Yesterday’s weblog left Nicholas and Andrea sleeping soundly at the Windmill Guest House on Thursday night after they had spent Wednesday night in Gay Parie and the following morning in the Gardens of Versailles before hurtling through the Channel Tunnel on Thursday evening to join me for a few drinks at The Ship Inn in Rye.

On Friday morning I strolled over to meet them for breakfast after getting up early to work on my spoof Global Warming piece for my 24/5 weblog. But a funny thing happened on my way to the Windmill. The evening before Nicholas had stood on the bank admiring a Fisher Motorsailer in excellent condition standing proudly on the bank at Rye Yacht Centre protecting Vemara from marauding foreigners. In the morning I found it gone…but then spotted it on a low loader over by the boatyard gates. I managed a few words with Tradewinds’ owner before he drove off.

It was a sad day for Vic Read. He has been sailing out of Rye for 40 years and this boat had been moored in Rye for the past 14 years. Our quick nostalgia check confirmed that he had known Connie and remembered the day Will ‘o the Wisp was wrecked in Pegwell Bay this side of Ramsgate. Vic was sending his vessel to Inverness in the far north of these islands. ‘Pity I didn’t bump into you earlier. Thought I recognised Vemara. Got a couple of Connie’s plaques on the wall back home. Some miniatures in the boat too ‘til I cleared it out for the trip last week. Lovely lass.’

The day was warm, wet and windy…not like Geoffrey Chaucer’s May of 700 years ago that ‘nyl shrouded ben / And it with new leves wryen / These greves eke recoveren grene / That dry in wynter ben to sen / And the erthe waxeth proude withal / For swete dewes that on it falle’…from the prologue to his Canterbury Tales. The Windmill was overrun with black leather-clad German bikers. ‘Long weekend in Germany,’ Nicholas assured le patron. We toured the Anciente Towne…dropping bags off at Vemara en route. Nicholas and Andrea even found themselves treated to an unscheduled encounter with Heidi…taking coffee with the former Mayoress of Lewisham recently moved to the neighbouring parish of Brede…as we strode past The Runcible Spoon along Cinque Ports Street.

Anxious not to fall too far behind with my blogging three hours were scheduled at PCHut. But first it was a birthday greeting to Andrea’s grandmother’s on my new William Norris Shepherd Skype account. So father and son got to do some male bonding getting Skype ready for action for the first time. The deal included a heap of free minutes so Nicholas decided to call Y Beudy and talk to his big sister. He caught her just as she was driving away from her wee Welsh cottage for the very last time. She had chanced across someone in Totnes going away for three months so it made sense to move straight away instead of in September as planned. We discussed Y Beudy phone matters.

While I toiled away in my PC Hut office my Swedish guests fought their way through mud, wind and rain to the shores of the English Channel…beyond Rye Harbour to Winchelsea Beach a mile further on. Afterwards it was Fish and Chips in The Mint, a drink before the Great Fireplace in The Mermaid Inn, a brief session with Meads Books to install recently arrived ABE Books software and back to Vemara for the bags before setting out for the 1950 train. The next stop for the intrepid Crocodile Uppsala was to be Ashford, Charing Cross and Balham where they were to overnight with some old school friends of Andrea before returning to Stockholm by air by way of Le Bourget.

Last week Nicholas was in Kuala Lumpa on ABB business and was curious about house occupancy in Rye because he had discovered that the Malaysian Government takes the same approach to empty dwellings as the Norwegian Government. In Rye it is a big problem with many houses standing empty all year round. But in Norway and Malaysia the governments see little sense in building more dwellings when there are enough already so instead laws have been passed requiring owners to live in their houses. Leave them empty for too long and they are forfeited. The result? Not irate homeowners but cheap rents for people who live and work in the countryside and in remote fishing villages beloved by Oslo’s urban elite. Nobody wants to lose their house so reliable house sitters are at a premium.

If New Labour were not in the pockets of the House Builders and Property Developers similar laws would have been introduced here nine years ago. But instead it is garden grabbing, green belt encroachment, building on flood plains and political corruption as land companies and commercial operators do what is necessary to squeeze money out of undeveloped land so their shareholders can lay claim to the windfall gains that accrue when planning permission is granted. Garden grabbing illustrates the problem and now accounts for 15% of all new houses…up from 11% when New Labour took office in 1997. Ever more lawns are being seized for development with the government complicit in this Garden Grabbing by decreeing that any back garden longer than 100 feet is prime land for housing.

Neighbours routinely object but local authorities are reluctant to turn down planning applications because they lose on appeal when the case goes to the Department for Communities and Local Government…and have to pay a small fortune in legal costs. The social corrosion has gone so deep that we are now two nations…those with properties and those on housing benefit. There is nothing like it anywhere else in Europe. It is rotting the fabric of English society.

The intrepid Nicholas John…and his fiancée Andrea...left Stockholm on Wednesday morning, flew into Le Bourget airport in Paris, spent the afternoon sizing up the Palace of Versailles and then rode Eurostar from Gare de Nord to Ashford International to meet up with me on Platform Two at Rye Station at ten to eight. I took them to their overnight accommodation…the Windmill Guest House. It was a historic night for the visiting Swedish couple.

Rye Windmill sits on a site in Gibbet Marsh by the River Tillingham with the Ashford-Brighton trains rolling gently past twice an hour. The mill was there before the railways. In fact a wind energy contraption has been on the site since the sixteenth century...if not before. There is one marked on the 1594 Synmondons Map of Rye as evidence. The mill’s first recorded owner was Thomas Chatterton who built a Post Mill in Rye in 1758. His widow Mary sold it to Frederick Barry who demolished it in 1820 to erect a Smock Mill. Milling continued until 1912 when the Webbs of Rye bought it to use as a working bakery. In 1930 the bakery ovens overheated and destroyed the wooden structure on the mill…leaving just the two-story brick base. The mill was rebuilt in 1932 and continued as a bakery until 1976 when it became a pottery...so the ovens had a final lease of life until the mill became a guest house in 1986.

The fire took place on Friday the 13th…and a Friday and the 13th falling on the same day is bad news…but only in English-speaking cultures. In Greek and Spanish cultures Tuesday the 13th gets the bad press…begging the question of how Brussels plans to harmonise bad luck across Europe. Thirteen has a long history of bad luck because the Lunisolar Calendar needs 13 months some years for it to work and both solar Gregorian Calendars and lunar Islamic Calendars stick to 12 months. At the last count there seemed to be three superficially plausible explanations.

In the Norse Myths twelve gods are a-feasting in the hall of the sea-god Aegir when Loki gate-crashes the party as an uninvited thirteenth guest. He persuades the blind god of darkness Hod to throw some mistletoe at Balder the god of joy and gladness which kills Balder and plunges the Earth into darkness and mourning. So the tale goes at least.

The trouble with this version is that the Old Norse original is Lokasenna in the Edda of the Icelandic Sagas and the poet lists not twelve but seventeen gods by name…and Baldur fails to put in an appearance. But Feminist Literature likes this version because Friday is named after a goddess in most European pagan calendars and thirteen has to do with lunar cycles. Hence fear of Friday the 13th is a patriarchal invention where femininity equals bad luck. QED.

Next comes the Christian version…and Christianity is adept at cloaking pagan traditions with a Christian veneer. Their focus is The Last Supper. Thirteen people present; Jesus crucified on Good Friday; hence Friday bad and Friday the 13th worse; Quod Erat Demonstrandum. This might sneak past George Bush and his Bible-Bashing Literalists but the problem is that Friday the 13th was not particularly unlucky until Victorian times and the timing is wrong when the Crucifixion is placed in its Jewish Passover setting and removed from the Church’s liturgy. And so to the Jewish version…the Book of Exodus 12:6…and the first Passover of them all with the death of the first born in Egypt. This took place on a Shabbat on the 14th of Nisan in the evening. As the Jewish calendar counts days from sunset to sunset this would have been Friday the 13th in Gentile reckoning. It gets worse. The Da Vinci Code next.

It was on Friday 13th October 1307 that Philip IV of France arrested, tortured and massacred hundreds of the French Knights Templar to get their money for the French treasury. Perhaps we should not dismiss too readily these echoes from the massacre of the Knights Templar 623 years earlier when contemplating the fate of our windmill in 1930. One must be rather careful about dismissing such synchronicities…even when separated in time and space. John Seymour…the guru of self-sufficiency…cast his eyes upon the mill in 1993 and shortly afterwards established his Order of the Knights of Gaia. He was distinctly unimpressed with Rye’s pride and joy. As he expressed it to myself and John Papworth at the time ‘There are enough damn museums in this country! Get the bloody thing working!’

To Indians Friday is Shukravar and derives from Shukra the Vedic Venus. Frigedæg in Old English means the Day of Frige…the Germanic goddess of beauty that the Norsefolk call Freja. After the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain Frige replaced Venus the Roman god of beauty as the fifth day of the week in Northern Climes. But in the Beautiful South and their Romance languages Venus lived on as vendredi in French, venerdi in Italian, viernes in Spanish, vineri in Romanian and so on while the Germanic languages insisted that Frige rule their weekend world…Friday is freitag in German, vrijdag in Dutch, fredag in Swedish and…oy vej…pity Les Pauvres Bureaucrats de Bruxelles.

Enough of Fraser’s Golden Bough. Here were the four of us…Ilbereth was there…thirteen years on from The Private Papers of Crocodile Uppsala sipping Strongbow Cider and Harvey’s Home Brew at The Ship Inn (sipping?). By the time the chairs were on the table, the music dead and the lights dimmed we knew that catching up on two years in one evening was not to be. Sufficient unto the day be the evil thereof. Tomorrow will be today too. Think digital radio. In cyberspace everything is relative. There was not enough time and space for Friday. Einstein has a lot to answer for.

The Chinese auction house Beijing Huachen has heeded the view of the Chinese Government and withdrawn the famous 1950 painting of Mao Zedong. It is now in talks with Chinese museums. I had a similar experience two years ago when I stepped in and purchased privately one of Connie’s Rye Maritime Heritage paintings for £500 to stop it going under the hammer at Rye Auction Galleries. At the time I scrambled to raise the money…and perhaps it would have made sense to let it go to auction to establish a price for Connie’s artwork. But I decided to stop the sale.

On the Rye Maritime Heritage Project…apart from meeting orders from Rye booksellers Martello and Meads Books and wholesalers like Gardners…my only activity since Connie’s death has been this buy back of one of the five paintings in the Rye Heritage Collection in private hands. To understand the situation some background is required.

Connie completed the last of her thirty-six (40”x30”) watercolours for her Maritime Heritage Collection a few weeks before her death in November 2002. The plan was to have Rye’s Maritime Heritage in local bookshops by Christmas 2003. This would have meant that the 2000 copies of Rye From the Water’s Edge…a pocket edition with seventy-two pen & ink drawings that combined Connie’s Rye Maritime Heritage pictures with her images of Future Rye…printed in 1996 and selling steadily for £9.95 each...would have sold out some time this year after providing a profit to Academic Inn Books’ Rye Water’s Edge Partnership of around ten thousand pounds.

By then the 16 author shares held by John Seymour…as well as Connie’s 16 illustrator shares…would have yielded about £150 per share. For my 32 shares…16 in my own right as the partnership’s Merchant Adventurer and 16 held as Capital Shares by William Franklin & Sons Limited to finance the project…this would have meant a nice little earner over ten years of around £500 a year. The illustrated coffee table editions of Rye’s Maritime Heritage and Future Rye were then to go on sale in local bookshops…and to a mailing list built up over ten years…to provide a further source of profits for the Rye Water’s Edge Partnership in the future.

In contrast to other publishers the authors and illustrators in an Academic Inn Book’s Partnership retain their copyrights...with illustrators leasing theirs back to their partnership on a seven-year lease. The Rye Water’s Edge Partnership took out its first lease in 1996 so Connie’s copyrights were up for Academic Inn Books' first ever lease extension in 2003…the signal for a new programme to exploit the commercial potential of the Rye Maritime Collection as artwork and digital images.

This sums up the Academic Inn Books’ business plan with this particular local partnership providing the commercial template for other partnerships. But Connie’s unexpected death put the whole Academic Inn Books’ Publishing Project on hold when I decided to defer all further work on my publishing interests until the Connie Lindqvist Estate had cleared through probate.

Looking back at the AIB 2005 Business Plan it is clear that I had decided against shutting down AIB and abandoning the dozen publishing projects on the drawing board. With hindsight I should have been more active during 2003 and 2004 as ‘on hold’ has been interpreted by some as ‘handing in the keys’ and ‘walking away’. This is what lies behind Berni Fiddimore’s grab for AIB’s Magpie Sagas stock…together with a disastrous relationship she was in at the time. Ironically one publishing project I pushed ahead with after Connie’s death was the Magpie Sagas Project.

Traditionally Connie had sold her water colour artwork, ceramic tile panels and vertical pottery ware for a penance straight off her easels or drawing boards. But her hourly rate often worked out at a third the minimum wage and a tenth of average UK wages. In 1993 I started to act as Connie’s agent. This meant seeing that digital images and copies were taken of her work and the terms of her work were improved. But these terms had been determined back in the early seventies. They would have outraged both trade unionists and feminists…but applied to all pottery workers in Rye. Connie had to withdraw her labour from Rye Pottery for two years before the novel idea of negotiation was grudgingly accepted and she could sign a new agreement with an acceptable structure.

Our response to the copyright issue was Connie’s own pottery. She did not need to become a potter but was going to buy in her pieces from Staffordshire…as the potteries in Rye often do...or from local independent potters. Selling was the hard part. Rye Pottery has their own stall at the Birmingham Gift Fair every February…and a list of customers worldwide. Iden Pottery and David Sharp Ceramics have sales outlets in Rye and sell to tourists and to local people within a catchment area that stretches to Brighton in the West and to Tunbridge Wells in the north.

Any idea of giving Rye Pottery a commission for selling Connie’s output was only feasible if she negotiated from a position of strength…something that looked like being another long process. But this was the route we were planning to go in 2003. Meanwhile in 2002 Connie had succeeded in getting her own signature on her Rye Pottery tile panels and on her David Sharp Ceramics house plaques. The next step was for Connie to have her own mark on the verticalware (jugs, vases etc) produced for…and sold by…Iden Pottery. More about this another time.

It was cold last night. I gave the boat a half-hearted burst of heat for a few minutes in mid-evening but then thought better of it and dug out a sweater. But we had the best of it. In Scotland the Sassenachs shivered through one of the coldest nights recorded for May with temperatures plunging to 25 Fahrenheit at Tulloch Bridge in the Highlands. Clear skies and an Arctic wind produced a freezing snap. We are clearly heading for a New Ice Age.

On 23rd May 1935 Britain was carpeted in snow. Small villages in the Yorkshire Dales were two to three feet deep in snow and villages had to dig themselves out of their homes according to a report in The Times. Cars were abandoned in snowdrifts on roads and trains derailed on frozen railway points. Devon and Cornwall were said to look like a scene from a Christmas card. The bitter cold spelt disaster for fruit and vegetable farmers from South Wales to Kent.

The Times reported a loss of thousands of pounds in Sittingbourne. In desperation one apple grower used thousands of oil lamps to save his crop from freezing. And at the Chelsea Flower Show exhibitors worked frantically to save prize plants using heaters in greenhouses to keep the blooms alive in the bitterly cold nights. With this wasteful and extravagant use of oil no wonder the world is running out. Oil for flowers indeed!

But what does this tell us about the temperature? Snow was falling so it would have been hovering around 32 Fahrenheit. Humidity levels and wind chill factors would have done the rest. A fall in temperature of seven degrees over 71 years is an average drop of 0.0547731 degrees per year. What a disaster. By 2100 temperatures will have fallen by a massive ten degrees. There will be icebergs in the Thames while Londoners mud-skate on the river’s edge.

But there is some good news. There will be no need to tow icebergs from Greenland to solve the capital’s water shortages. Thames Water will be quarrying its own ice and delivering it to the ice houses of the rich and famous in Thames Ditton and Wokingham. But spare a thought for the poor farmer. There are a thousand Sittingbournes in England and there will be thousands of cold spells between now and 2100. With decades of arctic weather, falling sea levels and declining soil fertility the apple orchards will disappear as the farmers throw themselves on the mercy of the bankruptcy courts and their new Debt Orders. There will be massive emigration to Nigeria and the West Indies.

The flowers of late May are beginning to open. On grassy banks there are startling pink clusters of red campion with their five deeply notched pink petals which open in the daytime. The first ox-eye daisies are also peeping out above the grass with their spreading white rays and bright yellow centres. The name ox-eye was a name affectionately given to Hera, the Queen of Olympian gods. Early Christians dedicated the flower to Mary Magdalen which is how the name Maudlin Daisy originated. Another name for leucanthemum vulgare is the Dun Daisy. Celtic legend told how daisies were the spirits of young children that died during birth and connects the flower with the god of thunder.

Mary Magdalen gets an interesting press. The film of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code had its world film premiere at the Cannes Film Festival a couple of weeks back and was roundly condemned by all the critics. Ordinary people take no notice of critics…despite their worship by the chattering classes…and are flocking to see the film. The idea that a director of Ron Howard’s calibre could produce a bad film or that actors of Tom Hanks’ or Ian McClellen’s standing could choose a film with a bad script was always rather far-fetched. I went to see the film today and loved it.

Just the privilege of watching Audrey Tautou for two hours on the silver screen is worth five pounds of my money. She’s my kinda girl. The film took $200 million in its first three days making it number four in Hollywood’s top opening weekends. Besides it’s time that the Christian churches married Jesus off again.

You will be left in suspense no longer. John Papworth’s mystery dinner guests were Naoko and Luke Cooper. Theirs is an unusual story. Naoko’s English husband is the son of Douglas Barker’s university pal and business partner who died a few years ago. Luke is Naoko’s 11-year old son. His English grandmother lives at Purton House…a paradise for children. So Luke in his wisdom declared that he was not going back to Japan but was staying in Purton.

It is not for me to know just what transpired between mother and father. But Naoko now lives in Purton while Luke’s father lives in Japan with their daughter. Naoko was brought up in Kobe but commutes to London each day and works above Charing Cross Station with Price Waterhouse Cooper…one of the giants of global accountancy. Kobe is the capital of Hyogo Prefecture and is one of Japan's major ports along with those of Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Hakata and Tokyo. It is in the Kansai region to the west of Osaka and was one of the first cities to open for trade with the West in 1868.

From time to time PWC has been on my job-seeker list but jobs are not my thing. However I am responsible for getting Luigi Genazzini to hand them his resignation. I gave him the European Investment Bank job advert from the Sunday Times and told him to go for it. He did…and has been eternally grateful to be ever since.

After dinner Naoko, John, Luke and I stayed up late playing three-card brag. It poured with rain the following morning which was just as well as Naoko had announced her intention of getting up early to mow the lawn. It is a remarkable thing but this is the first time I have sat down to dinner with anyone from Japan. Naoko returns to Japan in July when Luke goes off to an English private school. We expect interesting things of Luke.

Eric Forth…a Conservative Member of the Westminster Parliament…died last week of cancer at the age of 61. The Americans would have recognised him as a libertarian. He believed that human happiness depended on the absence of state restraint and he entered Public Office to secure for his fellow countrymen the fourth freedom…as Leopold Kohr called it in The New Radicalism…freedom from government. Forth believed that it is not what governments do that is the problem but what they are. The obituaries in the press failed to come close to explaining his principles.

The obituaries in the press wrote that Eric Forth was flamboyant and witty and quite a character damning him with faint praise. The English have a poor knowledge of the subtleties and shifting nuances concealed behind the commonest of words. It is often the case that those of some other mother tongue have a better understanding of the language of Churchill and Shakespeare than do its native speakers. Everyone dwelling in these offshore islands should be disciplined to learn Real English as a second language…not just new arrivals and asylum seekers.

If someone calls me flamboyant they are probably referring to my manner of dress…but they may be talking code about my sexuality. If they write that I am witty it means I am not amusing or funny and there is something a little precious and mannered about my sense of humour. However being a character is the worst put-down. It implies that I am fundamentally unserious, a flippant poseur and an attention-seeker. Eric Forth was all of these but more besides.

The new Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell has been under attack recently for his poor performance since his election to the post. He has sought to defend himself by suggesting that there is more to leading a political party than performing in the bear pit of the House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Question Time. In passing he observed that nothing in his training had prepared him for the ordeal of Dennis Skinner heckling in his left ear while Eric Forth heckled in his right ear. This begins to capture something of the man.

On one occasion Menzies Campbell rose to give his party’s view on New Labour’s latest Pension Reform Proposals. He had the Chamber in fits of laughter before he had started. But the tragedy for Menzies Campbell was that he had no idea why. With impeccable timing Eric Forth had muttered so all the house could hear, ‘Declare Your Interest’. The remark went to the heart of much unspoken criticism within his own party for having chosen a veteran to lead them when the Conservatives had turned to a younger generation with David Cameron.

On my way back from Purton I found myself sitting next to Neritan Kallfa…a lawyer and former Central Banker from Tirana in Albania…on the National Express Coach. You get to meet interesting people on these coaches. Neritan got off at Heathrow to catch a flight to Vienna. He was in the UK as a proud uncle visiting his nephew for the first time. His sister…a doctor…and her Jamaican husband…had recently had a baby. We talked all the way.

I have never met an Albanian before but I am now an expert on all things Albanian. We exchanged business cards and promised to get in touch with each other if ever either of us needed help. Albania is a small country with a population of just three million and no mineral deposits or oil fields to help them make their living in the world. So the Albanians have learnt to live off their wits. We decided that where small countries are concerned the trick is to back the winner. Last time around the Albanian backed the wrong horse. We have not heard much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire since it disappeared in 1918. But who knows what the 21st century might bring?

Media Studies is a standing joke to many...conjuring up images of PhDs in Elvis Presley and studies of the Sociology of Big Brother…not the one from 1984. But occasionally something interesting emerges. What begins as shifting verbal fashions…slang to you…in TV soap operas can lead to investigations of cycles, periodicities, correlation and randomness. From here it is one small step to mental abstractions, ideas, thought…and memes.

Within modern-day cultures ideas rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something and then they stop believing until no one can remember the old idea. In fashion as in natural ecology there are disruptions and sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. This happens to science too…the scientific process encourages it. Thomas Kuhn identified the internal mechanisms and structures at work creating these scientific revolutions.

In environmental thought in the 1960s the idea of the balance of nature was widely accepted. Leave nature alone and it will come into a self-maintaining state of balance. The young James Lovelock born in 1926 called it his Gaian Hypothesis but the idea has a longer pedigree…the Ancient Greeks believed it three thousand years ago.

But by the 1990s no scientist believed in the balance of nature anymore. Ecologists spoke of dynamic disequilibrium and multiple equilibrium states. Nature is never in balance, never has been and never will be. Nature is always out of balance. Man…the great disrupter…is nothing of the sort. The environment is being disrupted constantly.

Then one day at the leading edge of Media Studies some American media scientists set their search engines to work analysing the rise and fall of The Idea of Environmental Crisis. Others looked at transcripts of news programmes from the major networks…NBC, ABC, CBS. Others studied stories in the New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles and Seattle newspapers. They got their computers to count the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking. There was a major shift towards the end of 1989.

Before that time the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague or disaster. For example during the 1980s the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition prior to 1989 adjectives such as dire, unprecedented and dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper bulletins. But then it all changed. These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000.

In 1989 the stories changed too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty and panic. The critical question is why it should have changed in 1989 which seemed like a perfectly normal year. A Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other.

But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision to the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should have coincided so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall on the Ninth of November. At first the media scientists dismissed this association as spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet Empire…and the end of a Cold War that had lasted for half a century.

For fifty years Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the Other Side; fear of Nuclear War...the Communist Menace, the Iron Curtain, the Evil Empire. Within the Communist blocs it was the same in reverse…fear of us…but with the heightened fear of personal betrayal and incarceration.

Then suddenly in the fall of 1989 it was all finished…gone, vanished, over. The Fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum and the evidence suggests that instead of inventing the moral equivalent of the Cold War as William James would have wished…in the absence of any initiative from the Left…the Right homed in on Environmental Crisis to serve up for global consumption. But there is an irony here.

As far as the Right is concerned the Environmental Crisis has served its purpose. It is beyond its sell-by date. They have moved on and have generated new fears like Islamic Fundamentalism and Al Quaeda Terrorism. But in reality they have created a monster…and they cannot stop their Fear Machine. It is like the Sorceror’s Apprentice. Communist Menaces, Toxic Environments, Wars against Terrorism…it is unstoppable.

But the environmentalists are trapped in their time warp. The momentum of their careers and their funding means that like military generals they are fighting the last war. The thinking right are doubtless much amused. Be our guests, they cry. Fight your old stale environmental wars. We have moved on. We have created new fears and new wars for your distraction. But it’s no fun having the field to ourselves. When will you start to catch up?

A few weeks ago I got an email from a colleague on the left that went like this. ‘I don't get it. Are you guys saying there's no Global Warming? You think it's all created by fear-mongers in universities? Are you nuts? That's the right-wing line. It's real and it will have…as it already has had…many unintended consequences, most of them disastrous. Along with peak oil, collapse of the dollar and new diseases it will usher in the downfall of Western civilization and maybe worse.’ This is what I should have replied…one always thinks of these things some time afterwards.

What I am saying is that nobody understands climate and that the Precautionary Principle is being misapplied by environmentalists to justify ignorant meddling in a very complicated and very poorly understood process. If the left were to embrace the Precautionary Principle properly they would not be stampeded into meddling around trying to implement half-baked solutions cooked up from contaminated hypotheses like the Greenhouse Carbon Dioxide Theory. Instead we would be working day and night to understand how our planet’s climate works and the short-, medium- and long-term impacts of any meddling we might think was worth doing.

NASA did not rush off to the moon two weeks after Kennedy announced a lunar landing as an American National Goal. They took ten years making sure they knew what to do so they could get there safely and bring their astronauts back home again. Governments and corporations meddling around in today’s state of knowledge on climate is as likely to make matters worse as improve things. And in complex systems things often get worse before getting better.

Then there is the attempt to dismiss my opinions by calling them right wing. There is a set of right-wing views on climate that appears to be similar to mine but there is rather more to it. The right-wing slur for instance is a left wing way of avoiding facing up to uncomfortable truths. There is no scientific consensus on the causes of global warming for instance. If there is any consensus it is that scientific consensus is an oxymoron because science doesn’t work this way. But that is something else. More important is to clarify terms when discussing left and right.

For today think of left and right this way. The left believes everybody is equal. The right believes society needs leaders. A right-wing society works from the top down. A left-wing society works from the bottom up. That’s the theory…then there are the consequences. Authority, leaders and led, us and them is right-wing. Socialism as equal money, one man one vote…wyfman and karlman…and the freedom to do what you like is left-wing.

Both ends of the political spectrum talk of democracy and freedom. But for the right democracy means one dollar one vote…the democracy of the market place…while freedom means being free to be poor. So there are plenty of mind games to contend with. Then there are other ideas like the Rule of Law. For the right-wing this means the powerful use the police to get the powerless to do what they are told. For the left this means equality under the law for rich and poor alike…except that the right have expanded it beyond real persons to judicial persons like corporations.

In the global warming context this right-wing slur is deployed to close down debate and avoid discussion just as anti-Semitic is used to silence anybody who questions Israel. The right is quite skilled at putting such slurs in the mouths of useful idiots on the left. Divide and rule is the name of this game…and agents provocateurs the means employed.

Galbraith once remarked that there were two types of forecasters: those who don't know and those who don't know they don't know. But follow the money and it is clear there is a third category…those who don’t care. Between them these three categories hog 99% of the funding leaving very little over for honest scientists intent on searching for the truth about our planet’s climate. These are either muzzled or neutralised. Others write their headlines and mis-summarise their conclusions and recommendations. Their sound scientific reporting is turned into dodgy dossiers.

Nearly everything published about Global Warming should be labelled: WARNING: Forecasts are produced by Computer Models. The left should be wary of any global warming hypothesis and approach computer forecasts with scepticism...particularly those seeming to emanate from left-wing environmentalists pleading the case of the poor and assuring you they will be overwhelmed by tsunamis and rising sea levels unless The World Community Acts Now.

At the end of the day there is only good science and bad science. Regrettably since the demise of Edward Goldsmith’s scientific journal The Ecologist discriminating between the two is not easy. As a result the Carbonistas have been getting away with rather too many lies and half-truths.

Much of what the left labels right wing is disinformation put out by the right…and their public relations firms...to dupe the useful idiots on the left into shooting themselves in the foot with their Doom & Gloom & Climate Change. Have you noticed how Global Warming and Abrupt Climate Change…the specifics keep shifting as the bad science is exposed…knocks everything else off the global justice agenda while Nuclear Power, World Government and Piped Energy sneak through by the back door? Think about it…like Machiavelli…and ask yourself ‘Who? Whom?’

As always when in Purton I was up with the lark. By the time I moved from the study to the kitchen for breakfast with John at nine o’clock I already had a good day’s work behind me. The two memorable events of the day were to be the monthly meeting of the Conference Planning Group at five and dinner at seven with mystery guests.

The day was wet and rainy so we stayed in and chatted between nine and two when John took his nap. The specifics of what we chatted about escapes me. But I remember being astonished to find John was swinging round to my position on Global Warming. The next morning John was remarkably enthusiastic about the value of my presence over the weekend. So something we talked about clearly struck some nerves with him.

After lunch I arranged web hosting for www.radcon3.net with Fasthosts in Gloucestershire and typed up a memo for the Conference Planning Group on development plans for the website. Much of our conversation would have been about the September conference because when I went to map out the Conference Timetable at crack of dawn the following day everything I needed was in my head…except the launch date for Village Democracy.

Paul Kingsnorth has replaced Zac Goldsmith on the Any Real Questions panel. The Ecologist connection is important to us. Next Saturday Paul is interviewing John for the Ecologist…immediately prior to John’s appearance as Guest of Honour at the first Oxford Academic Inn Dinner-Discussion at the Church of St Mary the Virgin.

After the Bank Holiday weekend 18 000 brochures will be distributed with the Ecologist. Racdon III is picking up the £800 of printing costs. But Zac has done us proud by waiving fees for the privilege of being distributed as an Ecologist insert. Apparently these inserts represent a lucrative part of the business for a magazine like the Ecologist.

The Conference Timetable contains three distinct projects. Their working titles are the REB Project, the Radcon Charter Project and the Resurgence Human Scale Institute Project. Each has a timeline…but they have yet to be resourced. Any Real Questions is a Public Meeting on Thursday 7th September and the Academic Inn is a Dinner-Discussion in Swindon on Saturday 9th September with Douglas Barker of Purton House as the Guest of Honour…and Henry David Thoreau as the Ghost at the Feast. These two events are linked to the REB Project.

It would be nice to record both events as they are formats for some future Fourth World Radio or Radical Television Station by way of RSS feeds coming from around the world. Perhaps I can persuade my fellow REB directors Toni Pinschof and Alan Pryke to put in a bid for the radcon franchise…Cultura Communications looking after media production while the Cliff’s Edge Signalling Company (cesc) takes on sales and distribution.

Toni Pinschof could very successfully play the role of a sort of multilingual Michael Palin. If the money started rolling in visual content could always be added by sending Toni on location shoots around the world. Paul Kingsnorth’s One No Many Yeses lends itself to this REB Approach too so we should talk to him about the film and television rights.

The Real Charter Project begins on Friday 16th June when Dr Aidan Rankin delivers the final draft of the Real Nations Charter and I deliver the final draft of the Neighbourhood Communities Charter. The following Wednesday John Papworth as Conference Convenor calls a meeting of the Radcon Steering Group (RSG) for Wednesday 28/6 to approve the two Charters and discuss post-conference organisations. Afterwards we have a Press Conference to launch the charters while individual patrons do video interviews with journalists like Jane Taylor of Positive News for TV, radio etc. and provide footage for our own Radcon Media team. Hopefully the team is in place by then.

On Wednesday 26/7 final proposals on the structure of the post-conference Radcon Charter Organisations are to be ready…to Share Prospectus quality. These will provide details on legal status…Common Ownership or Private Limited Company, Charitable or Equity Trust etc…with their purpose, mission, shareholders and/or trustees in place.

Scheduled for Wednesday 2/8 is the first get together for the two Working Group Leaders Angela Bates and Dele Oguntimoju and their recorders…myself and Jagdeesh Singh erespectively. Our job is to deliver a rousing endorsement of the Real Nations Charter & Neighbourhood Communities Charter and oversee the election and/or appointment of the trustees and/or officers for Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization and the Edward Goldsmith Institute for Human Scale Ecology at the Final Plenary on Saturday 9th September.

On the Monday following the conference we will be holding the first of three press conferences with the catchy title of Beyond 9/11: Five Years On. The third press conference is scheduled for Guy Fawkes Day and will announce UNPO’s 2007 Programme and include the launch of specific projects like Village Aid International.

Either at the same time or at a date in between Nine-Eleven and the Fifth of November the Edward Goldsmith Institute will announce its programme for 2007. One of these post-radcon III press conferences will include an announcement of the establishment of a Planning Group for radcon IV on Cantonisation for small nations and real communities.

I woke up a three times in the night to subject my mooring lines to the indignity of a recount. Two bow lines, bow spring, mast line. Plenty of redundancy if any of them go. Four o’clock and all is well. It had been a wild and windy night with gales out in the English Channel. But all was still well when I awoke to a wet cloudy dawn and took myself off to town with my laptop over my shoulder. On the programme was a Purton weekend and anticipations of design work on the Radical Consultation Conference website.

A day of impeccable logistics. 0730 - to Jempson’s Coffee Shop on foot from the Rye Yacht Centre. 0950 - the Southern service from Brighton to Ashford International. 1028 - the Southern service to London Charing Cross. 1130 - atop a number 11 London Transport bus to Victoria. 1200 - half an hour on the internet across from Victoria Coach Station. On the dot of 1400 - a number 403 National Express coach departs to head west along the M4 motorway to pick up a full payload at Heathrow. 1500 - taxi ordered by mobile phone to Swindon Bus Station. 1630 - taxi heads west for the village of Purton. 1650 - arrive at 26 The Close to be greeted by a delighted Tempe at the back gate.

1730 - to the local Seven Eleven with my host. 2100 - to The Angel to hear the sad news that Vic…a stalwart of three-card brag and father of another player Rob…had died suddenly during the week at the age of seventy one of a massive heart attack. Breathing problems had started two years ago. 2100 - to bed…perchance to dream.

Return cost for trains and coaches and taxis - £50…taken from the wall at 0745 hours…all footwork free and comfortable courtesy of two Clarks shoes purchased earlier in the week at the Ashford Designer Outlet for the grand sum of £28…a great extravagance by any standards. Broke even on cards after scooping the last kitty of the evening.

An article in the latest issue of The Ecologist on John Papworth’s kitchen table informed me that the Bush-Blair Iraq War Project has been a complete success. The project really was all about oil. Iraq is back inside the OPEC Producer Cartel. Oil prices are far and away the best ever. And Oil Company Profits are going through the roof.

Don Palast’s article didn’t talk about the cost. So here it is…starting with the Brits. A hundred British soldiers dead, three or four times that number injured, many times more poisoned with depleted uranium and multiple vaccinations. And scheduled to manifest themselves in the years ahead are the traumas and the mental illnesses when the soldiers return home and seek to reintegrate themselves into civilian life. Go talk to some Vietnam Veterans if you think I’m making this up. That’s just the Brits. Next the Farm Boys from Iowa and the Niggers from the Delta.

Over a thousand Yankee soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Increase this for Private Contractors…the Off-Balance Sheet Mercenaries (OBSMs)…and you get yourselves a factor of 15-20 on the British figures. But these Casualty Counts are dwarfed by those for innocent civilians…otherwise known as the Iraqi people. Remember them? The Iraq War Project was all about liberating them.

Start with the estimates in The Lancet a year ago after a group of doctors visited hospitals and spoke to Iraqi families. Their figures were of a different order of magnitude to the statistics being issued under duress by the Pentagon. A year ago…before Faluja… the Medics reckoned that at least a hundred thousand Iraqis had been killed by the war.

We have not reached Jewish Nazi Holocaust numbers yet or the millions that vanished off the face of Mother Russia in Uncle Joe’s Purges. But we are heading that way if nothing gets done to stop the madmen in Washington, Wall Street and The City of London. Bechtel and Halliburton are doubtless working on their Faustian Contracts as I write…redesigning Dante’s Hell…an additional level here…a little more eternal torment space over there.

But Cheney & Co will be just fine. They have God on their side after all. This I know because they told me so. I also read it in The New York Times and The Independent…so it must be true. God works in mysterious ways. Nature is raw in tooth and claw. And who are we to questions this best of all possible worlds? We must trust Our Leaders. Ours Is Not to Question Why - Ours Is Just to Do and Die. But I do wonder what Kipling and Dickens would have said.

An official portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong that served as a model for the giant painting of the former Chinese leader in Tiananmen Square will be auctioned in Beijing next month in the hope of raising a few million dollars for the heirs of an anonymous resident of the United States who owns it. The work is the sole surviving portrait of Mao by Zhang Zhenshi, the artist chosen by the Chinese Authorities in 1950 to produce templates of the Great Leader’s image for the next three decades of portraits. Mr Zhang also painted portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. It must be enough to make Andy Warhol cry his heart out.

Huachen Auctions' timing takes advantage of the runaway prices in the market for Chinese Art where prices for both modern and traditional Chinese Art have soared in recent years as a new generation of millionaires has sought outlets for their wealth and foreign buyers have began showing an interest. Huachen shareholders include a branch of the Ministry of Culture.

The pubs of Rye were overflowing last Saturday for the FA Cup Final…the score was three all at the end of ninety minutes after Liverpool’s last gasp equaliser against West Ham who had taken a two-goal lead in the first half. Eventually Liverpool won the penalty shoot-out 3-1 after a goalless thirty minutes of extra time.

Everyone was back again for the final of the European Cup last night. Arsenal were playing Barcelona who had knocked out Chelsea…English League Champions for the second year running. It’s strange the way everybody talks about these professional teams. Barcelona’s best player is Brazilian and Arsenal’s French Manager Arsène Wenger recruits more from the French Football League than the English Premiership.

Early on Arsenal had their German goalkeeper sent off so played most the match with ten men...although it should have been a yellow card and a Barcelona goal instead. But they went one up against the odds in the first half when Sol Campbell…one of only two Englishmen in the side…put them ahead. Sol Campbell is black just to add another dimension to the multinational brew of European Football. Sport does more to dissolve racism than all the laws and quotas and public education. Barcelona eventually ran out worthy winners against a very tired Arsenal side with two goals in the last 15 minutes.

However Barcelona is something of a special case as far as sporting nationalism goes. Most people in England think of them as a Spanish side. But that is not how they think of themselves. The team has always been a hotbed of Catalan Nationalism. The rest of Spain knew that Franco’s Fascism was really over when the Catalan flags came out at the Nou Camp Stadium and the policeman stayed in their barracks.

Catalonia is to be given greater autonomy and wider tax-collecting and judicial powers after Spain’s lower house of parliament recently approved the Catalan Charter by 189 votes to 154. After further debate and amendments in the Spanish Senate the bill is on its way to the Catalan Parliament for approval before being put to a vote in the region. The right of centre opposition Popular Party voted against the bill as did the small Republican Left of Catalonia group which favours independence. Constanza Leal-Melo once explained to me that the Colombian ruling class comes from Catalonia and partly as a result have quite a different accent to other Spanish speakers in South America.

According to the latest wording of the charter’s preamble, the regional Catalan Parliament recognizes Catalonia as a nation but the Spanish Constitution refers to the north-eastern regions as a nationality. The text originally referred to Catalonia only as a nation which sparked an outcry from The Right which said that it could lead to secession.

I have been reading the Financial Times for the past couple of days to understand the European Carbon Trading Exchange. The newspaper clippings spread out on the cabin table in front of me…I am working on my Dell laptop…have headlines like Blair’s Decision Time On Nuclear Power, Carbon Credit Errors Throw Permit Scheme Into Turmoil, Independent Auditing a Must if Carbon Trading is to be a Success, The Real Story Behind the Collapse of Carbon Prices and Give the Emissions Trading Scheme a Fair Chance...written by the ceo of RWE npower. These shenanigans lend credence to those claiming that the whole point of The Kyoto Treaty is that it should fail.

I don’t believe the Global Warming Orthodoxy that sees Armageddon in carbon emissions. But that is no reason not to eliminate them. The side effects often turn out to be the main effects. It is almost a Rule of Nature. The less muck spewed into the atmosphere the better. But some of the side effects have to be seen to be believed…and many have little to do with cutting back on atmospheric pollution or reining in the emission of greenhouse gases.

My Crap Detector first began to register with the allocation of CO2 emissions permits for 2005…based on self-assessments which made Cod Quotas look like divine justice. The Dirty Half Dozen are Germany with 473 million tonnes, the UK with 242, Italy with 215, Spain with 181, France with 131 and Holland with 81. The other ten countries in the European Commission’s scheme account for just 12% of all permits and can be disregarded.

Demand on the Carbon Trading Exchange is driven by the UK, Spain and Italy…respectively 15%, 11% and 4% over quota. The UK has to buy 40 million tons-worth of CO2 emission permits, Spain 20 and Italy 10. Who has them for sale? Last week it was France and Germany. But then Angela Merkel announced that Germany would give 12 of her 21 million tonnes surplus back to Brussels. But France with her massive ‘non-polluting’ nuclear industry wants to keep her 15 for 2006. Market chaos duly ensued as carbon prices shoot up from €9 to €15 overnight. What a game!

It gets worse. Britain has enforced the toughest cuts on the electricity generators. Here’s the logic. The electricity sector is more insulated from overseas competition than sectors like chemicals, cement and steel so costs can be passed on to customers in higher prices. But the giant German polluter RWE owns Yorkshire Electricity and npower which supply UK consumers. Electricity companies have been accused of profiteering by charging customers for the free carbon permits they were given by Brussels. Now there’s a surprise. You couldn’t make it up.

The British Government is a signatory to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to restrict carbon emissions. The scientific work underpinning this came from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who claimed there was a scientific consensus that (a) global warming is a major threat to the planet; (b) it is primarily man-made; (c) the cause is carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and (d) these greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat and warm the planet.

But there has never been such a scientific consensus. Indeed a recent analysis of scientific papers on climate change by Dr Benny Peiser, of John Moores University and Dr Dennis Bray, of the German-based GKSS National Research Centre concluded that dissenters are in a healthy majority. In July 2005 a report from the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affair…The Economics of Climate Change Volume 1, HL Papers 1201…included a quote from Professor Reiter at the Institut Pasteur in Paris that 'consensus is the stuff of politics, not science’.

In China there are a million English language teachers suggesting tens of thousands in most major Chinese cities. With this in mind in 2004 my publishing company Academic Inn Books printed 2000 copies of Maggie Makes Amends for the Chinese English Language market. Last year’s Magpie Sagas Prospectus included a recommended retail price of £2.49p and planned to supply stock bundles of two dozen books on a Sale or Return basis to up to four accredited booksellers in each of twenty Chinese cities. The bookseller mark-up will be 50% so Academic Inn Books will have £40 to play with on each Sale or Return bundle and £ 3000 from the placement of all eighty bundles.

I believe that Connie’s illustrations will go down well in China…and that there are Chinese artists whose work would add a freshness to the English Children’s Books Market. So the idea is to develop a network of Academic Inn Books accredited booksellers in China and encourage them to promote Connie’s work while also proposing AIB Publishing Partnerships with Chinese Illustrators for English language publication in Great Britain and Scandinavia.

The Chinese cities selected as AIB Bookselling Centres were Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Lanxi, Suichang, Lishni, Dinghai, Xiangshan in Zhejiang Province; Chengdu, Yibin, Xichang, Luzchow, Ningnan, Deyang, Chongqing in Sichuan Province; Xi'an and Yan'an in Shaanxi Province; and Ichang and Wuhan in Hubei Province.

Unfortunately the whole project stalled at the end of 2004 when my Cambridge branch of Barclays Bank decided not to release the final £2 500 of funding promised for the Magpie Sagas Project. This wasn’t personal. The bank’s top management got cold feet about exposure to Microbusiness Bankruptcies. So someone revamped their Computer Lending to Turnover Ratio for New Microbusines Lending…the CNML-LTR…and my project missed the cut. The final payment of £ 2000 for printing 2000 copies of the fourth Magpie Sagas book got caught beween Loan Promise and Funds Non-Delivery and it was not until August 2005 that it was possible to replace the Barclays money when a private investor agreed to a 3-year loan of £1800 to myself…trading as Academic Inn Books.

Brian Swinson...a Print Broker in Cambridgeshire who had ordered the books from a printer in Milano Italy ...was caught in the middle and rather foolishly allowed the Magpie Sagas author Bernardine Fiddimore to talk him into delivering the 2000 copies of Book Four to Iden Kennels…her father’s vetinerary business…while pursuing me for the money under the pretext that the books were in Cambridge. Berni then removed 4000 copies of Book Three from their AIB store and since then has refused to discuss her perceived grievances or do a stock count so we can reach agreement on her account balance where her royalties are netted off against payments to Academic Inn Books for sales from her Sale or Return stock.

So instead of attending the October 2004 Book Fairs in Frankfurt and Gothenburg and selling Magpie Books into the Chinese Children’s Books Market in 2005 I have wasted time seeking to sort out Academic Inn Books’ legal position with the Magpie Sagas author…and the illustrator…just to get clear legal title to my Magpie Sagas Publishing Property without which clarity there is little sense in going to Frankfurt, Ningbo, Gothenberg, Bologna or anywhere else. But last October William Franklin & Sons wrote a Draft Prospectus for the sale of eight of the 64 shares in the Magpie Sagas Project…at the offer price of £875 per share this will raise £ 7000…so once the JAK/Cultura deal is in place I can turn again to the Magpie Sagas Project.

In Jiangsu Province Yang Tianshui has been sentenced to twelve years for posting essays on the internet in support of Velvet Action…a peaceful movement by exiles for free elections in China that takes its name from Vaclav Havel’s overthrow of the Communists in Czecheslovakia so it is not surprising that the Chinese Authorities see it as a threat.

Tang is a member of the China Chapter of International PEN and the Chinese Constitution permits the Empire’s citizens to freely express their opinions. So solidarity is in order. Another Chinese Blogger on the wrong side of the law is Night Wolf. He has been charged for posting essays on overseas websites by a court in Guizhou under his real name of Li Yuanlong. Is there an opportunity here for Academic Inn Books to offer Weblog Hosting to Chinese writers based in Zhejiang, Sichuan, Shaanxi and Hubei?

Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich is required reading on any discussion of the Medical Profession and the Legal Drug Industry and predicted the onset of such development-induced global pandemics as Cancer which appeared in the industrialised western world in the latter part of the last century.

Back in 1940 only 1 in 20 American women got breast cancer but now it's 1 in 8. Cancer is a disease that afflicts one woman out of three and one man out of two. I may be on a collision course with Teddy Goldsmith about Climate Change but we see eye to eye on cancer.

I am one of the healthiest people around. I never get ill. I spent a while in St Thomas' Hospital after being knocked over by a Royal Mail Van on Westminster Bridge in 1963...and have a 15 inch steel pin in my right femur to prove it. Wordsworth had the quaint notion that earth has not anything to show more fair than the view from this bridge...but forgive me for seeing things otherwise. There is a difference between having an accident and being ill.

Susan May lives in Jackson New Hampshire. Her children Kristen and Mischa were in the same classes at Cambridge Friends School in Massachusetts in 1980 as my children. So we go back 25 years. Susan has an endearing habit of turning up in out of the way places. The first stop on Vemara's Brittany voyages was always Barfleur...a tiny fishing village on the Cherbourg Peninsular with a post office, a bakery, a local store and a tabac. One year Susan was sitting drinking coffee outside the tabac in Barfleur when Vemara moored up after a 20-hour run down channel.

Until a few months ago Susan was the other person I knew who never got ill. But then back in February...while I was in Llangolman...Susan phoned me to tell me she had colon cancer...or rectal cancer as they call it on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean in a Continental Megastate separated from two corners of Old Europe...England and Spain…by their common languages.

My mother probably died of colon cancer. She certainly caught it and undoubtedly died not very long afterwards. But she never told her children the cause of her rapid decline in 1999 at the age of 84. Five years on I am beginning to suspect...and wondering about using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain her medical records.

It seems that a third of us Fifty Somethings are destined to catch cancer...another third will die from heart problems...with Bird Flu taking the rest. Susan phoned me last night and we chatted for an hour or so. She has been driving back and forth to Portland Maine for thirty hours of radiation treatment, scans at hundreds of dollars a time...and a few altercations with the Health Professionals. Susan has written off 2006 as her own personal annus horribilis and can't wait for it to end so she can get on with her life.

As far back as the 1950s the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 80 to 90 percent of cancers could be environmentally caused and and fifty years on the WHO states that enough is known 'to prevent at least one-third of cancers'. Yet the WHO also talks of ten million cases worldwide increasing to 15 million by 2020. This may sound a lot but works out at less than a tenth of one percent so something doesn't add up.

Back in 1971 President Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer. Since then US federal spending on cancer has gone from a quarter of a billion dollars a year to three billion...with many times this being spent by private corporations and foundations in the Cancer Industry.

Yet in The West the cancer death rate continues to rise steadily…and has done so since the mid seventies. Indeed the rate has been increasing since the beginning of the industrial age. Previously cancer was very rare and in some areas non-existent. But a researcher working for Edward Goldsmith at The Ecologist in 1973 showed on the basis of WHO statistics that between 1967 and 1968 the cancer rate in different countries…Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Portugal and the USA…was almost directly proportionate to GNP.

In a special 1998 issue of The Ecologist magazine Ross Hume Hall and Dr Samuel Epstein argued that there is a Cancer Establishment…organisations like the National Cancer Institute & America Cancer Society in the USA and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in the UK…set on discouraging research into how industrial pollutants cause cancer.

Two articles on Edward Goldsmith’s website go further and insist that the main causes of cancer are (1) exposure to carcinogenic chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe and (2) ionising radiation…from medical X-rays, nuclear tests and radioactive emissions from nuclear installations.

The Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Nuclear Industries that fund nearly all the research on the causes of cancer will not admit to anything like this. They make sure that cancer is attributed to anything except exposure to chemicals and radioactivity. So the official viewpoint blames minor factors like faulty genes, viruses, eating fatty foods, drinking alcohol and smoking...important in the case of Lung Cancer but nothing like as important as it is made out to be.

How long before the public realise that cancer is largely preventable and that if more of us are succumbing to the disease it is because our health is being systematically subordinated to the sordid financial interests of the chemical and the nuclear industries…a fact that bent government scientists are finding increasingly difficult to hide from us?