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.