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 internet postings.

I try to give Rye’s Own an article every other month. The obvious subject for the May 2006 issue was the Rye Marina as last week’s Rye Observer had announced that the Millward Homes Development Plan had been kicked off the Rother Local Plan. But so murky is the planning process that nobody has much idea what this means in practice. So instead I cribbed some remarks about planning from John Papworth’s Purton Today and wrapped it inside an article entitled Real Local Power. Here is is the start of the 1375-word article that went off to Rye’s Own at midday today.

Most small towns in England have a local environment group. Here in Rye it is the Rother Environmental Group looked after by Christopher Strangeways. They brought the Wednesday Farmers’ Market to Rye. One vital function performed by these environmental groups is to monitor planning. No subject breeds more copious paperwork. A few paragraphs later I introduced Woking’s carbon emissions strategy. Here is most of the rest of the article.

Woking Borough Council calculated that in 1990 their population of ninety thousand souls emitted collectively a million tons of carbon dioxide. They read the report by The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and decided to see if they could reach the report’s targets by reducing these emissions by eighty percent. They never asked anyone’s permission. Who’s business is it other than their own? They just went ahead.

Woking did not feel the need for a Kyoto Treaty with Wokingham. Nobody came up with the idea of a Carbon Emission Trading Exchange for Berkshire. There were no thoughts that their share of the sixty billion pounds promised for cleaning up Nuclear Power Plants should be diverted to a County Fund for Countering Global Warming…as James Lovelock has proposed. They just had a few bright people think about the local problem of carbon emissions and come up with a local plan and a local strategy to reduce their own pollution to 200 000 tons.

One key element in Woking’s local plan is to convert the town to combined heat and power sources of energy. How can a town do such a thing? Actually quite easily. The economies of scale are one of the myths of our age. Producing your own power is much more efficient than taking electricity from the National Grid. Most fuel cells run on hydrogen but there are some that convert natural gas to energy at the cost of little more than a conventional boiler. Gas consumption is unchanged but electricity is generated as a byproduct. There are 25 million households in this country and British Gas who will be backing the Ceres micropower initiative reckons two thirds of them are suitable for these home micro-power plants…like disconnecting your BT landline and going with Skype.

Buying electricity from unscrupulous foreign-based intermediaries and letting the French off the pollution hook by paying rigged prices for the surplus nuclear electricity they clandestinely pipe through the Channel Tunnel is a mug’s game. Rye does not need to play. After all, what is best? A small group in Rye battling for the public weal or a small group in positions of power (presumed to be) battling for it for the nation at large?

The Rye Town Region has a tenth the population of Woking so our carbon dioxide emissions will be around 100 000 tons per year. The town should reduce this to 10 000 tons. That will bring in tourists from all around the world to find out how we did it. Next year’s Independent Rye Town Council should join with other like-minded town councils in associations like the South East Climate Change Partnership to claim back real Local Public Powers over airborne pollution as an extension of their responsibility for land-bourne pollution such as sewerage.

Rye Town Council already has the right to be consulted on planning matters. The new council should not feel itself limited to reclaiming old powers that have fallen into disuse. It should get ahead of the game and start wielding Future Public Powers locally. It should insist that Planning Applications within the town…and by agreement with the surrounding parishes also within the Rye Town Region…comply with Rye Local Plan Carbon Emission Targets. One of the golden rules of power is that it must be won. Sometimes this can be done without a fight.

Christopher Strangeways may have missed out by 111 votes in the May 2006 elections but his slate of a couple of dozen new local candidates from an Independent Democratic Rye Party should be a shoo-in 12-months hence when all sixteen council seats are up for grabs. It is time that Rye once again had a local scene of disinterested and dedicated citizens devoting their lives to making things better for the people in Rye and her surrounding parishes.

As such people start to acquire real power to make real decisions on local affairs…rather than to serve on powerless committees…so they will involve more and more local people in their work and the present cult of passivity in politics will start to change. When asked how to invigorate democracy my thoughts never turn to Messrs. Blair-Brown, Cameron or anyone up there to tell us local people how to run our local matters. ‘What do you thing of John Major?’ my mother once asked me. ‘I don’t think of John Major,’ was my response. Instead here in Rye…and in all the other Ryes around the country…I turn to good people like Sonia Holmes, John Izod, Jo Kirkham, Christopher Strangeways and others whom I know can be trusted.