The capacity of my hard disk is nine and a half gigabytes and nine are in use. I am tempted to buy an external hard drive…or add one of the spares acquired from dismantling computers that have died on me. But the real problem is that I have so many back-up files and so much recovered data on my hard drive that half the capacity may turn out to be surplus to my requirements. Two weekends ago frustration set me to work addressing the problem.

Then last week my 100Mb website started playing up. It refused to accept the 2.25Mb Adobe pdf file of England’s Climate and Energy Politics due for e-publication on Guy Fawkes Day. I had exceeded my 100 Mb. So I removed some folders from the host computer, paid £10 for another 10Mb of space and tried again. Still no joy so I got irritated because a few months ago I had complained that my Control Panel was wrong. It told me it was full when there was only 50Mb of files there. Eventually someone in authority at Head Basement threw a switch and my stuff started getting through…but the Control Panel was still reading full. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Shrug! Whatever!

I am now spending £2.80 on my Senior Railcard to visit Mahavi’s in Hastings whenever I have Webwork to do. Jamal Mahavi knows his stuff, his Cute FTP programme is a joy and his systems never crash. The £10 I pay for six internet hours is money well-spent. To cut a long story short on Friday I decide to pay Mahavi’s Webhosts thirty pounds for a year’s worth of more data storage and data transfer than I could ever dream of. My arrangement with IX Web Hosting in Kentucky means no more Webworries for a year…a pretty good deal. But home and dry I am not.

Last weekend I wasted an hour discovering that I have no copies of the thirty-six Rye Maritime Heritage images either on my computer or in back-up discs elsewhere onboard. They must be in the Jempson’s Storeroom on Winchelsea Road. Two weekends ago I wasted a couple more hours searching for the manuscript of Loves of My Life…Part III of Aspects of Autobiography. By the end I was almost convinced that the several versions of the three-page manuscript on my hard drive was it. But only almost. I knew that the 24 original hand-written pages are in a recent journal but I could have sworn I had typed them up. There is unrecovered data on my Apple Mac Mini.

This weekend I found a 150-page and 100 000 word draft entitled England’s Economic Politics for a new century by William Shepherd. It is dated Thursday 26th May 2005 and on the cover page it says ‘published on Midsummer Day 2005. Second Draft - 30th May 2005. Edited to Page 20 of Draft II - Page 16 of Draft I. On my hard drive I also found a 66-page manuscript dated 7th October entitled Wiping The Slate Clean with the same three parts…Theory, Reality and Strategy. In both cases the chapter headings for the first part were: Orthodoxy & Heresy, Political Economy, Money Talks, Kings, Land, War Business, Debt Laundering and Clean Slate Doctrine. What to do?

I fear things may get worse before they get better. Beside me on the port bunk is a 132-page Guy Fawkes Day 2004 version in hard-copy entitled English Economic Politics for a New Century which I have scribbled all over in classic Buckminster Fuller manner. There is a hand-written note on the cover page dated 8/1-2005...my daughter’s 32nd birthday…which goes like this: ‘My Apple Mac exploded on Wednesday 13/10-2004 leaving me without the means to continue with this manuscript until I had obtained money to replace my laptop...and £100 to recover data from my two exploding computers.’ Perhaps I need a few Personal Assistants to sort all this out for me. I had a whole menagerie at my beck and call in 1993 when working with Connie on The Tales of Crocodile Uppsala.

My reason for seeking the English Economic Politics manuscript was to introduce Clean Slate Doctrine into this week’s blogging record. Let me take up the story of this particular chapter in the early summer of 2001. Michael Hudson's had been busy researching Babylonian economic history at Harvard University's Peabody Museum when he wrote his history of debt cancellations. The Henry George School of Social Science in New York printed a few dozen copies and stapled them together as a 124-page booklet entitled The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations. One of these eventually landed on Boudewijn Wegerif's desk and it is here that our story really begins. Boudewijn spent a couple of days summarising the booklet and then sent his summary to his e-mail list. It was so it came to pass.