William Shepherd

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?

All of a sudden I am blessed with a surfeit of digital power...a rare treat. Two weeks ago I discovered Mahavi's in Hastings where I get six hours for eight pounds. Last week I discovered that Gateway in Ashford’s Park Plaza is open from nine to four Mondays to Saturdays. And of course PC Hut…the Internet Café in Rye…is back up to speed after swapping Broadband Supplier…and is now staying open until eight in the evening.

Also after cranking up my Apple Mac Mini for onboard use…and I was watching some Hans Christian Anderson DVDs that came with the Daily Express on Vemara last night…Tony Payne offered to get me kitted out with a working PC Laptop by finishing the work he had started on my Dell. It needs an external USB keyboard as the internal keyboard-cum-random number generator was disconnected. But otherwise it has everything I need to work on web designs…something we have decided to do together based on a Dreamweaver MX, Java, and PHP platform.

This improvement in my working conditions…and Vemara is finally approaching the vertical too…together with a plea from my son that I stay in Rye until after his arrival on Eurostar next Thursday en route for Paris and London finally decided my travel plans for the next few months. So yesterday I booked my tickets with Ryanair to Stockholm at the start of July with a return five weeks later. I also booked with National Express for this weekend in Purton. From Stockholm I plan to take a trip or two to Lund to organise my time there...and may not use my return ticket.

I last talked to Marie Appelqvist at JAK on Friday 28th April 2006 after her boss decided my signature was not sufficient for JAK to cough up 75 000 kronor as an unsecured 5-year loan. JAK would require the signature of a resident Swede as well as mine on the loan documents…at least until the half way mark after which they would start to owe me money. I discussed this with Cultura and the bottom line is OK for hundred thousand kronor provided 70% goes to Cultura to pay off some high interest credit accumulated during the 2000-2003 depression.

I have almost decided to go with this but would need to get £2750 out of it myself as I figure I will need between £2500 and £3000 for my six months in Lund. I have budgeted £500 per month to cover my Swedish expenses…living costs (£200), rent (£200) and loan repayments (£100). While in England I may have to pay £80 per month for the boat and £100 to store my stuff…offset by income already in the pipeline of around £1000. So my bottom line is SEK 37500…although my budget assumes no income while at Lund University even if I plan to prove this wrong. Before sorting out the final details with Cultura I might try again with JAK to see if I can secure an unsecured loan of half as much as I originally asked for repayable in half the time…SEK 37500 over 30 months instead of 75000 over 5 years.

The invoice for Job 653 went off to NCAB yesterday which involved Spanish and Norwegian translations from a 650 word English text that started life as a 600 Swedish word NCAB Customer Survey newsletter. Last week I also chased a couple of late payments and brought the Cultura UK accounts up to date. There always seem to be a thousand pounds less in the bank…and the pipeline…than one would like leaving business and cash flow exposed to the vagaries of the unexpected. But the situation is a lot better than a year ago…and net worth is improving steadily.

A windfall on the property market would have been nice but owning property is not cost-free so my cash flow would have been stretched...and the temptation to release equity too great. So I am happy to forgo the windfall and the worry. Besides I have done the property profit game three times and want to score some other way for my next windfall.

With that in mind I put £25 into my IG-Index account last week to make sure everything was working properly. Over the next six weeks I will be making a few small bets to give myself confidence in handling the mechanics of operating a Spread Betting Account. But I don’t want to start playing properly until I am able to devote at least thirty hours a week to following the markets. But something interesting happened last week.

I had My Yahoo! Financial Page up on the screen as I was doing currency calculations for NCAB Job 631 and noticed some sudden movement between dollars, pounds and euros. I drew them to Tony’s attention and then spent half an hour on the news feeds. But there was no reaction. Nor was there any mention in the newspapers the next day. So I dismissed it and assumed the scale of my charts was set wrong. But on Friday the stock markets collapsed.

It was the same pattern Bob Stuart and I had observed when sitting in Charles Street in 1987 during what came to be known as Black Wednesday…although actually it was Black Monday through to Friday. Bob believed in following the money so this is what I was doing. Actually not the money…but the statistics about the trading of the money… from trading volume figures in the Boston Globe, New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

These were crucial. On Day One there was a surge of trading in Swiss Francs; on Day Two volumes exploded on the British Pound; on Day Three trading in the US Dollar went off the top of the chart; and then on Days Four and Five activity moved to the stock market. Data from these two weeks…twenty years apart…will validate my model.

Per Einarsson was shaking with anger. He raised his fists. “I tell you, no!” he yelled, and pounded the table.

Standing opposite him, Drake was very red in the face, clenching his teeth. “Per,” he said, “I am asking you to consider the realities.”

“You are not!” Einarsson said, pounding the table again. “The reality is what you do not want me to publish!”

“Now Per – ”

“The reality,” he said, “is that in Iceland the first half of the twentieth century was warmer than the second half, as in Greenland.* The reality is that in Iceland, most glaciers lost mass after 1930 because summers warmed by .6 degrees Celsius, but since then the climate has become colder. The reality is that since 1970 these glaciers have been steadily advancing. They have regained half the ground that was lost earlier. Right now, eleven are surging. That is the reality, Nicholas! And I will not lie about it.”

“No one has suggested you do,” Drake said, lowering his voice and glancing at his newly arrived audience. “I am merely discussing how you word your paper, Per.”

Einarsson raised a sheet of paper. “Yes, and you have suggested some wording – ”
“Merely a suggestion – ”

“That twists truth!”

“Per, with due respect, I feel you are exaggerating – ”

“Am I?” Einarsson turned to the others and began to read. “This is what he wants me to say: ‘The threat of global warming has melted glaciers throughout the world, and in Iceland as well. Many glaciers are shrinking dramatically, although paradoxically others are growing. However, in all cases recent extremes in climate variability seem to be the cause…blah…blah…blah…og svo framvegis.’ ” He threw the paper down. “That is simply not true.”

“It’s just the opening paragraph. The rest of your paper will amplify.”

“The opening paragraph is not true.”

“Of course it is. It refers to ‘extremes in climate variability.’ No one can object to such vague wording.”

“Recent extremes. But in Iceland these effects are not recent.”

“Then take out ‘recent.’ ”

“That is not adequate,” Einarsson said, “because the implication of this paragraph is that we are observing the effects of global warming from greenhouse gases. Whereas in fact we are observing local climate patterns that are rather specific to Iceland and are unlikely to be related to any global pattern.”

“And you can say so in your conclusion.”

“But this opening paragraph will be a big joke among Arctic researchers. You think Motoyama or Sigurosson will not see through this paragraph? Or Hicks? Watanabe? Ísaksson? They will laugh and call me compromised. They will say I did it for grants.”

“But there are other considerations,” Drake said soothingly. “We must all be aware there are disinformation groups funded by industry – petroleum, automotive – who will seize on the report that some glaciers are growing, and use it to argue against global warming. That is what they always do. They snatch at anything to paint a false picture.”

“How the information is used is not my concern. My concern is to report the truth as best I can.”

“Very noble,” Drake said. “Perhaps not so practical.”

“I see. And you have brought the source of funding right here in the form of Mr. Morton, so I do not miss the point?”

“No, no, Per," Drake said hastily. “Please, don’t misunderstand - ”

“I understand only too well. What is he doing here?” Einarsson was furious. “Mr. Morton? Do you approve of what I am being asked to do by Mr. Drake?”

It was at this point that Moreton’s cell phone rang, and with ill-conceived relief, he flipped it open. Einarsson stared at the floor, sucking in his breath, still furious. Drake stuck his hands in his pockets, looked at the roof of the tent.

Drake said, “Look, Per, I feel we have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

“Not at all,” Einarsson said coldly. “We understand each other only too well. If you withdraw your support, you withdraw your support.”

Note*

P.Chylek, et al. 2004, “Global warming and the Greenland ice sheet,” Climatic Change 63 201-21. “Since 1940…data have undergone predominantly a cooling trend…The Greenland ice sheet and coastal regions are not following the current global warming trend.”

I have been reading the Daily Mail. But there are mitigating circumstances. My copy was number 9300 and it cost just a penny at the time it was issued at 3.30 am on Wednesday 21st April 1926. A baby girl had been born to the Duchess of York, Mr Churchill was ‘again emphasizing the fact that further economies were becoming increasingly difficult to make’ and ‘there was no sign in the fall of the franc being stayed’.

But this was the item that caught my fancy…Big Ben Blunders: A Cold in the Stomach. ‘Big Ben, the authentic mouthpiece of Father Time, deceived London yesterday. When the hands of the great clock over the House of Parliament were telling the truth and announcing the time as 3.45 pm, the chimes announced the hour and Big Ben himself solemnly rang out four times. A quarter of an hour later he declared in clarion tones it was five o’clock, and when it was five o’clock, according to rival authorities, Big Ben chimed six. After this his outraged keepers gagged and corrected him severely for he was silent at six o’clock and returned to the path of truth at 7pm. A representative of the makers said: ‘The weather is believed to have been the cause of the trouble - amounting to a slight ‘stomach ache’ which Ben quickly got over.’ I am a secret admirer of Matthew Parris…something I have mentioned before.

In today’s weekly column in the Times he put his literary finger on something he called ‘the corruption of the fabric of expectation in society’. He begins his article by discussing the Afghans who highjacked a plane in February 2000 and claimed political asylum at Stanstead Airport. Several courts have looked at their request since their arrival in this country. Each time their right to asylum has been upheld. And each time the government has moaned about it.

This week Tony Blair got involved. Here is Matthew Parris. ‘The Prime Minister is a bit muddled here. By no means had the High Court ruled that we are not able to deport people like this; the Court had ruled that such people can only be deported if their cases for asylum fail on their merits; that the Home Secretary cannot arbitrarily create a category of applicants who are to be automatically refused asylum on account of the means they employed to reach Britain. Such a category could be created, of course, but it would have to be done by law. We do not have such a law.’

As the judge pointed out: ‘Lest there be any misunderstanding, the issue in this case is not whether the executive should take action to discourage hijacking, but whether the executive should be required to take such action within the law as laid down by Parliament and the courts.’ As Matthew Parris notes this is a forlorn hope on the judge’s part. Yet we do need these rules and definitions, and we do have to respect them. It’s called the Rule of Law. Parris again.

‘I am sorry to labour what for many readers may seem an obvious truth, but I believe the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen something of a slipping of attention to this truth in Britain, and that Tony Blair, with his rather 1970s New Seekers vision of self-evident morality and ‘natural’ law, is the worst exemplar of a dangerously lazy approach to the idea of due process, and the ideal of certainty of contract between the citizen and the State.

The other week the Chancellor of the Exchequer…without bothering to mention it in his Budget Statement… announced plans to rip up retrospectively arrangements that millions have planned for their legacies when they die. Whatever view you take of the use of trusts, the citizen must know where he stands, and where he will stand. Gordon Brown’s disregard for a whole web of presumed entitlements unsettles me. How confident can we now be that pensions really will be linked to earnings in 2012? I am talking about what we might call a corruption of the fabric of expectation in society: slow, incremental, and rather abstract; but no less poisonous for being hard to dramatise.’

Matthew Parris then takes up a subject at the centre of many household budgets…the new Tax Credit System. ‘The computer system failed to work; two million poor families were forced to repay a total of £2 billion in wrongly assessed payments during the first year. Overpayments are still running at about £2 billion a year; six million families claim credit, and there is no promise that the system will be fixed. Millions of the poorest people have had to repay what are, for them, huge sums. Millions will prove unable to. Those who have repaid will resent those who have not. Everyone will view the next big government initiative with diminished confidence. In a complicated system such as ours, confidence is the cement of what politicians call ‘social justice’ From ministers the fiasco has elicited something not far from a shrug of the shoulders, as though only intentions count.’ Here is how he ends his article.

‘I could mention the Child Support Agency; the repeated, broken promises of NHS dentistry; the virtual (undeclared) abandonment of clear Home Office rules about released foreign prisoners…to me, through all these very different problems a thread does seem to run. It is insidious: at a national level a gradual, modest but persistent corruption of the fabric of expectations: a chipping-away at confidence in the contract between citizen and State. Slowly, we are getting more like a banana republic where promises are cheap, nothing ever really happens and nobody expects it to. I am sorry to sound portentous but I fear we are losing what you might call administrative certainty, a deeply unsexy term and hard to make an issue of. Slow to accumulate and easy to squander, certainty matters.’

The planet we inhabit is a sphere…of this we are assured by the evidence of the satellites that we send into space to take its picture. Globes are three-dimensional objects while maps are typically two dimensional. Transferring three-dimensional information to a two-dimensional flat surface requires a technique. The techniques most commonly adopted for our planet have had as their principal purpose the propagation of some nationalism or other. The latest of these is called Internationalism and being the biggest is both the most dangerous and the most deceptive.

This map is no exception but my nation is the circle of my friends and these typically live at the boundary between the water trails criss-crossing the North Atlantic Ocean and the land trails fanning out from the ports, harbours and estuaries where their forefathers rested their vessels and reprovisioned them for further exploration.

At certain places on our planet the three elements of earth, air and water can be found coming together and merging into one another. These places are not fixed but ebb and flow with the rhythms of the cosmos. Joined together on maps these land-falls appear as shore-lines.

The only map that accurately represents surface areas is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map. Our map distorts like all the others. But in like manner to satellite cameras it distorts only to the extent that the eye delivers a distorted image when it gazes at a globe. And that means that the mind can deduce the three-dimensional shape with practice. This projection takes a point between Norway and Siberia...not the North Pole)...slices a great circle through Stockholm and then peels thirty degree segments from this northerly point.

Four water trails lead out of the North Atlantic Ocean to other places on the planet. 200 years ago there were just two. Then the Suez and Panama Canals were built to the great confusion of our modern day politicians whose ideologies were invented before the engineers set to work. The mountain pass at the top is narrow enough to allow the Siberian and Alaskan Electricity Grids to be connected. The pass at the other end of the lake is a couple of sailing days wide.

Whether you go by mountain pass or the man-made water trails cut through the mountain ridges sloping down into the Pacific and the Indian Oceans you can if you will make a journey by water of about 10 000 miles and arrive on the Great Australian Bight. This is where you will find the Eyre Peninsula…that is what the signs say. Contrary to popular belief you can get there from here...several ways. That's Spherical Geometry for you.

The third progress report from the Buncefield Oil Depot Inquiry into Europe’s biggest peacetime explosion has been released. Government Inspectors are worried about legal proceedings so they don’t dare say too much which makes it all a little unsatisfactory. But here is the gist of what the General Public are permitted to know about what happened.

At 1900 hours on 10th December 2005 operators at the Buncefield Oil Depot began filling Tank 912 with 20 000 cubic feet of petrol an hour. That is a bit faster than your run-of-the-mill petrol pump. By 0300 hours the tank was about three-quarters full. At this point the fuel level gauge stuck. Why it did so seems to be anybody’s guess.

By 0520 hours Tank 912 was full to overflowing and duly did so. It poured over the top and turned itself into vapour clouds. Half an hour later with petrol everywhere the rate of inflow increased itself to 30 000 cubic feet per hour for reasons unknown. Ten minutes later the whole lot exploded blowing out windows two miles away and waking up the Dutch two hundred miles away with the sound of the explosion. Those seem to be the facts. Then comes the rest.

Alarms should have sounded in the control room when the fuel gauge stuck. There were two control room staff, four maintenance men and plenty of tanker drivers around but nobody noticed that there was petrol everywhere. Didn’t anyone even smell anything? Another thing that has come to light is that the explosion was much too powerful. Blast pressures were between 700-1000 mbars but should have been between 20-50 mbars. Nobody knows where the spark came from that set everything off. The Buncefield Oil Depot’s fire-fighting equipment was destroyed in the explosion as well as much of the evidence. But apparently a somewhat charred fuel gauge turned up the other day.

A pretty light green cloud blew across from Denmark yesterday. Cars all down the East Coast were covered in the stuff when it floated to earth. We had been invaded by birch pollen. Apparently there is nothing unusual about this. But it was a new one on me. Trees get more and more interesting…like oceans and clouds. One of many new discoveries from the Climate Research boys and girls is that trees respond to variations in carbon dioxide levels by altering their water sweating rates. Each species of tree has its own particular response profile so you cannot generalise about the effects of carbon dioxide on planetary forest cover.

Not only do you need the dynamic profiles for the carbon dioxide…and water…absorption and emission rates but this must be matched with an individual forest profile. Climate is complicated and many models are so outdated that they are scientifically useless…although politically valuable as they churn out their global warming scenarios.

Back to our clouds of travelling pollen. Aerosols are also crucial to climate modelling as they offset the warming effect of greenhouse gases by causing the atmosphere to reflect more solar radiation into space than otherwise would be the case. Between the middle of February and the end of May one tree species after another sends its pollen into the atmosphere. Hazel and Alder are the first off…followed by Yew, Willow, Poplar and Ash in March and April. By the end of April Birch and Plane trees are sprinkling the countryside with their airborne angel dust. The last to go is the Oak Tree which comes into its own this month. Pity the poor pollen sufferers because it doesn’t stop there. Once trees have finished polluting the atmosphere oil seed rape lets fly…followed in July and August by grass and nettles.

Vemara’s Apple Computer is up and running again after three months of idling. In this time the USB plugs on the keyboard and the mouse had gone rusty and the Wee Beastie was a little reluctant to crank up initially. But with a little coaxing and oodles of tender loving care we seem to have won the day. Boats are not nice places for computers with 22 million transistors crammed onto four square millimetres of silicon. The wonder is that they work at all.

Sandra is busy trying to find a secondary school place for her son who just missed the cut. What a nightmare this whole process is in this country. The Swedes never seem to have the same problems…nor the French or the Germans. One of the best schools in the country must be Highgate Wood Comprehensive…or it was in 1982 when it sent forth into the world a young man by the name of Gary McKinnon. He finally made a name for himself five years ago in the aftermath of 9/11 by carrying out the biggest military hack of all times….from his bedroom in North London.

Instead of congratulating him and giving him an annual salary of half a million pounds to monitor Ministry of Defence computer security the British Government in its stupidity is intent on extraditing the young man to Virginia just because Uncle Sam wants to send him to gaol for 70 years and fine him two million dollars. The very least the Blair-Brown Government should demand is a quid pro quo. You can have him if you shut down Guantanamo Bay.

Between February 2001 and March 2002 young Gary crippled 53 army computers, 26 navy computers, 16 NASA computers, 1 Department of Defence computer and the Earl Naval Weapons Establishment in New Jersey. ‘Security was not compromised,’ claimed a US Government Spokesperson. And pigs can fly. Solo was lookig for UFOs.

One problem with Global Warming Orthodoxy is that it is based on some pretty questionable scientific hypotheses built into its Climate Forecasting Models. Most of the computer models embrace partial hypotheses that rely on Old Science and are backed up by data of very varying reliability. Climate Science is a rapidly evolving field...and one that Climate Politics is unable to keep abreast of. New connections are being made by Good Science all the time.

With this uppermost in my mind I decided to take another of the 100 blog spots on offer from my Berlin-based bloghosts and devote it to Shepherd on Climate. I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon posting everything written in this year’s William Shepherd weblogs onto the new site.

My request on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC website for their report generated an instant e-mail response for downloading the document. I had to promise not to cite, quote or distribute it before I could get the document but duly did so. Not being sure quite how to keep on the right side of The Feds I then consulted my partner at the Cliff’s Edge Signalling Company on what to do with the document. Here is what I wrote.

I have downloaded the 15-page draft IPCC Report on Global Warming and was wondering about making it available on the cesc website for policymakers such as ourselves and our cesc colleagues...behind a password perhaps. Do you have a view on how cesc should deal with this? I ask because despite US Freedom of Information Acts etc. the IPCC website states ‘please do not cite, quote, or distribute the draft report’...see today's weblog for background.

I also included the text of the reply that went like this. Date: Tue, 9 May 2006; To: REB Limited (UK Company Number 04199788); Thank you for your interest in participating in the US Government Review of the Working Group I contribution ('Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis') to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. You will need the following username and password to access the Draft document; username = usreview; password = phys-sci. And the email continues in the best UN/S federalese.

Be advised that you must be a US citizen or resident alien to participate in the US Government Review. Please send properly formatted comments by the 9 May 2006 deadline if you wish to have your input considered for the official US Government submission. Comments submitted as part of the US Government Review should be reserved for that purpose and not also sent to the IPCC Working Group I Technical Support Unit as a discrete set of expert comments. I particularly like the bit about the rights of aliens. But I suppose Venusians have a legitimate interest in making sure Planet Earth doesn’t go the way of their planet after the trouble they took restocking their new planet with life forms.

There is an interesting footnote on page 3 of the IPCC Report which I am not allowed to quote so I will just summarise...provided you promise not to cite or quote me because it may have disappeared by the time the final report emerges next year. Climatic change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity. This usage differs from that in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, where climate change refers to a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods. Here we go again. Alastair Campbelling around.

The fourth report of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) is being finalised as I write. The second-order draft is up on the internet behind the citation ‘please do not cite, quote, or distribute the draft report’. It would be nice to be able to copy the report onto my hard drive and ignore it until the Sexed-up Dossier emerges next year. But nothing is ever quite that simple. Here are my marching orders…and I quote…

‘Because the report is still in draft, distribution of the materials for review will be through a password-protected website. If you are interested in reviewing the report, send a message …with your name and affiliation in the subject line…to ipcc-usgrev@climatescience.gov to obtain the username and password required to access the report. Then follow this link to download the report and to obtain explicit instructions regarding comments formatting.’ Nothing ventured nothing gained so I'll give it a whirl and report back on my success or otherwise.

In my father’s day Trade Unions worried about wage differentials. The idea was that skilled workers should get more than unskilled workers and older workers more than younger workers. Skilled workers had to do a long apprenticeship and older workers had a family to support with the breadwinner’s wage. George Bernard Shaw…one of the principal authors of The Fabian Papers in 1884…didn’t believe this could be done and insisted throughout his long life that socialism was equal money.

When the first Common Ownership company was established by the Wilson Labour Government wage differentials were spelt out in the constitution of the Scott Bader Commonwealth. Nobody was to earn more than seven times what anybody else earned. All this has been forgotten at Scott Bader just as the issue of wage differentials has been forgotten everywhere else.

Nowadays top corporate bosses pay each other several million pounds a year while mad bloggers and whistle blowers like me…in a good year…self-assess at a few thousand pounds. Why this differential? To write well takes years of apprenticeship...and only a tiny proportion make the grade. To run a company is easy in comparison. Your job is to make more and more money for your shareholders. If you don’t the company gets taken over. But this isn’t hard.

All you do to run a company is increase the company’s income and reduce its expenses. You increase income by raising the price of your products and you reduce expenses by getting somebody else to pick up the tab. Oil has shot up in price since the Bilderberg Boys decided to go for it. The bigger you are the bigger the pocket you must pick. The biggest pockets are public pockets. Big corporations have become adept at wheedling money out of taxpayers.

What better way to transfer a sixty billion pound Clean-up Budget from the Nuclear Fiasco Industry to the Public Purse than to roll out the 80 year-old James Lovelock to extol the joys of spent fuel lumps for home heating and reallocating Nuclear Clean-up money to Global Warming?

What better way to get the Public Purse to pay to swap out the petrol in petrol station for some new piped fuel such as hydrogen or cornoil than to invent Climate Change and promote a theory that blames it all on Carbon Emissions? This is probably all you need to know about Global Warming. Adam Smith would have been sceptical too.

Spent fuel rods in your gardens will do wonders for the shrubbery. Wildlife is flourishing inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In one of Tom Paxton’s song a father is telling his daughter about flowers. It was quite hard for him to explain them to her because she had never seen any. So let us rejoice that bluebells are coming into their own and flooding the woods with ultramarine in long lakes under the trees. They exploit the sunshine before the oak leaves come out and the leaf canopy closes over them.

Our native bluebells are a rich colour…but a paler bluebell is also invading the countryside…the Spanish bluebell. In addition to its colour it can be distinguished by its upright bells, whereas English bluebells nod lightly from the stalk and have a sweet scent…while the Spanish ones have no scent at all. The two species have started to hybridise so the continued existence of the English bluebell is in danger. The Spanish flowers have generally escaped from gardens and parks and gardeners are being discouraged from growing them.

It gets worse. At Kew Botanical Garden the English bluebell is being threatened by a plant invader that Paul Donohoe, the head of wild areas at Kew, and a team of gardeners have failed to repel despite pulling out thousands of the yellow weeds. Kew is recruiting 300 volunteers to help. The five foot invaders Perfoliate Alexanders or Smyrnium Perfoliatum grow in the same forty acre plot as the bluebells and block out the light, effectively smothering the bluebell bulbs. In North Africa, parts of Asia and southern Europe the plant is used as a substitute for celery, which it resembles, and its seeds can be ground up as a sort of pepper. No fun being an English bluebell under New Labour.

Life is problems yet problemology is not a taught subject. E.F. Schumacher noticed this and devoted one of the chapters in Guide for the Perplexed to the subject. Unfortunately he only identified part of the problem with problems so I extended the analysis in my Foundations of Structural Sociology essay many years ago. Here is what I wrote.

The dimensional issue in the overdeveloped world is primarily one of management. There are not two types of problem as Schumacher explains in Guide for the Perplexed but three. The third type is the uncircumvergent problem...too big to solve like the convergent problem or grapple with like the divergent problem. However in a human scale environment the dimensional issue takes on a different form.

As an analogy consider a gas turning into a liquid as the temperature is reduced. At the lower size levels the nature of the rules of dimensions are of a different nature. And indeed, when size levels fall even further there is another change of state analogous to the solidifying of a liquid. Did the Great Washerwoman in the Sky empty the dirty bathwater on us...and threw us the baby with it?

Social morphology and Ivan Illich's notion of the vernacular kohr deal with the laws of dimensions in the Socially Liquid State. In structural sociology the political problem might be defined as bringing the overdeveloped world from a gaseous to a liquid state while simultaneously melting the many fragmented crystals of the underdeveloped world into a liquid state.

Both steam and ice must become water. This task would be extremely difficult for the laboratory technician if the gas and the solid were maintained at similar temperatures in the same vessel. Our New Age Samurai must do the same and isolate the gas and the solid from each other.

The energy transfers also need to be carefully controlled...both the liquefaction of the gas and the melting of the solid. Without a controlled heat exchange there will be a whole range of unpredictable intermediate conditions ...superheating, supercooling, boundary layers, turbulent fluid flows etc. These can lead to undesirable results like chemical reactions, explosions or cracking of the containing vessel. Each of these intermediate conditions could with imagination be given its analogous condition in the social liquid.

Captain Burt Kleijwegt is a salvage expert who knows a convergent problem when he sees one. While Antonia Nicholson the 32-year old skipper of Gypsy Moth IV was being grilled at UK Sailing Academy HQ in West Cowes on the Isle of Wight he was driving a mechanical digger across a reef in the Toumotu archipelago north of Tahiti.

The digger lifted the boat, sandbags were placed beneath the hull and a plank slipway built to the edge of the reef. Meanwhile the hull was patched up while a nervous watch was kept on the weather. This is the season of tropical storms and there was every chance that the famous craft would be pounded to pieces. But the gods were kind.

In a stroke of diplomacy…reminiscent of the time that Benjamin Franklin persuaded the international maritime powers to give Captain Cook’s Endeavour clear passage around the globe…the French Navy saved the day by lending a tug. After six days on the reef Gipsy Moth IV was hauled off and taken to dry dock in Tahiti. From there it will be cargo ship to Auckland for repairs before sailing for Sydney and a rendezvous with Princess Anne on 12th July…forty years after Sir Francis Chichester’s triumphal arrival there in his 53ft ketch.

Questioning Global Warming Orthodoxy instantly banishes you to outer darkness…with holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists as your cellmates. The abuse poured on Michael Crichton for getting State of Fear into the US bestsellers list is a case in point. Use Google to locate the columns of journalistic vitriol. Psychologically this is perhaps more interesting than the fear that a challenge to the global warming orthodoxy itself engenders. Let me discuss the Scientific Enterprise as seen by a former Minister for Science and Technology in a Socialist Government.

Scientific tradition derives from six main principles: (1) an insistence upon maintaining a rigorous regime of accurate scholarship; (2) a practice of subjecting hypotheses arising from research to the critical scrutiny of the scientific community which then judges those results by the highest possible standards; (3) a determination to defend and entrench academic freedom to protect scientists from improper pressures which might lead them to abandon their research or to corrupt their results to suit the powers that be; (4) an acceptance of the importance of dissent within the scientific tradition allowing scientists to seek to establish new hypotheses even though these may run counter to the conventional scientific wisdom of the day; (5) the maintenance of an output which overrides political, theological or ideological divisions between nations; (6) the assertion of the importance of publishing results so that the whole world may benefit from the new knowledge as it is acquired.

In Dare To Be A Daniel Tony Benn then goes on to contrast these scientific traditions and principles with the ideas that lie at the root of parliamentary democracy. Benn’s view…which was also the official view of Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party when I stood as their Parliamentary Candidate for Oldham West and Royton in 1997... is that in Britain the idea of democracy is not based on the sovereignty of Parliament or Government but upon ‘the sovereignty of the people as a whole who have a moral right to govern themselves.’ By exercising their vote they lend their sovereign powers to members of Parliament to be used on their behalf for the duration of a single parliament…and these powers must be returned intact to the electorate to lend again at a subsequent election.’

Benn then points out that ‘in the end the people can dismiss ministers without bloodshed, and replace them by others’ and that it is this ‘destructive power of democracy that gives it its vitality, because ministers who know they can be dismissed are obliged to listen.’ So Benn’s democratic theory rests on being able to kick the rascals out because ‘in this way the capacity to dismiss changes the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed.’

For Benn the role of the elected representative is not to reproduce the expertise of the expert but to subject him or her to rigorous cross-examination on behalf of the people. In Dare To Be A Daniel the 80-year old veteran of countless socialist rallies…and the best Prime Minister this country never had… is reflecting on projects that came up on his watch…like Concorde and Nuclear Power rather than Climate Change. But general principles are just that and indicate the direction he was leaning in his thinking. Here are the first nine of Benn’s Ten Questions for Scientists.

1. Would your project promise benefits to the community? What are they? To whom and when will they accrue?
2. What are the disadvantages? Who experiences them? What remedies might correct them? And when?
3. What are the demands on skilled manpower? Can this be met?
4. Is there a cheaper, simpler, less sophisticated way to achieve all or part of the objectives? What are the options?
5. What new skills would people need to acquire? How are they to be created?
6. What old skills would be rendered obsolete? How serious is this for those involved?
7. Is the work being done elsewhere? Is there experience elsewhere to help assess the proposed project?
8. If the project happens what disadvantages would accrue to the community? What are the alternative approaches?
9. What other supporting projects are needed to cope with consequences or subsequent stages?

Benn regarded his tenth question as very important. ‘If an initial decision to proceed is made, for how long will the option to stop remain open, and how reversible will this decision be at progressive stages beyond there.’ It is on this tenth point that I took Kirk Sale to task in an e-mail exchange this week when commenting on the Global Warming lobby’s abuse of the Precautionary Principle…which has now become a policy of convenience to environmentalists.

The Precautionary Principle should mean that we do not meddle around implementing half-cock solutions that are just as likely to make matters worse...the dynamics of complex systems often means that things get worse before they get better for instance...until we understand what their long-term and intermediate impacts will be. The Precautionary Principle is being misapplied to justify ignorant meddling in very complicated processes that are not understood.

By the way I should warn you that Michael Crichton owns the patent for ‘essay or letter criticizing a previous publication’. So I am taking this stance on Global Warming to avoid getting sued…and not because of threats by right wing corporations to withdraw their funding of my Life of Reilly as a Mad Blogger and Journeyman Tenor.

Today’s marching orders were to attend a Greek Wedding in Camber…well half a Greek wedding…the bride’s half. Of such is the life of a Journeyman Tenor. There was a commercial break half way through the service. The Church Doors were flung open and in trooped the other half of the bridal contingent. Some found room with us in the choir stalls. They had not been caught up in Rye’s six weeks of road chaos en route from Nikosia…as first suspected…but had simply driven past the church and got halfway to Folkestone before discovering the error of their ways.

Arriving at Folly Wall at the appointed hour for my ride out to Camber, I woke Alan Catt from his midday nap. Either he recovered well or has impeccable social graces because while awaiting Frances Catt’s return I was well looked after with a gin and tonic and good conversation. Just time for a quick lunch before being wafted across the marshes.

The Catts have been sheep farmers on Romney Marsh for generations…and have one of the purest breeds of Romneys around. Fifteen years ago a boatload of ewes, rams…and sheep dogs…from the Catt’s Romney Marsh flocks was shipped out to The Azores on the instructions of some World Bank experts. I wonder how they have fared? Alan tells me that this year the rain came just in time to put enough grass on the fields for the lambing season.

The Catts and their guests from Battersea and America went off on a Bluebell Safari after we returned from the wedding…the woods are blanketed with bluebells at the moment. I was tempted to join them but instead buried my head in a PCHut computer for a couple of hours before taking myself off for a drink in The Ship Inn.

Herewith the second of two weblogs on social morphology…with extracts from The Foundations of Structural Sociology...see yesterday's weblog for the first instalment. In the inverted state the letters spelling the name of each mechanism have been reversed and run from right to left...Leonardo da Vinci knew a thing or two. This reversal indicates that in the Inverted State not only has the Hierarchy of Dominance inverted...this is the Societal Inversion to which Thomas Robertson refers in his 1947 book Human Ecology...but the goal of each mechanism has become the reverse of what it would be in the Natural Order.

The Natural Order----------------------------------------------------The Inverted State

This is the Bad News. But consider the other possibility. Once the Inverted State has destroyed the Natural Order and a Money Culture has elbowed aside the Cathedral Culture then the constituent institutions of society will be under great stress. Under the right conditions small changes in a subsystem can lead to a sudden shift in the structure of the whole system. Living in an Inverted Society means being alive in interesting times…which is the Good News.

Ilya Prigogine referred to such structures as Dissipative Structures and won a Nobel Prize for his scientific explorations into their nature. Ilya Prigogine was interested in social analogies. Perhaps he never knew that Bernard Shaw...a man greatly skilled in his use of metaphor...had come up with one.

In The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism Shaw asks rhetorically whether his young woman reader had seen a curiosity called the Prince Rupert Drop. He explains that it is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits. Europe was like that in 1914 he added before switching off from big things like empires and their wars to little familiar things like pins. The world is like that today...and getting worse. Shaw's image of the Prince Rupert Drop is powerful but where is the hope? Who will sweep up the pieces? The Great Charlady in Heaven? Structural sociology is more hopeful.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known. Montaigne was no doubt thinking of religious fervour when making this remark…but with Global Warming on the agenda for tomorrow I will give it a different spin.

On Guy Fawkes Day 2001 my essay on The Foundations of Structural Sociology went up on the internet as a Work & Human Fulfilment Workshop paper in the proceedings of the September 2001 Radical Consultation. The original essay had appeared first in The Canterbury Papers ten years earlier and at regular intervals ever since I have sent it to Fourth World Review for publication. But the editor rejected it each time. I have never understood why.

Societal Inversion is fundamental to my thinking and first appeared in Thomas Robertson's 1947 classic Human Ecology. Leopold Kohr believed the problem of society was dimensional…‘whenever something is wrong something is too big.’ Embracing both the Kohr and Robertson perspectives implies different policies for the natural order and in the inverted state. Policies for the Human Scale Movement should be what Fourth World Review is all about.

In the Robertson model a society is made up of seven mechanisms…or subsystems as they would be referred to nowadays in the language of von Bertalannfy's general systems theory. In a Cathedral Culture the religious mechanism establishes the values on which the educational, political, administrative, sanctions and industrial mechanisms are structured. Industry in its turn calls forth from the financial mechanism the money required to fulfil the needs of society for goods and services. In a Money Culture Finance determines the behaviour of other mechanisms…controlling the environment in which the individual and his collective institutions must function. Diagrammatically the inversion can be modelled like this:

The Natural Order-------------------------------------------The Inverted State

The societal inversion process can be visualised as the buckling of a sheet of metal. It always happens suddenly but there are several ways to make it happen. A relatively slight relaxation of pressure on opposite sides can do it. A variation on this Mode of Inversion is to fluctuate the pressure on the sides.

A third way is to apply a force at the point of major curvature in the centre of the metal sheet. This can lead to a number of highly stressed intermediate states before the metal sheet finds a new stable state. This new state might be a full- or half-sine wave pattern. Pressure on the sides to burst their bounds will be extremely high…as will the compressive force on the metal itself.

Each inversion mode could with imagination be given analogous conditions in society. The social upheaval would be frightening. During inversion tremendous stresses build up. These can be relieved in three ways. The sheet can snap in half, return to its earlier state or flip through into the inverted state.

However our sheet metal analogy implies little difference between the natural order and the inverted state. Stress levels return to their original state in both cases. The only difference is that layers that were in compression are now under tension…and vice versa.

Metals are unusual in having similar properties in tension and compression. Many materials do not behave this way. Concrete is a good example. It is very strong in compression but very weak under tension...that is why reinforcing bars are used. So imagine our metal sheet being replaced with a piece of marine ply or some other form of layered structure. How strong is the glue keeping the layers together? Class structures produce layered societies.

During the process of inversion operant conditions, local policies and goal-seeking targets to which each of the seven mechanisms respond will either become plastic...as in the buckling of a hinge in structural theory...or become distorted into a highly stressed and mechanically unstable condition. If inversion takes place then two very different outcomes are possible…to be discussed in tomorrow’s weblog about Social Morphology.

Evo Morales…the Bolivian President…spent the First of May weekend with Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela figuring out their strategy for a Free Trade Zone in Latin America. No doubt high on their agenda was not how to do it…which is not hard…but how to deal with the response of overdeveloped countries like the USA. A couple of days later on his return to La Paz Morales sent Government troops to secure the country’s foreign-owned gas fields.

To some extent this was grandstanding for the Bolivian public. The Bolivian President has always been conscious of the fact that previous Bolivian leaders had made promises to the indigenous population only to renege on them when in office. But if this was Gesture Politics it was the right gesture…and was not only gesturing.

Before being elected Morales had said: ‘We will renegotiate all contracts…they are illegal since Congress has never ratified them. The State will recover the property of its national resources. But we are open to foreign investment in exchange for a share of the business.’ The point of yesterday’s action was to let foreign multinationals know that Morales is serious. Foreign companies have been given 180 days to strike new deals with the Bolivian State Energy Company ( YPFB ). What Morales wants is for all gas and oil sales to be handled by YPFB which will take a cut at source leaving the foreign operators like BP and BG to act as operators of the fields.

But when you read the small print yesterday’s actions look more like the opening move in an anticipated long drawn-out haggling session…familiar to anyone who has bargained with a stall holder in an Arabian Souk…than the radical nationalisation implied by the World’s Press. Buried within Morales’ talk of imposing 82 percent taxes was the qualification that this would only apply to gas fields that last year extracted more than 100 million cubic feet of gas. This applies to only two concessions so this muscle flexing is really a shot across the bows.

Morales has already successfully regained control of water resources for the Bolivian people from the mighty Bechtel Corporation. So it makes sound political sense to take on the multinational energy giants next as they have a tradition of negotiating the sort of agreements that Morales has in mind. But the squeeze is unlikely to stop here. Next on the President’s list will be the mining and lumber companies. American Liberals should wish Morales well and do what they can to stop their governments from Allende-style interventions. It is not true that what is good for General Motors shareholders is good for the American people. America’s long-term interests are better served by a self-sufficient Cuban-style Latin America with a well-educated middle class at ease with itself and with the outside world.

This scramble for global resources is not restricted to Putin’s Russia and Morales’ Bolivia. These…and the War in Iraq…are merely the situations in the glare of day-to-day newspaper headlines. Something is afoot in Greenland for instance. A few weeks ago the European Union signed a treaty with Denmark which appears to give Greenland £30 million a year in exchange for control over policies like scientific research. Let’s hope that the Danes know what they are doing. There are rumours of massive oil deposits under Greenland’s ice…and that means 90% of Greenland…prospecting licences have tripled in the past three years and untold mineral riches supposedly lie under the melting Arctic ice waiting to be mined by multinational companies.

At midnight on Monday 3rd May 1926…eighty years ago…our Trade Unions called for a General Strike and got one. Nothing of this is talked about in our schools. Few know that in the 1920s the fear of Communism was akin to the fear of Islamic Terrorism today. My father once told me that few ordinary working people ever trusted Winston Churchill again after he used his powers as Home Secretary to break the General Strike by sending in the troops.

I had the pumps going on the boat for the first time for seventy five days after getting my electricity reconnected over the holiday weekend…electric lights in the evening too. As an experiment in Voluntary Simplicity living without electricity is an interesting exercise. The biggest difficulty turned out to be how to charge my mobile phone. A couple of years ago I read that Siemens had a clockwork prototype…you just pull a chord.

After the mobile phone it was appliances like radios, CD player and my assortment of computer collectibles. None of these gadgets uses much electricity so I could almost run them off batteries…or install a solar energy rig as Roger Monday has done. MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte recently went public with a $100 wind-up laptop for the Third World.

But a more interesting reaction has been my instant dislike of BBC Radio 4. I have long been irritated by the BBC’s charter requirements of hourly radio news bulletins but it was more than this. I wouldn’t normally quote The Daily Mail…my Street Cred as a radical might never be the same again. Here is columnist Stephen Glover. Politically the BBC is Leftish and pro-European. Culturally it is progressive. This value system has sustained New Labour. After an hour or two of independence the BBC reverted to its traditional role of compliance after the Hutton Report.

However Stephen Glover is barely scratching the surface. After a long ten week absence with just the newspapers and no BBC what struck me was the Radio Four obsession with Westminster party politics. Now it is true that the mainstream media have a similar focus with pages and pages over the past week or so about Prescott’s dalliances, Hewitt’s arrogance and Clarke’s incompetence. But you can shut this off and not read about it. And the same is true of the paedophile stories and everything else designed to titillate, frighten or just sell newspapers. And this is exactly what I do. But the radio is intrusive. Shutting it off is different. It’s all or nothing. What I want is some bits…and I like to choose which bits. I am not the only one. But a shift is taking place.

Migration Watch has managed to get just twenty minutes of airtime on BBC Radio Four in the past four years. The reason? The BBC clearly regards immigration as off-message. It is quoted occasionally on the Today programme as part of an agenda setting collusion between the BBC and the Print Media…incestuously playing each other’s stories.

Digital Radio will not have its full impact until several decades hence but even now Listeners who can be bothered…and know how…can select their ear-food from any of the programmes broadcast over the previous week. Another development is RSS Feeds. Nowadays web designers are expected to provide Dynamic Content. They can do this with regularly updated RSS Feeds. At present these are limited to weather reports and stock market prices. But this will change as the way of setting up RSS Feeds becomes more user-friendly and content becomes more eclectic.

On My Yahoo! for instance I have set up my Daily Weblogs as an RSS Feed…alongside columnists from The Guardian. Anybody doing likewise will notice that the BBC and Print Media gradually lose their agenda setting role once this happens. Their right to decide what matters and what people ought to be thinking about each day is being taken from them by a very different voice...mine. My weblog gives them different Thoughts For Each Day.

Remember the Great Tsunami Disaster on Boxing Day 2004? Afterwards a Tsunami Alert System for the Pacific Ocean was installed. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Earlier today a massive earthquake rocked Tonga raising fears of tsunamis and tidal waves. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre went into crisis mode and issued its warnings fifteen minutes later. Tonga never heard it. There was a power failure on the island…you got there before me…caused by the earthquake. Hasn’t anyone heard of back-up generators? One victim of the earthquake might turn out to be Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV owned by the UK Sailing Academy. Last week the boat ran aground on a Polynesian atoll 1500 miles from Tonga. Nobody has heard from the rescue team since the earthquake.

The Mean Fiddler was ordered to pay the West Yorkshire Police £290 000 for last year’s Leeds Festival. They appealed and yesterday had it upheld by three Appeal Court judges because The Plod had not provided any special services. This has wider ramifications because Mean Fiddler also runs the Glastonbury and Reading Festivals.

In America some ambulance-shasing law firm would probably have organised a Class Action by the city’s tax-payers had the appeal been refused. This would have counter-claimed for the return of the £290 000 the West Yorkshire Police did not spend on policing the rest of the City of Leeds while the hoodies and other assorted criminal elements were going about their unlawful occasions at the festival instead of around town.

The 1841 census was the first to include an individual’s place of birth. It also collected detailed household information not previously collected. Last week there was much excitement among the genealogical fraternity when this census went up on the internet. The Ancestry website now has the seven censuses from 1841 to 1901 available online.

But the world is running away from us faster than we can catch up with it. Each morning planes take off from Heathrow every 30 seconds dispatching armies of investment bankers to the far corners of Europe armed with plans to restructure companies and even entire industries. Estimates fluctuate wildly about how much pollution this produces. The airline industry tells us that British planes only contribute a tenth of one percent of global emissions. But others claim that aviation accounts for thirteen percent of British greenhouse gas emissions. Because of the boom in cheap flights this is also the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases…and hence a big problem.

One reason for the discrepancy is in the class of planes selected. Then there are theories that carbon dioxide causes more damage when released at high altitude…while others argue that planes hopping from London to Frankfurt don’t actually go up very high. There is also talk about the non-CO2 effects of aviation so environmentalists include Uplift Factors in their emission calculations of between two and three…though there is no scientific consensus about this.

It is easy to see why the City of London has so enthusiastically embraced European integration. In the first place the banks themselves are more European than twenty years ago when the City was still dominated by banks such as Barings, Schroeders and Warburgs. They may have had the German-sounding names of their immigrant founders but they were quintessentially English and impossibly grand in a way that only an English institution can be.

But today many of the biggest employers in the City really are German…such as Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank…or Dutch or French. And the people who work for them…or for the big American banks…are likely to be called Frederico or Raul or Anne-Marie and to be armed with doctorates and MBAs from the best business schools. There are thousands of ambitious multilingual graduates now seeking their fortunes in the Square Mile.

But the Europeanisation of the City is more than just a matter of personnel and brass name-plates. The business has changed. Twenty years ago the business of the City was still primarily focused on the domestic market…a legacy of decades of exchange controls that ended only in the early 1980s. Investment research was organised along national lines and corporate financiers relied for much of their income on domestic mergers, acquisitions and capital raisings, backed up by fat fees from a more clubby era. Europe was hard work with different accounting standards, little respect for shareholder rights, unfamiliar stock exchanges and differences in currencies and language.

Nowadays every bank regards Europe…and not just Britain…as their domestic market. All the big banks organise their research along European lines. Companies like BP and GlaxoSmithKline are compared with European competitors while fund managers invest across national borders. The truth is that the City has done extraordinarily well out of European integration. In fact it has the feel of a boom town. It has ridden out the millennium bear market and last year it hit new records for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Companies from every part of Europe including prospective European Union members like Ukraine and Turkey are clamouring for the prestige of a London listing.

This has led to a rather peculiar situation. While the City of London has embraced the single market and persuaded the British Government…though not the British people…to throw open the country’s borders to the free movement of people, goods and capital, other countries in the European Union continue to refuse to play by the rules and look for ways to protect their domestic companies from overseas competition. The worst offenders are the countries thought to be the most pro-European like France, Germany and Italy. The Italian Government for instance refuses to allow foreign-owned banks to buy local banks. And Germany still allows listed companies to ignore the views of investors.

A year ago an article in The Spectator reckoned it was clear which way things were heading. ‘The City has financial muscle on its side, it has EU law on its side, and it increasingly has the EU Commission on its side too. ..That is why national governments are increasingly dismantling some of their most extreme anti-business laws…such as France’s 35-hour week and Germany’s oppressive business taxes…while as a rearguard action, still calling on Brussels to resist the spread of Anglo-Saxon Capitalism.’

Our money came in from NCAB just before the May Holiday Weekend so today in my little corner of the world of globalisation my principal task was to clear William Franklin & Sons’ payables by disbursing two thousand pounds to the translators who had worked on the project. As PCHut was still waiting for its broadband connection I had planned to take the train to Ashford. But at eight o’clock a call came in from Francoise asking for help with some computer glitches. So I ended up going into Hastings instead and making my connection to Barclay’s ibank from the Hastings Public Library. Afterwards I went in search of a good internet café in Hastings and discovered Mahavi’s.

John Kenneth Galbraith died on Saturday at the grand old age of ninety seven. He was a child of his age though a generation ahead of his contempories and their conventional wisdom…a term he coined. Galbraith is the best-selling economist in the world…although with John Maynard Keynes as his mentor he was never eligible for the Ludwig Von Mises Nobel Prize in Economics awarded annually by the Swedish banking fraternity to Chicago University. But he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Galbraith once remarked in the lightly ironic and self-deprecating style that so delighted his readers that he always put his manuscripts through the typewriter three times…first for sense, second for style and third for both. It showed. He was the author of over forty books. His method was to sort out the wheat from the chaff of Economic History and Theory and to popularize what emerged without dumbing it down. My generation trusted Galbraith. In an age of increasingly dodgy dossiers this was quite something. To believe or not to believe. That is the question for Our Age.

At Ottakars in Ashford on Saturday I paid £16 for a copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Dummies. I have been in Meads Bookshop on Lion Street after closing time learning how book sellers go online. ABE Books is one answer. But Bookdealer Magazine has been running negative editorials about the amount they take from book sellers…a sales commission of 8% and then another 6% by insisting that members used ABE Books own merchant services. Despite this I will be recommending to Clive Ogden the Proprietor of the Meads Book Service that he signs up with ABE Books for £ 17 per month…but also marks up his antiquarian book prices by 15% to cover their commissions. But Meads Book Service should also have a website of its own…with back office systems and database integration.

The best book on Keynes is by Michael Stewart…the long-forgotten Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s administrations of the 1960s and 1970s. More than any other Labour politician he was responsible for ensuring that our generation never became embroiled in America’s disastrous Vietnam Debacle. For this alone I put Michael Stewart right up there with Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Edmund Blunden as one of the best of Christ’s Hospitals’ favourite sons. It was Tony Blair’s misfortune that he chose to surround himself with the Mandelssons and Campbells of this country’s political world instead of the Michael Stewarts and Michael Meachers of the Labour Party.

Keynes had said that there would be a time when society had to become accommodated to plenty rather than scarcity. Galbraith said this time had arrived and went on to argue that rather than constantly creating material wants through advertising the time had come to pay attention to the quality of life. The European Green Movement learned a lot from Galbraith’s liberalism...but he never believed in socialism as a method. For Galbraith socialism failed the only test that really mattered…the test of practical economics. Socialism didn’t and couldn’t work in the real world.

In Galbraith’s opinion American economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of a world of the past where poverty was nearly universal. He pointed out that America’s economy produced individual wealth but failed to address public needs. An oft-repeated Galbraithian phrase refers to Private Affluence in the midst of Public Squalor. He gave American liberals many of their sound-bites…and much of the language for debating issues of money, work and power. Galbraith revealed what other economists obscured by their obfuscating mathematical illiteracies…and uncovered what other politicians covered up by their rhetorical flourishes. By any measure he was a giant.

Planning is at the heart of what corporations do to create their managed markets and controlled oligopolies. Galbraith wanted Governments to do it too. Laissez-faire was never the Galbraith way…but nor was Soviet-style 5-year Planning. Galbraith had been in charge of Price Control in the Second World War and confessed afterwards that he knew the game was up when his enemies started to outnumber his friends. Galbraith wanted a better balance between the public and the private sectors. This is what he felt the Classical Economic Model fails to achieve.

One of my favourite Galbraithian remarks was his put-down of trickle-down theory so beloved of those of a right wing persuasion. ‘Trickle down theory,’ he wrote, ‘is the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.’ Another was his remark that there are two sorts of forecaster: those who don’t know…and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Before the Hitler War the young Fritz Schumacher was a world-famous expert on International Finance. So it made sense for him to accompany John Kenneth Galbraith into Allied Occupied Germany in 1946. In my article The Schumacher Enigma I remarked that Schumacher had worked closely with Galbraith after the war. I have yet to read any reflections by Schumacher on this period in his intellectual development. But it may be significant that he rarely touched on International Finance in any published writings afterwards. I wonder what the Schumacher Archives have to say on his time in Germany with John Kenneth Galbraith?