Last Friday’s disparaging remarks about the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs prompted a response from our Chief Veterinary Officer. ‘Sir,’ she wrote, ‘I am concerned that you described [DEFRA’s] response to the discovery of the dead swan in Fife as ‘worrying’. The bird was reported at 6.40 pm on March 29 and picked up at 1pm the next day. It arrived at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge the following day.’ Debby Reynolds continued. ‘The VLA works 24 hours per day 7 days per week. It conducts its work based on risk. Suspected cases in poultry are dealt with more quickly and out of normal office hours because of their potential to have more serious consequences than wild birds collected as part of routine surveillance.’

Debby then goes on to inform me that there have been 1100 wild birds submitted to Weybridge since the end of February’ and that ‘the swan samples were subjected to tests on April 3-4. These were more challenging than usual because of the state of decomposition of the tissue. These tests led to the announcement on April 5 of the H5 strain. Identifying the N-type and isolating the virus took longer and the VLA were able to do that only on April 6.’ So that’s all right then. But is it? If I understand this aright then we have hundreds of dead birds coughing and sneezing their way to Weybridge from the far reaches of the kingdom…spreading bird flu as they go. Now I am really worried.

A couple of months ago James Robertson posted on his website a new introduction to Future Work…first published in 1985. Helen Dew in New Zealand brought it to my notice over the weekend. According to James Robertson world society is in the early stage of a great transformation. One outcome will be a liberation of work as we go beyond slavery, serfdom and wage slavery…otherwise known as employment…all of which involve people working for a minority superior to themselves. As this process continues people will work more freely than conventional employment allows. They will do good, useful and rewarding work for themselves, for other people and for society. In Future Work James Robertson called this ownwork…a term included in my Curriculum Vitae.

Such progress as there has been in recent years has been destroying the ecosystems of our planet to a point where people all over the world now realise that the future of the human species and many other species is endangered. Globalised capitalism in its present form has been systematically widening the gap between rich and poor countries, and between rich and poor people in every country, to a point increasingly seen as intolerable and unsustainable.

The impoverished Third World is now exerting effective opposition to the unjust system of international trading and finance imposed on them by the Euro-American powers. Combined with the growing strength and economic power of countries like China and India and Brazil, this will spell the end of the 500-year period of Euro-American world domination and leadership. All this means that world development is going to take a new direction which will bring changes in the kinds of work people do, the ways they work, and the way work is organised.

In Britain although official unemployment has gone down the number of people receiving disability benefits instead of unemployment benefits has gone up so much that the government has decided it is out of control. The number of people in employment has increased partly because both parents of young children have found it financially necessary to get a job outside the home and the government has positively compelled many single mothers to do so.

Many new jobs created in the past 20 years are not pensionable. In general the ability and readiness of employers to contribute to pensions for their employees is also declining. The Old Labour assumption that most people will be able to rely on employment to provide them with a decent pension when they retire is no longer valid. There is not only a pensions crisis on the horizon but the certainty of a breakdown in the employment way of organising work.

But in his new 2006 introduction to Future Work James Robertson mentions more positive, forward-looking factors in favour of the Future Work approach. Projects by the New Economics Foundation have been generating practical understanding and practical experience of that approach to the future of work at local level. Practical proposals have also been worked out for a systematic reconstruction of the scoring system for the game of economic life at every level This will make it easier for people and localities to control their own economic lives.

Nowadays politicians talk about social entrepreneurs and enabling public policies first floated in The Sane Alternative and Future Work. Not too far from the public domain is the idea of a Citizen's Income referred to by James Robertson in Future Work as a Guaranteed Basic Income. James Robertson sees a Citizen's Income replacing an equivalent amount of public spending as one element in a reconstruction of money and finance.

In Future Wealth Robertson proposes that a Citizen’s Income be financed by new sources of public revenue that replace existing taxes on incomes, value added and business profits. Robertson’s new sources of public revenue include taxes on common resources…such as the value of unimproved land and unextracted energy…along with new non-tax revenue such as the profit from creating additions to another common resource…the national money supply.

I had my day well-organised. But so much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. ‘Events dear boy events’ as Harold Macmillan remarked when asked the most difficult thing about being Prime Minister. At 0901 Swedish time a text arrived. ‘Need your help urgently this morning.’ It was a Film Synopsis for SKF… by midday. So that was the morning shot. On the other hand thirteen hundred words is a hundred pounds in the kitty so I can’t really complain.

My son almost worked for SKF in the days when they were part of the Wallenberg Empire. If my memory serves me right he was up for interview in Gävle…but perhaps it was Sandvik. Anyway he ended up wage-slaving for Asea Brown Boveri in Västerås. With hindsight everything probably worked out for the best because the Wallenberg holding company Investor offloaded SKF in one of their recent investment shuffles…while retaining ABB.

Investor has 85% of its holdings tied up in ten core investments…ABB, AstraZeneca, Atlas Copco, Electrolux, Ericsson, Gambro, Saab, Scania, SEB and WM-data…where SEB is Sveriges Enskilda Banken. Investor bunches these into four groups…technology, healthcare and financial services…worth two billion pounds each at stock market prices…and engineering worth four billion with Atlas Copco and ABB hovering around two billion and Scania and Electrolux making the Investor grade at five hundred million pounds apiece. Not bad for a small country with a population of just nine million But transnational corporations assure us they don’t think in nationalistic terms…although my son tells some amusing stories about the Swiss and the Swedes inside ABB.

Heidi texted me mid-morning and we arranged to meet for lunch. Alan’s last minute discovery of an untranslated piece of synopsis meant turning up without shaving but this has its advantages…a kiss on the lips instead of on my stubbly cheek when we parted at two. I am not sure what to make of these meetings. In the past when a relationship ended I usually moved away avoiding the emotional fall-out problems. Ah well. All part of life’s moth-eaten tapestry.

I felt strangely depressed most the day. I hate Mondays so put the blame on the Romans. But there was the sense of anti-climax after the concert the night before. Sandra said she had enjoyed the concert and it had gone well enough. In Faurés Requiem the basses came in two beats early at one place leading to a ripple of confusion for the tenors, alto and soprano entries. But we recovered quickly and inflicted only ten seconds of dodgy harmonies on the audience…which went unnoticed by nearly all of them. Then there was lunch with Heidi.

Every year well over a hundred thousand divorces take place in this country involving getting on for half a million people. During our lifetime we have a 1 in 2 chance of getting directly involved in divorce. In a sane world we would probably arrange to get married by lawyers and divorced by priests but this is not the way we do it. I know people who still suffer from the trauma of badly handled divorces from decades ago. And for every divorce there must be several times as many break-ups…and breaking up is hard to do. Here is a list of 32 social realities that are not adequately addressed in our present doctrine of divorce. Goodness knows what is to be done? So much misery

Costs of litigation / rise in property values / change in expectations / change in matrimonial roles / the multicultural society / religious differences / employment & earnings of women / the mediation service / choice of jurisdictions / father access to children / prenuptial contracts / no-fault divorce / civil partnerships / long-term impact on children / length of marriage / length of previous partnership / separation of partnerships other than civil partnerships / pension rights / impact of rising longevity / press freedom to report / change in attitude to extra-marital sex / change in attitude to physical violence / acceptance of promiscuity / abuse of children / the 50-50 split / share of future earnings / tax treatment of marriage / decline of the extended family / grandmothers in full-time employment unavailable as child carers / impact of care for the elderly / impact of drink & drugs / impact of modern working hours.

Heidi and I had quite an extensive exchange back in January before our private equivalent of the Valentine’s Day (emotional) Massacre we inflicted upon each other. At one point I remarked that I didn’t feel she was seeing me but was instead inventing some caricature of her theories about me muddled up with her theories about men and her experience of other partners in her life. And I followed it up with a plea to ‘please try to see me’.

In my exasperation I also felt the need to point out that I was not a bundle of categories like man, white, English etc. but a person. ‘Please look for the person’, I pleaded, ‘and not some straw man you set up so you can knock him down to boost your own self esteem. You don't need to do this’. Perhaps not the most diplomatic thing to say.

I ended the exchange by remarking that I did not accept Heidi’s idea that people ‘sort things out and then move on in happiness and harmony’. In my view by sharing oneselves and one’s life one gradually learnt to be kinder and more caring by talking with each other and reflecting on the conversations alone afterwards. There is not some magic make-over with a before and after. Life is problems…and the interesting ones were worth grappling with. T’is said that hell is people…but then so is heaven. William Blake’s The Clod & The Pebble is saying much the same.