population in Vilne.

Twenty years on restrictions are still in place on reindeer in Lapland and on 274 farms in Wales and Cumbria while caesium-137 levels are ten times above permitted levels in Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland and Lithuania.

I just about survived Monday but it was a close run thing. I was meandering along quite well until two o'clock when I came out from the changing rooms at Rye Swimming Pool, switched my mobile on and found a rather panicky voicemail message from the Rye Harbour Master telling me that he didn’t want Vemara on The Strand. So I called him back to let him know I had got the message and to find out what had caused this change of mind.

As I was getting nowhere I changed tack and asked where there were vacant berths in Rye…reminding Carl that Vemara had been berthing in Rye for 20 years. The Harbour Master gave me the phone number to Ryepartnership who collect the fees for boats on Rock Channel Point. So I spent the rest of the afternoon organising to move Vemara onto Berth 15 at midday on Thursday. If Vemara likes her berth payments start the beginning of May. At 2030 in the evening I ran the engine for a quarter of an hour. It started with the starting handle…but as it’s seven months since the engine was last fired in anger I was pleased that it started at all. So all's well that ends well.

Global Warming was invented in 1988 by a prominent climatologist James Hansen. At the time he was giving testimony before a joint House and Senate Committee headed by Senator Wirth of Colorado. Hearings were scheduled for June so Hansen could deliver his testimony during a blistering heat wave. This would be fair enough for a Press Conference but Public Science should be beyond such ploys. However this was no isolated incident of media manipulation. Global Warming is awash with dodgy dossiers. Dossiers about Weapons of Mass Destruction are paragons of integrity by comparison.

In the late 1980s the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which comprises a huge group of bureaucrats…and scientists under the thumb of bureaucrats. The idea was that since this was a global problem the UN would track climate research and issue reports every few years. The first assessment report in 1990 said it would be very difficult to detect a human influence on climate although everybody was concerned that one might exist. But the 1995 report announced with conviction that there was now ‘a discernible human influence’ on climate…echoes of the 45-minute claim when Alistair Campbell sexed up the WMD Dossier.

Much the same happened to the 1995 IPCC Dossier. Originally the document said scientists couldn’t detect a human influence on climate for sure, and they didn’t know when they would. They said explicitly, ‘we don’t know.’ The statement was deleted and replaced with a new statement that a discernible human influence did indeed exist. It was a major change…and one that caused a stir among scientists at the time with opponents and defendants of the change coming forward. If you read their claims and counter-claims you can’t be sure who’s telling the truth. But a review of the actual text changes makes it crystal clear that the IPCC is a political organisation and not a scientific one.

Back to James Hansen. In the summer of 1988 he accompanied his global warming announcement with a prediction that temperatures would increase 0.35 degrees Celsius over the next ten years. The actual increase was 0.11 degrees and this prompted him to state…along with his fellow authors Makiko Sato, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Ina Tegen and Elaine Matthews…in a 1998 article Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (127533-58) that ‘the forcings that drive long-term climate change are unknown with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.’ arguing for scientists to use multiple scenarios in future.

The problem is that climate is very complicated…so complicated in fact that no one has been able to predict future climate with accuracy…even though billions of dollars are being spent and hundreds of people are trying all around the world. Nobody is trying to predict weather more than ten days ahead but computer modellers are predicting what the temperature will be one hundred years in advance…sometimes a thousand years…three thousand years. And they are probably doing worse than the weathermen. The biggest events in global climate are the El Niños. They happen roughly every four years. But climate models can’t predict them - not their timing, their duration, or their intensity. Climate science simply isn’t there yet…not by a long chalk. It may be one day. But not now.

As for David Cameron’s trip to Norway, like Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Siberia, Alaska, the Alps, the Himalayas and Mount Kilamanjaro, Norway has nothing to contribute to the scientific case for Global Warming. 94% of all the ice in the world is elsewhere…4% in Greenland and 90% in Antarctica where the ice is 5 to 6 miles thick in places. This merely reinforces the need for an impartial forum for Public Science. What Cameron is doing is media manipulation.

The irony is that Cameron’s key adviser on environmental matters is Zac Goldsmith who took over the editorship of his uncle’s scientific journal The Ecologist and to Edward Goldsmith’s horror has destroyed everything that Teddy had built up over the years. The impartial and respected scientific journal that once reported scientific facts and the considered opinions of leading scientists in the new field of Ecological Science is now no more than a glossy purveyor of ethical chic for the chattering classes. With The Ecologist Zac Goldsmith has done for ecology what Satish Kumar has done for politics with Resurgence.

Thirty years ago Lake Nakuru had a pink flamingo population. Their pinkness came from the lake...they were what they ate. Flamingos are sensitive to water quantity and quality...and tourists think they’re pretty. So flamingos equals tourists equals foreign currency equals economic benefits. The way Classical Economics works is that if there are benefits then money can be spent off-setting them with costs...but only if you really have to...or you have someone you know (like your own contractors or even consulting company) to give the money to.

Then there are a few hitches in the economic method. For starters it is assumed that there is someone willing and able to pick up the tab for these benefit off-sets and someone else with the know-how to solve the matter costs are being lavished upon. Then there is the manner in which dollar signs are attributed to these costs and benefits.

Cost-Benefit Analysis has nothing to say about the distribution of costs and benefits and takes no position on whether or not there is any money available to invest in any capital works from which the benefits and costs are deemed to flow over time. Then there is Net Present Value theory which I won't go into here. Taken together these makes a nonsense of Economic Appraisals.

As for the fluoride, economics could not begin to grapple with this because any benefits depended upon a complex function that at the low end might be positive but at the high end was very very definitely seriously negative. Bones start breaking, mice get nasty things happening to them, teeth start mottling…and no scientist was willing to risk his or her neck about the long term consequences. The New Zealand Pure Water Association and Fluoride Action Network have links casting doubts on the veracity of fluoridation’s healthiness.

In Imperial Times the Kenyan Colonial Authorities sunk boreholes around the town of Nakuru to supply the town with water. The water came from the groundwater of the Rift Valley and was high in all sorts of chemicals…including fluorides. So it was diluted with surface rainwater flowing off the Aberdares to make sure it was drinkable. The Turasha Dam was to be built high in the Aberdares. Its size…and any staged development programme…depended upon forecasts of the growth of Nakuru and of its water needs…not necessarily the same thing.

The phased development of the groundwater sources also entered the equation along with the appropriate water mix…surface and aquifer…at different times of the year. In those days the Kenyan Ex-Patriots worked with the notion that rain came twice a year…a long rains and a short rains. This complicated matters…and was only a little bit true.

So the scene is set. I was interested in how high fluoride levels could be allowed to rise…while along the corridor the Sewerage Project was concerned about increasing water levels in the lake and its chemical composition because they didn’t want the pink flamingos to turn blue or fly off to the film set of The Constant Gardener up at Lake Rudolf.

In 1944 DuPont was producing weapon-grade uranium for the Manhatten Project. A major by-product of the process was the pollutant fluoride, which was producing death and disease on nearby farms. The farmers set out to sue DuPont, the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture and Justice departments, the Manhatten Project, the US Army and the War Department. While the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service undertook fluoride testing round New Jersey, Manhatten Project directors convinced farmers, including those suffering from fluoride poisoning, of the government’s good faith, before the government spiked their lawsuit by concealing how much fluoride DuPont had let fly. ‘Disclosure would be injurious to the military security of the United States.’ You ain’t kidding!

It gets worse but let’s go back to 1941 for another strand in this twisted tale. In 1991 Covert Action Quarterly put out an article entitled Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?. Fluoridation was simply the aluminium industry dumping toxic waste at a profit. The villains of the piece were the Mellon Institute, the Mellon Family’s cash cow Alcoa, the American Aluminium Company and one-time Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

Both these accounts of the hidden history of the push for fluoridation are pretty dark tales of industrial companies seeking to spin their toxic dumping into a profitable health benefit. But you can’t fool all the people all of the time. In the US, 60% of voters have been against fluoridation of their water supplies…and a third of American cities have managed to resist the contamination of their tap water. In the UK, water companies were permitted to fluoridate for the first time in 1985. But in 1995 Yorkshire Water refused to do so, not because they thought anti-fluoridators were a bunch of cranks but rather because they said, ‘we know which way public opinion rides’. We will see if this attitude survives the take-over of Yorkshire Water by the Essen-based power and utilities conglomerate RWE. But meanwhile the independent Welsh Water remains fluoride-free and refers to fluoride as a ‘toxic and potent chemical’.

In 2002 the Medical Research Council reported to the Department of Health that while fluoridation benefited teeth ‘much of the current evidence on benefits of fluoride comes from research conducted several decades ago’. By 2003 only five million of England’s population of sixty million had fluoridated water. There are better ways to cut down on dental caries without exposing 80% of the population to fluoride poisoning. Ralph Nader says that...and has done so for years.

The Fluoridation Saga will continue after the third and final instalment of Teatime at Marshbeck. The first instalment was two weeks ago on Sunday 9th April 2006 and the second instalment last Sunday. The story first appeared in the revised 1983 edition of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson and included the idea of an LHP…a Leisure Home and Personal Infomatic Set…indicating that James Robertson was already 25 years ahead of his time foreseeing the merging of telephones, computers and other digital devices. It is the afternoon of 5th January 2050 and Herbert and Emily are continuing their conversation about The Good Old Days back in the 1980s and 1990s.

‘Let’s be fair to them, though’, Emily says. ‘The great transformation didn’t take place suddenly, out of the blue. Indira’s right. People had been discussing alternative futures for some time. Would it be Business As Usual? Disaster? Police State? We once retrieved some of the debates from the archive data bank through the LHP. And surely, Herbert, there was the big controversy in the ‘80s about masculine and feminine values, and whether the post-industrial future was going to be HE (Hyperexpansionist) or SHE (Sane Humane Ecological).’

Old Meg Jones can keep silent no longer. ‘This is all very interesting, Emily’, she says, ‘but the biggest thing that changed was politics. It’s only about fifty years since most people realised that politics was about how you lived your own life. Then they began to do politics for themselves.

When I was young in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a few thousand full-time politicians did politics for everyone else, mainly in places like Washington and Moscow, London and Brussels. They made a profession of it, a career. My mother was in the game herself for a while. She was an MP. And Herbert’s quite right; I remember her saying it was a very masculine game, even for women. For most people politics meant casting a vote from time to time. That was it. The politicians liked it, of course. It gave them a lot of attention, and made them feel really important.

No-one would want to go back to that now. But imagine how exciting it was at election time. Everyone stayed at home to watch the results on television. In fact, as that way of doing politics began to break down, it turned into an entertainment like horse-jumping and all the other spectator sports of those days. It must be difficult for you young people to realise what it was like, with everyone sitting passively in front of the television all the time, watching and listening to the performers. Ordinary people couldn’t communicate directly with each other all over the world as you do today through the LHP’.

‘Talking of politics,’ says Emily, ‘it’s nearly six o’clock, and time we all went to the monthly cluster meeting. There won’t be many domestic matters on the agenda this time, though I want to get the minifarm roster settled for the year and I think your Harley wants to propose up-grading the coppice, doesn’t he, Meg?

But there are some external questions to discuss: what should be done about the dispute over the Marshbeck Water Supply? What do we think of the proposal that Trentside District should stop trying to be self-sufficient in energy? Do we have any ideas for this year’s inter-continent exchange programme? And shall we take up the idea of a special link with the dolphin group at PISCES?

‘Come on Bruno and Shantih. ‘We want a full quorum of under-tens at the cluster meeting; the voice the future must be heard. Anyhow, we don’t want people saying you’re missing your education. They might suggest we send you out to school!’

God forbid! Schools? What were they? Prisons or Child Care Centres? And so to the second part of my three part essay on Me & Fluoridation. The first part of the saga is in yesterday’s weblog…Number 112.

In 1974 a report went off to the World Bank about the future water supplies for the Central Rift Valley in East Africa. The engineers wrote their bit...and I wrote the rest. Once upon a time the rest meant demand projections which the engineers did themselves. This is how it worked. The Chartered Engineer would design his dam and set his demand growth rate to yield a positive Net Present Value. Then he would write his report, putting his demand projections as the opening chapter. Hey Presto! The Engineer's Dam is the only supply response to the expected demand for water.

Lake Nakuru was not quite that straightforward. In the Central Rift Valley there are two problems with the water coming in and going out. It goes in dirty and comes out different dirty. The in-problem helps the engineers get their dam...so they were happy to let the resident Economic Planning Engineer (me) loose on the problem.

But the out-problem was best hived off to a separate project. This would have worked just fine had our firm of consulting engineers not been awarded both the Nakuru Sewerage Project and the Rift Valley Water Supply Project. Big mistake. The engineer working on the Sewerage Project drank with me at the Impala Club, had lunch with me at the Lamu Coffee House and had his office just along the corridor from me opposite the Jomo Kenyatta Centre. So we talked to each other...something that was not really supposed to happen.

The last couple of nights I have worked late at Rock Channel Quay with Francoise de Naillat putting together a Powerpoint presentation on Dale Chihuly. I get well-fed and Francoise shaves rather a lot of unavailable hours from her hectic schedules. Something that takes me ten minutes might take her two hours. Ricardo would be impressed.

By the early hours of Saturday morning it was done and Francoise was pleased enough to slip me £20 for my efforts...to be gambled away on three-card brag. I was pretty exhausted as my day had started at seven and much of my timewas spent staring at a computer screen. Tiredness is one of the two sets of ideal conditions for falling ten feet into the Rye mud upon returning to Vemara...a state of inebriation being the other...so I trod the catwalk carefully.

Today was Radcon Planning Group day in Wiltshire and my bus was scheduled to leave Victoria at 12.30 pm. By eleven o'clock I was sitting beneath the church of St Martin in the Field eating a splendid late breakfast and at 11.30 I strolled across to The Strand to buy my ticket for the Number Eleven bus.

I shouldn't have bothered. The buses were at a standstill...and the taxis and cars weren't going anywhere either. Tomorrow this would make sense as it was London Marathon Weekend but not today. I had no explanation. Perhaps this was a rehearsal. Whatever the hold-up the alternative was Shank's Pony .

It was a lovely day and I had the time so I walked down Whitehall, crossed Parliament Square and headed up Victoria Street past the Houses of Parliament towards the Victoria Coach Station. My thoughts were on the thorny economic conundrum on the precise economic category for my £1.50 expenditure on an unused bus ticket. Single journey tickets in Ken Livingstone's New Model London are only valid for one hour.

John Papworth was taking his afternoon nap upstairs when I let myself in at 3.30 pm after an £8 taxi ride from Swindon Bus Station. It was a lovely warm day in Wiltshire as well so I sat out in the garden under a tree with beautiful upturned white lilyesque blossoms...with a cat and a dog for company.

The Radcon Planning Group met for its monthly session and exchanged their respective progress reports. Zac Goldsmith has pulled out from the conference but by way of an apology for doing so he is donating a free insert in the Ecologist. This is no trivial matter. The Ecologist has 400,000 readers across four continents and is the biggest environmental affairs magazine in the world. The Magazine Group tells me that The Ecologist 'provides information the commercial press cannot print whether it is health care, oil prices, school food, product ingredients or climate change' and 'will cause you to rethink basic assumptions about the world we live in'.

John Papworth is Conference Convenor, Committee Chairman and Cook. This helps ensure that meetings are brought to a timely conclusion. 'Meeting closed. The lamb is done. Time to serve up!' Later in the evening at The AngelI won one of the kitties so returned home six pounds better off. It seems some time since I lost money at three-card brag. Perhaps there is some skill in the game after all.

When I was living in Llangolman the biggest explosion in Europe since the end of the Second World War took place on the other side of the country. Dense clouds of black smoke hung over Southern England for several days and were picked up on satellite photographs. Four months later we have no news from the Buncefield Oil Depot Investigators on what sparked off the inferno. The finger of suspicion is being pointed at a petrol leak from a six thousand gallon tank...but it takes a leak to know a leak. Six hundred firemen battled for sixty hoursto bring the blaze under control.

As with the Camelford Disaster when aluminium sulphate was dumped into the local water supply, all the authorities sang from the same hymn sheet to assure the public that water supplies around the Buncefield Depot were safe. Humbug! How can water supplies be safe when eighty-eight gallons of diesel oil have to be pumped out of a borehole next to the depot? Answer? When the borehole is cut off from the local water supply. Unfortunately this one wasn't. In fact it was feeding directly from the same underground aquifer as the one being pumped dry by the water company to ensure the effectiveness of their hosepipe ban this summer...no water; no garden watering at midnight for the neighbours to report.

Drug Companies are accused of many things and one of them is that they actively seek to make people ill so should be regarded as part of the Toxic Chemical Industry. A variation on this theme is the accusation that the Toxic Chemical Companies have been trying for years...and with considerable success...to become part of The Drug Business. Specific allegations have been made against Alcoa, the American Aluminium Company and the Mellon Trust which gets a slice of their dividends on the one hand; and against DuPont de Nemours and the Nuclear Bomb Making Industry on the other. The issue is the fluoridation of the world's water supplies. I was not in at the start...which can be traced back to The Manhatten Project in the 1940s...but I found myself involved in the debate when it was still in its infancy thirty years ago in the 1970s. More in tomorrow's weblog.

Sir Francis Drake is an English hero but there are surprisingly few Drakestowns or Drake statues around the country. Perhaps he ended his years in disgrace after the howler on his world expedition of 1579. Drake was sailing the Golden Hind along a mysterious coastline shrouded in ‘thicke mists and most stinging fogges’...as he wrote in his ship’s log...so dense and persistent that Drake sailed away after 30 days without any of the usual explorations that Captain James Cooke would have done two hundred years later. Big mistake. The ‘fogges’ were hiding the entrance to one of the finest natural harbours on the western coast of the Americas...San Francisco Bay.

After Drake’s close encounter San Francisco was not officially discovered until the 18th century…by the infidious Spaniards. The fogs are caused by the cold Pacific waters swept down from the Arctic running into the warm moist air wafting off the California mainland. When the hot air hits the cold sea it cools and its moisture condenses into a ground-hugging cloud. Then further south there is smog and Los Angeles…which brings me to Global Warming.

Four hundred years later California was one of the biggest economies in the world…and an actor from Hollywood was Governor. Most people regarded Ronald Reagan as deeply conservative but his policies ran counter to traditional American conservatism. Noam Chomsky referred to Reaganomics as military keynesiamism. In Towards A New Old War he summarised Reagan’s programme as ‘the transfer of resources from the poor to the rich by slashing social welfare programmes and by regressive tax policies, and a vast increase in the state sector of the economy in the familiar mode: by subsidising and providing a guaranteed market for high-technology production, namely military production. This is in no sense a conservative programme, as it is customarily mislabelled’.

One of the most conservative American politicians of the last 75 years was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio…known as Mr Republican. He condemned the cold war ideology constructed by the Liberal Democrat Harry Truman at the end of the Hitler War and echoed by Neo-Conservatives today. Taft represented farmers and small businessmen who had no interest in global markets and feared militarisation of the economy and conscription as threats to their liberty. Taft rejected the idea that America should become a world policeman saying Americans ‘were not fitted to a role of imperialism and would fail at an attempt at world domination.’

Robert Taft saw small wars in the post-war world: ‘Certainly however benevolent we might be, other people simply do not like to be dominated, and we would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves in the nineteenth century.’ America and England are two countries divided by a common language. Words like conservatism and liberalism have very different nuances and associations. In the United Kingdom the latest leader of the Conservative Party has been on a three-day fact-finding mission to see at first hand the impact of climate change. David Cameron’s 15-mile journey by dog sled…the ultimate in environmental friendliness…took place on the Svalbard Peninsula in Norway. Big mistake. Spitzbergen is definitely not the place to go for a photo opportunity on glaciers and the melting of the Arctic ice.

Some computer models tell us that higher temperatures in the Arctic lead to more snowfall as more water is evaporated off the oceans and carried north on the prevailing winds. Conclusion? Glacial Advance. Unfortunately other computer models predict that warmer weather will lead to less precipitation…and Glacial Retreat. In the Svalbard Peninsula both processes are taking place at the same time…in different glaciers. Some climate is local.

Here was another problem. Before David Cameron jumped on his canine caravan he had to get to Norway. So he arranged to be driven from London to Farnborough in Hampshire by Government Car. Over the 38-mile journey his Vauxhall Omega spewed out 30 lbs of carbon dioxide. At Farnborough he boarded a 10-seater private jet which flew him and his entourage to Longyearbyen in Svalbard…a distance of 1909 miles. Another five tons of carbon dioxide per passenger into the atmosphere. The coordinators of the trip…World Wildlife Fund-UK…insisted that all carbon emissions would be offset using Gold Standard credits which will cost the Conservative Party a total of £200. So that’s all right then. Perhaps they might like a non-repayable interest free loan to cover. Conservative Central Office might see this as yet another example of Sod’s Law…on which more below.

Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: negative expectations yield negative results positive expectations yield negative results. Howe's Law: every man has a scheme which will not work; Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics: once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a larger can; Skinner's Constant. the quantity which must be multiplied by, divided by, added to or subtracted from the answer you get to give the answer you should have got; Law of Selective Gravity: an object will fall so as to do the most damage; Jenning's Corollary: the chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet; Barth's Distinction: there are two types of people - those who divide people into two types and those who do not. Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: the first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90%.

DEFRA’s two mile quarantine zone around the Scottish town of Cellardyke was lifted today. All other restrictions on the movement of poultry and captive birds around the fishing village in Fife will be removed in ten days time. Try as they might DEFRA have failed to find any more whooper swans with bird flu since Cyril floated in a few weeks ago. Incidentally an instant hand sanitiser that goes by the brand name of No-Germs can be purchased at all good high street chemists for £2.99p. This handwash kills 99.8 percent of the bird flu H5NI virus in half a minute.

Excitement on River Brede Moorings this week as Roud delivered another little piece of maritime theatre. For me the drama started on Tuesday with a phone call at 2.11 pm from Peter Butler…my eyes and ears on the moorings. ‘They are taking your boat away!’ I was in East Street Antiques with Heidi at the time with my mobile phone switched off so I didn’t collect the voicemail until 3.30 pm. Time and tide wait for no man.

By the time I got to the boatyard Vemara was in the berth next to her old £500 per year mooring. That was the good news. The bad news was that to get myself aboard I had to risk life and limb crawling across a narrow rickety metal catwalk…the wooden one had collapsed a year or two ago…ten feet above the Rye mud. From there it was a simple matter to step aboard…at high tide. The tide was falling fast but was still high enough to allow me to step aboard.

However at low tide there is a vertical drop of twelve feet onto the deck. I took up my defensive position aboard and awaited the inevitable altercation. It took place an hour later at 4.30 pm. ‘You are trespassing! You are not welcome!’ from him; ‘More theatre! More illegalities!’ from me. By then it was low tide. Twelve feet above me was the bank. Nothing a ladder couldn’t handle…and where there are boats and hard standing there are ladders. But they were up there and I was down here…and the next high tide was at two o’clock in the morning. I set the alarm.

Since then I have returned to the boat late at night, collected a ladder, taken it aboard with me and then in the morning taken myself into town at seven thirty…after returning the ladder to the place it came from. It does not take long to slip into new routines. Unfortunately Murphy was on the prowl. Returning to my new berth at ten thirty on the first evening I selected my ladder from one of the boats on the hard standing and took it and myself aboard.

At seven o’clock the next morning I was awakened by an angry bellowing from above. ‘I want my ladder! And I want it NOW!’ I had chosen the only boat on the hard standing with someone aboard. ‘Didn’t you hear the television?’ Profuse apologies from me…irritated mutterings from him. ‘I owe you one!’ I said tamely as I clambered off Vemara and put his ladder back against his boat. I choose a different ladder the following evening.

I deliberated on the situation overnight and on Wednesday morning phoned the Harbour Master…rather than my solicitor. After ten minutes with R.K.McGregor…his deputy…it was agreed. Today a nice polite letter went off to Mr Roud. ‘Dear Mike. I have made arrangements with the Rye Harbour Master’s Office to move Vemara to a long-term berth on Strand Quay immediately Jackson’s have completed construction work on The Strand. The move from River Brede Moorings has been tentatively scheduled for 11 am on Thursday 27th April 2006. Please contact me if you anticipate any difficulties with this scheduling. Yours faithfully.’

My new Mooring and Harbour Fees will be £793.76p per year with electricity extra. This compares with the £650 (including electricity) being paid on Brede Moorings from 1998 to 2002 and the £750 (with electricity extra) demanded after Vemara was moved to the far end of the moorings ‘to allow work to take place on the old berth’. The good news was that the new berth was further down the Rye Harbour Road and more secluded…but the bad news was that Vemara sat higher on the mud so could only get away on the tide about one day in three.

After I discovered in August 2005 that Roud had been accepting fees from both myself and Connie’s Estate for the same berth throughout 2003 and 2004 I refused to pay any more until Vemara’s credit had been used up on mooring fees and electricity. Instead of a little humility…an apology even after being caught with his fingers in the till…Roud tried to bluff his way out by claiming that Vemara had been given ‘residential moorings’…which cost the equivalent of £1150 per year (without electricity). I would expect the Courts to take a rather dim view of such a transparent self-serving defence against the charge of Fraud. Perhaps I will pursue it. Perhaps not. We will see.

After writing about Murphy being on the prowl I thought of my extensive readership in foreign parts. Hmm! So I thought I better explain myself. Google to the rescue. I have linked Murphy to his very own website…one of 85 000 that responded to my Google “Murphy’s Law” request. However Murphy’s Law is often known as Sod’s Law so I tried that in Google too. Another 85 000 responses. Here are a few little gems. Sod's Law: if anything can go wrong, it will; O’Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law: Murphy was an optimist; The First Corollary to Sod's Law: anything that is to go wrong will do so at the worst possible moment; The Unspeakable Law: as soon as you mention something, if it's good, it goes away; if it's bad, it happens. Have a nice day!

Over Easter I was asked what motivates me to keep in touch with what is going on in the world and offer analysis, commentary and solutions. When asked a similar question in an interview with Radio Havana in October 2003 Noam Chomsky responded that privilege confers responsibility and that intellectuals are privileged. They have education, training, resources and opportunities. In England there is also no repression. So we have much more responsibility. After that, Chomsky said, it’s just a matter of choice. You just do these things naturally and automatically. It doesn’t merit any credit or applause. It’s just being a human being and using the opportunities you have.

It’s not quite that simple. Take repression. In England what intimidates is not the police but defamation. Departure from the conformist subservience to those in power is dealt with by tantrums, lies and endless vilification. Lies repeated long enough become truths…you become anti-Semitic or a Conspiracy Theorist to name two epithets thrown at dissidents and free thinkers. But this is nothing compared to what other people face around the world.

Noam Chomsky was asked by Bernie Dyer if a better world were possible. Possible certainly...but attainable is another question. If people undertake their responsibilities seriously a better world is very possible. But there is an inverse correlation between opportunity and commitment. Typically it’s the people who live under repression and deprivation and face serious penalties and lack privilege who are working hard to build a better world. Those who have the opportunity and every kind of privilege typically throughout history subordinate themselves to power.

People who are really sincere about the belief that a better world is possible will refuse to take power. In fact they will try to undermine institutions that even grant power. Maybe to some extent certain kinds of authority are required to delegate responsibility but one who is really interested in a decent world would want to reduce that to the absolute minimum…in fact to constantly be challenging authoritarian relationships and institutions and require them to justify themselves. Sometimes they can be justified but the burden of justification is always on authority and domination. It is never legitimate in itself. That’s true even if it’s a family or an international society.

Noam Chomsky was also asked whether popular movements were taking the place of the organised Left Political Parties in the task of building a new society and whether this explained the disarray of The Left. Well, he replied, I have never really thought that The Left was much in ‘array’ as far as political purposes were concerned. These new popular movements are not taking the place of anything. They’re really new.

The Left has never been anti-globalisation. What is happening now is really international with participation from a vast range of components from society: peasants, working people, environmentalists, intellectuals, poets etc. How far this will go? Who knows? There are a lot of disruptive forces inside and a lot of pressures outside. Maybe this one will fail but even if it fails it succeeds by laying the basis for something that comes next.

You don’t expect anything important to happen in a day…whether it is the elimination of slavery or women’s rights. These are things that take time. If you want to achieve something like an electoral victory that means something you have to spend decades organizing the basis of groups so all local communities can take part. It’s a lot easier in countries where there are more opportunities and wealth and less repression.

Over the Easter weekend I saw the first bluebells opening in the woods around Rye. There are many more waiting to open but with their flowerheads still curled up. Another blue flower now spreading vigorously along the edge of cornfields is veronica agrestis otherwise known as green field speedwell. It has masses of white-eyed bright blue flowers on every plant. By the time MayDay arrives the woods will be carpeted in blue. My horoscope tells me I am due for a strange but pleasing week. If this pans out I will be in southern Sweden on the first of May.

A hundred years ago a foreshock rocked the San Francisco Bay area in California. The great earthquake erupted half a minute later with violent shocks punctuating the strong shaking for about a minute. Most of the damage was inflicted afterwards not by the quake but by the fires that broke out. Roads folded up like paper and gas lines underneath ruptured setting off an inferno that tore through the city. Winds generated by the blaze created a firestorm that sucked air out of buildings and whipped up giant flames. Most of the water mains broke during the quakes. Six thousand people died and 300 000 people were left homeless from a population of 400 000.

I was in San Francisco for a few days in 1981 visiting the ex-boyfriend of Linda Blitz who had a small trust fund he used to fund good causes…small by American standards. My expectations were not high…ex-boyfriend didn’t strike me as quite the right connection…and I turned out to be right. With me in my briefcase was a project I had been working on with a Harvard Law School graduate friend David Halprin.

We felt a need to set up a Center for Conspiracy Studies. David took the idea to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University while I was dispatched to the West Coast to do the rounds. I would have ended up spending ten years of my life on the project so it was just as well that no West Coast funders showed an interest. But somebody took our ideas and ran with them because I have in front of me The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Studies which is very much the end result David and I had in mind 25 years ago.

A strange thing happened to me when I arrived in East Africa in 1972 after a three month trek by long wheel-base Land Rover from London in the company of my Swedish wife Ingrid, my Cambridge flatmate Robin Garnett and a young bookseller and barrow boy from Manchester Les Smith who I had met on my previous trek to South Africa.

Ingrid had a degree in microbiology and soon found a job with the Wellcome Trust at a laboratory in East Africa. With Ingrid’s job assured I then went job hunting and ended up with a part-time posting at the University of East Africa alongside a full-time job with Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners…a firm of civil engineering consultants.

It was at this juncture that Ingrid found she was pregnant with our first child which led to something of a moral dilemma for her. There would be no sign of her pregnancy for several months…by which time she would have made herself indispensible…so my advice was for her to officially discover her pregnancy in a couple of months time. But being young and naïve and Swedish, Ingrid felt distinctly uncomfortable taking up her new job under false pretences and resolved to confess all to the Wellcome Trust. She never got the chance.

Wellcome called her up and told her they had changed their minds. Their job offer was withdrawn. Ingrid was delighted with this outcome but I thought it a little strange and wanted to push for an explanation. With hindsight I conjectured that they changed their minds because Ingrid was young and naïve and Swedish…and not necessarily in that order. Ingrid had learnt in her interviews that the laboratory was doing research on green monkeys.

AIDs or Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome is the final fatal stage of infection for people with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Sufferers have their immune systems wiped out which makes them susceptible to diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis and Kaposi’s sarcoma…a form of skin cancer common in the end stages.

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Studies informs me that the precise origin of HIV remains unknown but according to one broadly accepted scientific theory the disease originated among green monkeys in Africa and somehow become transmitted to people, possibly because they hunted and ate the monkeys as ‘bush meat’. However not everyone goes along with this explanation. Many link the higher prevalence of AIDs in Africa to something more sinister.

In late 2003 the Catholic Church instructed people in AIDs-stricken countries not to use condoms. The head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family Cardinal claims HIV was small enough to pass through the net formed by condoms. The WHO says this is nonsense. But then what does the World Health Organisation know about pins and angels?

Men and women cope with cancer very differently. Men seek information about their illness and the latest treatments whereas women mostly seek emotional support and advice about the impact of cancer on their family and friends. The report in Social Science & Medicine was based on a study of int