William Shepherd

I promised I would take you for Teatime at Marshbeck. Today is as good a day as any. LHPs are leisure, home and personal informatic sets and this piece first appeared in the revised 1983 edition of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson. It is the afternoon of 5th January 2050. A few days ago the 21st century reached the half-way mark. The occasion has made people think. They are still talking about the New Year Celebrations, and the various ideas about the past and the future that came up.. Emily Malik, Eskimo Johnson, and their two children, Bruno (aged eight) and Shantih (aged six), are a typical English family group. Their way of life is typical too. They live in a village called Marshbeck a few miles from a town centre called Trentside about a hundred and fifty miles from London.

Emily and Eskimo originally came to Marshbeck as a result of a contact made through the LHP. A house and work-role had become vacant and the members of the cluster concerned were seeking a new family group to take the place of the people who had left. As they were reminded during the New Year celebrations, their grandparents and great grandparents seventy years ago did not have LHPs linked to the worldwide networks. The possibility of combining telephones, television sets and computer terminals had long been foreseen but it was not until after 1990 that LHPs began to come in as standard domestic equipment. Similarly, it was not until the ‘90s that clusters of houses owned in common by the residents came in as a regular form of home occupation and neighbourhood living, after the final breakdown of the old money system had brought publicly provided housing virtually to an end and put personal house purchase out of most people’s reach.

Emily’s and Eskimo’s predecessors at Marshbeck has been invited to move to PISCES (the Pacific Inter Species Communication and Empathy School) in Tahiti to work out their growing commitment to the Marine Consciousness Movement. The cluster needed someone to take their house who would also take responsibility for managing the minifarm. This suited Emily well and Eskimo discovered that the Biodegradable Plastics and Recycling Unit in Trentside would give him three days work a week, monitoring their automated quality control. He also found that the Marshbeck Community Health Centre would be an ideal place to develop his capacities as a healer. So Emily and Eskimo visited Marshbeck and met the residents of the cluster. Then both sides made a few enquiries, agreement was quickly reached, and the newcomers moved in and took up their share in the common ownership.

That was about five years ago. Their cluster is a little smaller than the average. It covers about six acres. The minifarm occupies three. Buildings and private houses occupy the rest. There are three other family houses, two four-room bungalows for elderly people, one of which is shared by three people and the other by two, and a teenagers’ mess containing six bedsitters, a common room, kitchen and shower room. In addition to the teenagers’ mess and the sheds for the minifarm, other shared buildings contain: the deep-freeze units; food-processing equipment for making breads, meats, jams, chutneys, cheeses, wines, beers, and so on; the laundry; and a repair and maintenance workshop with tools for repairing clothes, household furniture and equipment, minifarm equipment, electronic and electrical equipment, bicycles and other vehicles, and buildings.

There is also a coppice, a small communications and operations office with informatic facilities more sophisticated than the ordinary living room LHPs. Several of the cluster’s residents use the coppice for their work: for example, Harley Jones does Environmental and Architectural Consultancy; Sheelah Mackenzie calculates personalised diet and exercise optimisations; and Pik Musgrove puts together multi-media skill-transfer packs. It is Pik, in fact, who - with his nineteen-year-old daughter Indira and her friend Herbert from Lagos - has dropped in on Emily and Eskimo this afternoon. Harley Jones’ mother, Meg, an elderly widowed lady who shares one of the bungalows, is also there. Pik is a recent widow; Marika, his partner, died last summer after an accident at a solar-powered bike-plane show in Arizona. Indira met Herbert during her community service last year at a Biotechnics Centre in China, where they learned to use bacteriological techniques in urban horticulture. They came back together by Round-the-World Windship just before Christmas.

Herbert remarks how strange it is that in England mid-afternoon is still called tea-time and mid-morning is still called coffee-time although it must be thirty or forty years since people living outside the tea- and coffee-growing areas of the world have drunk tea and coffee regularly. Emily doesn’t find this surprising; surely, she says, one of the functions of language is to reassure us that things haven’t changed all that much; later generations use the same words as earlier ones, and don’t recognise that what the words refer to is something quite new. Pik has recently been doing historical research with the Trentside Community Communications Society for their contribution to New Year’s Eve Worldwide. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and I think this is especially true of the last sixty or seventy years. The biggest changes that have taken place since the 1980s, when the great transformation gathered speed, have been intangible changes…changes in what some of our grandparents used to call software, meaning people’s ways of thinking, communicating and organising. The deep, unspoken priorities have changed…to be continued next Sunday.

For the past few days I have been stepping over a box of spilled matches…half of them struck…when leaving my boat to go into town in the mornings. They are the first thing I see as I step off the catwalk onto the bank. Today I noticed the matchbox itself on the other side of the wall and this gave me just enough of an incentive to clear up the mess. So imagine my surprise when I got to Jempson’s Coffee House and read in the Rye Observer that Sussex Police had put out a call for help to catch the Rye Arsonist. Over the past four months there have been 25 deliberate fires in litter bins and in the undergrowth with many of them being set very early in the morning. Hmmm! A set-up?

While perusing The Times in Jempsons, Taxi Driver John popped in for coffee leaving his dog outside. Taxi driver is something of a misnomer. John is one of three partners in a firm that owns a couple of hundred London Cabs and he is seriously rich. He owns Gallant Maid who sits in the berth next to Vemara…so you could say we are quite close. As the police have identified Dog Walkers as their key suspects I thought I would fill John in on the details. Well one thing led to another…as they do…so by the end of our conversation we had our own Prime Suspect.

Peter Butler has been my eyes and ears on the moorings. It was Peter who told me somebody had walked off with Vemara’s compass while I was in Llangolman. Peter has a record. He has done time. His story is that the owner of a petrol station in Lincolnshire failed to show him respect so he set fire to the place…and then waited until the police came to give himself up. Peter is the most important person in Rye as he opens and closes the Public Toilets every day and makes sure they are clean and in good working order. John calls him Peterloo…and this is how gossip starts.

This week I sent out a bunch of invoices. These take time to prepare. Nowadays most go by e-mail and arrive on the client’s desk in the twinkling of an eye. But they can be rather fiddly because errors are not allowed. Also no two translators have the same rates. But my wordsmith plus microbusiness has not been this healthy for several years. Nine invoices were sent out during the first quarter …£ 5773 in total in four different currencies...pounds, dollars, euros and kronors. Two have been paid putting £ 1093 in the kitty. The balance of £ 4680 will be through later this month. My Barclays Business Account is what the solicitors call a Client Account with beneficiaries dotted all around the globe...in Sweden, United Kingdom, New Zealand and then some.

I manage my microbusinesses by cash and margins. The theory is that with a decent handle on margins I can improve cash budgeting and operating profit. The first quarter figures worked out quite neatly. William Franklin & Sons earns ten percent for managing everybody’s money...and paying UK taxes. In the first quarter I earned another ten percent managing the more complicated projects (6.6%) and making my own contribution as an English Wordsmith (3.3%).

Add a few dozen zeros to my micro-figures and much the same is going on at Her Majesty’s Treasury. My big day each year is 22nd March. My father was born on this day 100 years ago. Each year on this day I file online the Annual Return for the company I inherited from him...retrospectively...William Franklin & Sons Limited. This year on 22nd March The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP delivered his Budget Speech in celebration of the centenary of my father’s birth...which was jolly decent of him even though he forgot to mention it in his preamble.

Blair stands up at the Dispatch Box and tells bare-faced lies. Brown has a different approach. He doesn’t lie. But he doesn’t tell the truth either. He just leaves out the really important bits in the vain hope that nobody notices. Matthew Parris is not so easily duped. If Brown sent Our Boys to Hong Kong to protect British Interests when China attacks Taiwan...or when civil war breaks out in China...there would be no dodgy dossiers…he would just fail to mention it.

Brown is planning the most sweeping change to English Trust Law for centuries and he intends it to apply retrospectively. As it happens I applaud the Chancellor for this. But Retrospective Legislation is unfair. So unfair in fact that it amazes me that no Court has seen fit to throw out measures based upon such an illegitimate principle.

On my father’s anniversary Brown delivered a long tedious Budget Statement. It contained everything but the kitchen sink yet his radical reform of the Trust Laws...the most controversial and far-reaching of all his proposals...was simply left out from his speech and relegated to some obscure corner of the reams of small print that always accompany a Brown Paper. I have no problem with a Socialist Chancellor abolishing the division between the Britain that hires accountants and lawyers to avoid Inheritance Taxes and the Britain that does not.

But Brown should say he is doing it. And he should be proud that he is doing it. So proud in fact that he announces it in The House before an audience of his peers...and I don’t mean those Blair have appointed to the other place. My suspicion is that Brussels is the treason that dare not speak its name. Brown may be doing the right thing…but he may be doing it for all the wrong reasons. English Law comes in two flavours: Common Law and Equity Law. There is nothing remotely like this in the Napoleonic Code. Trusts comes under the jurisdiction of our Courts of Equity which apply the strange judicial notion of fairness to their deliberations. Methinks I smell a great big EuroRat.