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.