A 65-year-old Scotsman with a communist record was found working in the Home Office last week. Mr Reid had no papers and no qualifications but claimed he had been given the job because there was no one else. Mr Reid has had a number of jobs in the last five years since he entered the country from his native Scotland. He once had a temporary job working in hospitals and even had a sensitive post in a defence related office for a few months.

As soon as the mistake was discovered nothing was done…but was done efficiently. Dr John Reid was allowed to continue to come in and work provided he made no attempt to tidy up the mess. ‘We have no idea how many Scotsmen there are in Westminster but estimates suggest anything between two or three thousand or maybe fifteen or maybe none at all. We have no idea about anything’ said a Home Office spokesperson. Alan Johnson is 56.

Private Eye might have made that one up…just…but you couldn’t make this one up. 35 miles away to the east the French have slipped back into their comfortable surrealist world. For French Socialists worker solidarity goes just so far but no further. Back in 2003 fifteen thousand elderly people were killed…allegedly…by a heat wave. In a panic response President Chirac and his Dysfunctional Underlings (PCDU) hit upon the absurd poetry of levying a corporate tax of a third of one percent to fund a two million euro scheme to help the elderly and the disabled.

Business kicked up their usual fuss…extravagant, unfunded etc…so PCDU caved in and compounded their stupidity by abolishing one of France’s eleven annual bank holidays for a Day of Solidarity. You got there before me. Today…Whit Monday…is France Solidarity Day. And it’s working. Solidarity has broken out all over France. Schools and post offices are closed, half of French businesses are closed, Government workers are staying home and SNCF…the French state railway…is running its normal restricted Bank Holiday service. President Chirac’s approval rating has plummeted to an all time low of 17 percent. Even George Dubya Bush looks popular by comparison.

My extravagance needs reining in or I will never leave Rye so I am budgeting £200 for my office and internet expenses in June. This means some careful scheduling. Now that I have a working laptop there is really no excuse for paying £2 an hour at PCHut when much of the work could be done on Vemara. So the plan is to work aboard Vemara on Tuesdays and Fridays, use two hours of free Broadband…plus free laptop time at Starbucks…in Ashford on Wednesdays and Saturdays and take the train into Hastings for Mahavi’s on Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays. Train fares work out at £20 per week while my 18 hours per week of paid internet access at Mahavi’s will set me back £24.

I have been working on two blogging projects over the weekend…the Magna Carta II Project and the Shepherd Blogs for the Website Project. Saturday afternoon was devoted to setting up the Charter 2015 blogsite which now has half a dozen initial postings to give a flavour of what I have in mind…The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; The Knights of Gaia. I have not talked to anybody about this so have no idea if it will fly. It might be another damp squib…like the idea of The Real Bank of Wessex that I attempted to piggyback onto the first Radical Consultation five years ago without success.

On Sunday I got myself into quite a mess muddling up days and dates creating a Microsoft Word database for my 2006 Web Documents. Three volumes…120 weblogs long…will be going up on the William Shepherd website in Adobe pdf format. The problem was that my Welsh weblogs were created on my Apple Mac Mini and converted to Adobe pdf files but while I was in transition between Llangolman and Rye my weblogs were posted straight onto the bloghost. Once I got organised in Rye each weblog has had its own ‘.doc’ document. But we’ll cope. We always do.

Last week I paid £0.80p for East Sussex County Libraries to acquire a copy of The Complete Fawlty Towers from Polegate Library and truck it across the eastern half of this truncated county to me here in Rye so I can take it with me to Stockholm. I have a fiendish plan. The last time I went away to foreign climes it was Hersonissos on Crete and Creaky Tales…an everyday story of boating folks.

This time it will be Sundbyberg and PCHut…an everyday story of an internet café. Tony Payne is ideal as a young Basil Fawlty. PCHut's fictional propriéteur will hate Americans the way Basil hated the Germans. Sandra is a larger than life character already without any fictional creativity…and…well…surely it is time for the Mad Blogger of Carmarthen to be given his chance on the silver screen. Manuel…John Cleese’s Spanish waiter…is missing. Three of the twelve episodes are already plotted and Tony Payne has gone off to the Costa del Sol to come up with more plots.

Helena has arrived in Totnes and is busily settling into the Bowden House Community. We were chatting about life the universe and everything on the phone for an hour over the weekend. If you were to build a replica of the Papworth Farmhouse as an extension tacked on to the present building you would have Bowden House. Replicate a few more times…adding a third storey for good measure…and you get Buckingham Palace. Get the idea? Queen Anne style…very four-square…and run on Tapeley Park principles…at least in theory. Practice is something else.