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.