William Shepherd

In the 1720s Count Tommaso Sandi commissioned a cycle of five paintings to decorate his family’s palace in Venice. Three of the paintings were by the Rococo Artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and the other two by Nicol Bambini. Six months ago Sotheby’s in Milan auctioned the paintings for a record price to an anonymous buyer…the King of Nickel Angelo Guido Terruzzi…who paid four million pounds for the pleasure of adding to the 4000 works in his £350 million art collection.

Last month the paintings went on display at the privately-owned Cavalieri Hilton Hotel in Rome in the opening round of a Battle Royal to house the Terruzzi Collection. The province of Veneto has reopened a bid to house it in Venice, Milan is rumoured to be interested and there are whispers about a palazzo in Rome.

I know all this because a recent Italian Auction Record in The Times chanced to catch my eye because it was authored by Colin Gleadell who was ‘in my year’ at Churchill College…and remembered chiefly for the occasion he turned his Frank Zappa Poster to face outwards onto Storey’s Way. Such an act by a student in the Revolutionary Sixties provoked the College’s Ruling Council…after due diligence…to command its reversal or removal. Mr. Zappa was seated upon the toilet and actively engaged in doing what is done on toilets many millions of times each day.

Some people devote their lives to their old school or college. They return for the annual Founder’s Day Dinner and dine at Top Table twice a year. At the pinnacle of their Extra-Curricula Career they gratefully accept the honour bestowed upon them and become Honorary Secretary of the Old Boys’ Benevolent Society. The rest of us are only aware of such activities because a goodly proportion of the mail dropping through the letter box…or PO Box in my case…is high-class junk mail from institutions like Christ’s Hospital, Churchill College and Cambridge University.

Their magazines are of the highest quality…and their appeals make subtle hints as to my generous disposition. But where will it all end? Where Friends Reunited lead others must surely follow. Within a few years Deansfield Junior Mixed School, the Universities of Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund and East Africa, Wheelock College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Stone Institute of Management and the System Dynamics Group will be in on it.

Already Cambridge has joined Oxford in providing a high-class Blue Stocking Dating Agency…should I wish to avail myself of their services. They then lowered the tone by advertising in Private Eye but no doubt we will be screened against the university records before each Introduction to counter Dating Fraud.

As Blues Match coalesced with Auction Record in the deeper recesses of my brain I reflected on the curious nature of Celebrity. Of the 200 young men in my college year…the college went coeducational after my time…I could recollect the names of just 10%…and half of these were no more than names.

In my College Celebrity B-list, Norman Wilson, Mick Brewer and Ron Sandford were reading Mechanical Sciences; John Kingsley and Tim Davison doing Natural Sciences, Geoff Hallett studying History; and Frank Dobson and Dave Anderson…two soccer-playing and Newcastle Brown-swigging Geordies…signed up for a Jeffrey Archer-style Graduate Education Programme. There is no record of them in Google…yet these were the Best and the Brightest…the elite 0.8% of the Baby Boomer Years.

Churchill College is unique among Cambridge colleges. Its statutes require that it discriminate positively towards Science and Engineering and negatively against Private Schools. It is therefore statistically significant that of the eleven on my College Celebrity A-list five were not reading Natural or Mechanical Sciences Tripos.

Johnny Watson read Classics, Malcolm Phillips and Christopher Frayling read History, Colin Gleadell read English and Nick Jaff struggled over Alfred Marshall’s Magnus Opus. Completing the list is a Chemist…Nigel McCarthy who spent several years putting lead into petrol…and three Engineering Colleagues...Christopher Singleton who works for computer firms and lives in Wokingham, Peter Charles Mechlin Thompson who joined the Civil Service and Robin Garnett who did Geology and then sold himself to the Oil Business for the duration of his working life.

Also on my A-list are Geoff du Bois and Her from Leeds. Geoff was another Geordie and a Research Scientist who entered college a year after me in 1966 but became part of the Watson-Shepherd-Phillips Social Set. The name of my only Undergraduate Girlfriend escapes me. We met when Girton College played Churchill at Table Tennis. She was reading Natural Sciences and we hitch-hiked to Leeds one weekend for a party my brother was throwing at Leeds University. I let her go badly when my wife-to-be came to town. If Blues Match could find her…well then…

According to legend the young Jimmy Goldsmith was being admonished by his father for failing to learn to read. He listened attentively and then replied. ‘But Daddy I don’t need to know how to read. When I am big I will pay someone to read for me!’ Edward’s young brother was just seven at the time.

In my archives is a hand-written letter dated 26 March 1997 from Sir James Goldsmith addressed to me as the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Oldham West & Royton. ‘Dear William Shepherd. Marc Gordon tells me that you are doing a superb job, and I just wanted to write to congratulate you, to thank you, and to say we are all behind you. James Goldsmith.’

The letter came from Dean Bradley House, 52 Horseferry Road, Westminster, London SW1P 2AF. It was here I first met Priti Patel ten years ago. Jimmy Goldsmith had declared the Referendum Party into existence in a television interview. Many professional firms…lawyers, public relations, accountants…received a significant portion of their annual income from the Goldsmith coffers. They were all caught off-guard by the announcement.

The Referendum Party had just taken a lease on the Horseferry Road premises. There were crates and boxes everywhere. Priti was at the centre of the storm…answering phones, directing removal men, greeting candidates and party supporters, and spreading good cheer among her fellow-workers…a mix of Alistair Campbell Political Operatives and Sloan Rangers on Day Release from Roedean and Benenden. Finding a young Asian girl brimming with confidence and directing operations came as quite a surprise…and for me a very refreshing surprise.

I had a couple of run-ins with Horseferry Road over the next six months…a section in my election address explaining that as an MP I would work for average wages with the rest of my salary going to a lottery for those on social benefit in the constituency and concern about my Fortnightly Update…which was otherwise extremely well-received… reprinting Flanders and Swann’s Song of Patriotic Prejudice. On each occasion Priti gave me her take on mood and substance…and on each occasion I took her advice and withdrew the offending piece. Priti was 23 at the time.

Last week Priti Patel was picked to fight Witham in Essex for the Conservative Party at the next election…a first for the Cameron A-list Strategy where HQ candidates challenge Favourite Sons to win selection on merit. In her Selection Interview Priti Patel had made clear her Conservative beliefs. Fortunately for her chances these beliefs were those the committee wanted to hear…like ‘I will never vote for the euro because I want to see a Britain that is governed by the British for the British.’ A bigger hurdle for Priti was keeping her place on the Conservative Party’s A-list nine months earlier when she just scraped through after much online criticism 49% to 48% with 3% undecided.

Here is a transcript of the Three-Minute Speech that won me selection as the Referendum Party Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Oldham West and Royton ten years ago. Election Result? Meacher 58.8%, Shepherd 2.5%. Hmm!

‘Good evening. Thank you very much for coming today…I am William Shepherd…I live in Rye...a small town on the south coast of England…I travel to Boulogne more often than Ashford or Hastings…I am a committed European… my son studies engineering in Sweden…my daughter is fluent in Spanish...and her best friend’s father is French...but I live in Rye because it is English…and because I love its Englishness…this Englishness is being destroyed…not by invasion from without...nor by corruption from within…but by stealth...stolen by a thief in the night.'

'Now I have decided enough is enough…I want a Nobler Europe...a Europe of the People…governed by the people...and for the people…but this is not the way it is going. The Referendum Party is going to change that…our aim is to secure a fair referendum…on this country’s future in Europe…twenty years ago we voted for a future as part of Europe…our politicians told us this would mean we could go to Bruges or Salzburg without a passport…buy wine, beer and baccy at French prices…compete for contracts in Dresden on a level playing field…the politicians lied to us…they were embarked on their own private millennium project…to create a United States of Europe.’

‘We lend our power to politicians…we lease it to them for five years...then we expect it back…as the Referendum Party we are saying…return the power borrowed from the people of Britain…we will decide our own future in europe…we insist on being consulted.'

'As a party we have no interest in whether you agree with Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone…or Margaret Thatcher and Virginia Bottomley…the Referendum Party is saying Yes to Europe…but as a party we are also saying a Nobler Europe is only possible by first saying No to Maastricht...a treaty too far in Margaret Thatcher’s words.'

'This election may be your last chance…once power has slipped away to Brussels…It won’t matter who you vote for in British elections…your Members of Parliament will be men of straw…Tony Blair will not have the power to reduce income tax to ten percent…John Major will not have the power to allow our farmers to grow healthy crops.'

'But a vote for the Referendum Party will change this…as a party we are saying…Let the People Decide if Westminster or Brussels governs Britain…as a party the Referendum Party has one policy...and one policy only…to obtain a fair referendum on Britain’s future in europe…once we have secured this...we will dissolve the party...now let me hear what you think...starting with your questions…thank you.’ [2m45s].

On 21st August this year Russia’s state-controlled Vnesheconombank( VEB ) paid off £11.8 billion in debts to the Paris Club of creditors. The seventeen countries had not expected repayment of their loans to the Soviet Union…and certainly not the £680 million technically due for early repayment. Eight years after the Financial Crisis of 1998 Russia no longer has any debt obligations while Gold & Currency Reserves are up 50% this year to £150 billion.

On the cabin table before me are five articles from a Russian Supplement distributed by The Daily Telegraph. Nina Kulikova writes about Inflation in Russia and Yelena Korop on State Investment in Russia. Nina and Yelena are women’s names so my anecdotal evidence reflects an important reality to emerge from three quarters of a century of Communist Rule.

The degree of equality in modern urban Russia where professional elites are to be found, matches the 40% requirement laid upon the Boards of Norwegian Corporations by their Oslo Parliament.

In the other three articles Vladimir Bogdanov writes once and Dmitry Dokuchayev writes twice about Russia’s Debts. Vladimir tells us the Russian Government no longer owes any money to the International Financial Brotherhood of Central Bankers. Dmitry tells us that the Russian People are mired in debts and in hock to something euphemistically called the Russian Banking Sphere and that this strange entity has presented the Russian Parliament with a plan for cancelling a goodly portion of the debts it has created. These five articles suggest that Financial Capitalism has done a good job in Russia and can pull out…after two decades…leaving Russia to her grizzly fate.

How much longer America’s Stormtroopers and Private Contractor’s remain in Iraq depends on whether comparable progress has taken place at the Iraq Central Bank between the First and Second Gulf Wars. It seems that their stay could be anything from three months to three decades. The Bush Dynasty may yet face interrogation about its repeated failures in Mesopotamia…not in Geneva or the Hague…but before a Court of Central Bankers in Basle.

During the Carter and Reagan Presidencies two power factors would have loomed large in the deliberations of the Foreign Policy Elites in Iran…an undivided secular and religious unity. First the fear of the Next Crusade of the Judaic and Neo-Judaic (Christian) Fundamentalists…the Koran versus the Bible. Secondly the Millennium Aspirations of Russia for a Warm-Water Port. Strategically both forces harbour dreams of a settlement that would last a Thousand Years. In response Iran would have formulated a strategy…with developments in Iraq as a key focus.

Iran Strategy would have been to destroy Iraq militarily; remove the danger posed by Saddam Hussein as a power rival; extend the Iranian Shia Revolution into Iraq; expand Islamic Fundamentalism in the Moslem World and beyond; and present the United States of America to the world as The Great Satan in the Middle East. Where is the cartoon of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posing in front of a banner with the words Mission Accomplished?

On 30th October 2006 there was a Parliamentary Debate in London on the Second Iraq War. The war has been waging for 1 300 days…killing 120 and injuring 4 000 British Soldiers. The total death toll is estimated at 655 000 Iraqi Non-combatants and 3 000 Coalition Forces…twice the highest death count in any of the other 25 conflicts around the globe since the end of the Vietnam War 40-years ago. Her Majesty’s Government won the debate by a 25-vote margin. Twelve Labour Rebels voted against the ruling Labour Government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

During the day the Government made a series of retreats, refusing a proper inquiry into the conduct of the war in the morning before promising one in the evening…after Our Troops have left Iraq…in order to ensure its Commons Victory. In recent times there have been two occasions when this condition has been waived and The Commons have debated the conduct of a war before it had ended. The first was in World War I over the failed attempt to capture the Dardanelles. The second was at the start of the World War II over the fiasco of the Norwegian Campaign.

In 1940 the British Government defined Britain’s task as bringing American Power into a European War on their side. Forty years later when Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq began to be groomed for Global Capitalism, Islamic Iran saw itself similarly threatened by a Foreign Invader. Although Military Courage in the field is ever matched by Intellectual Cowardice at home, the real task of The Historian is to challenge assessments of the National Interest.

Nobody reads H.G. Wells any more but three-quarters of a century ago he was a giant. He once remarked that Finance and Administration were key to the rise and decline of Imperial Fortunes. Wells was brought up to understand the two 19th Century schools of thought on Trade and War. But he also glimpsed as through a glass darkly a third possibility. This faded option was the driving force behind the 12th to 17th century Hansa Trading Empire.

In the 19th Century the Corn Laws were at the heart of English Parliamentary Debates. Most of the arguments were rooted in vested interests. Nonetheless underpinning the opposing positions were moral arguments about War and its relationship to Trade.

The Free Traders argued for Peace through Trade and the Protectionists for Peace & Permanence through Self-Sufficiency. The Hansa represented a third school. Trade per se was not the point at issue but the manner and moral tenor of that trade…Trade as a Carrier of the Usury Virus for instance.

In the Middle Ages, the walled town of Visby was at the centre of the Hansa Trading Empire with commercial treaties and lines of supply and demand reaching out into all the corners of the Roman Catholic United States of Europe. Maritime Law was determined by the Hanseatic Elders. Herring was the Hansa staple and a Hansa ship never travelled with an empty hold. Visby was host to the Hansa top brass for many years...as good an off-shore tax haven as one would wish.

The people of Gotland however were less than enthusiastic about this great cancerous growth upon their island home. There were skirmishes and unstable alliances. The little maritime interests of the Gotland fishermen and the little landed interests of the Gotland smallholder would not always coincide with the big European maritime interests of the Hansa Merchants…and as time passed even less with the commercial interests of the Confederation of Hanseatic Towns.

By the end of the 14th century Gotland wanted nothing to do with the military pretensions of the Hanseatic League. They wanted out. Their prayers were answered. Mysterious cosmic force caused the deep ocean currents of the North Atlantic Ocean to move and the economics disappeared overnight from the Hansa Shipping Cartel. Gotland returned to its former peaceful glory and became the home of such great Swedish poetic spirits as Ingmar Bergman…creator of the rich visual and emotional feast that is his silver screen production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.

It is normal to associate the Association of Hansa Merchants, the Confederation of Hansa Towns and the Hansa League of City States with the Hansa’s periods of Growth, Power and Decline. My model also has periods of growth, power and decline but my focus is on the key shifts in the Structure of the Hansa.

(I) Merchant Adventurers 1130-1180
(II) Merchants' Hansa 1180-1250
(III) Hansa of the Towns 1250-1350
(IV) The Golden Years 1350-1400
(V) Power Games 1400-1450
(VI) The War Years 1450-1480
(VII) Two Centuries of Decline 1480-1680.

In the summer of 1999 I sketched out a plan of research. My starting point would be the historic records of the five Hanseatic City-States of Visby, Novgorod, Hamburg, Riga and Danzig and the three Hansa Factories at London, Bergen and Boston.

Research into the Competitive Relationships between the Hansa and the Teutonic Order, the Roman Catholic Church, the English Court, the Swedish Court and the Spanish Court would also be pursued. Enlargement of the European Union would open up new opportunities to trace the relevant Medieval Documents.

Underpinning my Research Plan were two working assumptions. Strategically the Hansa operated like a modern multinational corporation. The Hansa’s goals would thus be to secure a minimum thirty percent market share in each key commodity sector.

Secondly, while the tariff measures of the Hansa at the end of the 13th century were grounded in Sound Political-Economic Theory and led to the rise of the Hansa, the confiscatory measures introduced at the beginning of the 15th century were grounded in Unsound Political-Economic Theory and led to the Hansa’s decline.

I have in mind to spend half of next year affiliated to the Economic History Department at Lund University while gathering the data needed to prepare Financial Accounts for 40 commodities traded by 200 Hansa City States from 1130 to 1630. Here is my basket of commodities:

Amber, Barley, Beer, Butter, Cereals, Cloth, Copper, Corn, Fish, Flax, Flour, Furs, Gold, Grain, Hemp, Herrings, Hides, Honey, Iron, Lead, Leather, Linen, Manufactures, Orientals, Pitch, Potash, Rye, Saffron, Salt, Saltpetre, Silk, Silver, Spices, Sugar, Tar, Timber, Wax, Wheat, Wine and Wool.

Seven years ago I argued that a Hansa Study of this nature would be valuable as Pure Research. However two further benefits now suggest themselves.

First my Hansa Study will establish the basis for exploring the hypothesis that the Financial Technique of Central Banking introduced in the second half of the 17th century shifted the relationship between War & Peace, Trade, Finance and Administration and led to our 300 years of Global Material Expansion.

Secondly…to the extent that British Imperial Policy from Elizabethan Times to the present day was grounded in lessons learnt from the success and failure of the Hansa…valuable insights are to be gained into Trading Policy for a new century by establishing the soundness of the Political-Economic Doctrines presently vying for public favour.

If the Ozone in the atmosphere were compressed into a layer on the ground it would be a few millimetres thick. If a 100-yard football pitch represents the Earth’s atmosphere the width of the chalk line is the amount of Carbon Dioxide.

If a scientist came up with a Homeopathic Theory of Atmosphere I might believe minute quantities of Ozone and Carbon Dioxide are crucial to life on earth. But homeopathy is being rubbished...and Atmosphere Theories to date are mostly nonsense. The Ozone Story…like the Carbon Dioxide Story…is complicated and poorly understood.

200-years ago Friedrich Schönbein noticed a strong odour lingered in the air after a lightning strike on a church near his home in Basle. 40-years later he noticed a similar smell when he passed a current through water. He named the substance Ozone after the Greek ozein ‘to smell’. He experimented and found the gas had some very unpleasant effects. It affected breathing, caused chest pains and irritation of the mucous membranes and killed small animals.

The Oxygen we breathe has two oxygen atoms…Ozone has three. Airlines fly six miles high. From here to 30-miles is rarefied Ozone…a cause célèbre for Environmentalists since 1985 when holes were found in it over the poles. A few of us pointed out that this was to be expected if the earth was spinning on its axis. But in September 1987 the Montreal Protocol banned chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs). Subsequently this agreement was trumpeted as proof that a One World Government is needed to make such agreements and exact compliance from recalcitrant states.

A few months ago we were told that the Ozone Layer would be hunky-dory by 2050. Then a month ago NASA’s Aura Satellite photographed an Ozone Hole over the South Pole of 10.6 million square miles…close to the record 11.4 million square miles on 9th September 2000. Equinox handbrake turns at the far end of an elliptical orbit will swirl the ozone layer about. Yet Ozone Layer Theories fail to take such a dynamic planetary orbit approach to the Ozone Hole.

Back on terra firma it is a well-known fact that pollution from industrial emissions and car fumes builds up in hot sunny weather. Ozone is accused of playing a big part in the subsequent Smog Problem. Ozone is also accused of damaging vegetation in rural areas ‘because wind can carry Ozone and the pollutants that form it hundreds of miles’. Perhaps someone can explain the mechanism to me. But until then I will stick with my anecdotal expertise. I was in London for the Great Smog of December 1952 which killed 12 000 people and led to calls to outlaw coal-burning.

Fifty years ago Parliament passed the Clean Air Act banning coal smoke. In the early years of the twentieth century November Central London averaged a total of just 38 hours of sunshine. After the Clean Air Act the hours of daily sunshine improved hugely throughout the winter months. By the end of the century November’s sunshine in the capital had soared to more than 70 hours with lichens recolonising the capital’s trees, parks and gardens.

In December 1952 the smog was as acidic as a car battery. The corrosive effect of centuries of acidic smogs eating into metal and stonework disappeared when buildings were scrubbed clean of grime and black soot. By the end of the millennium London was sparklingly clean.

Back in the days that the climate computers were being run in reverse to predict a Nuclear Winter the dust particles in the atmosphere were key parameters. Erupting volcanoes were also accused of depositing dust in the atmosphere. Yet where are these Clean Air Acts in the Global Warming Studies?

In the summer of 1952 a fine woman of my acquaintance came home from school in East Berlin…and woke up the next day in Dusseldorf. Six months later she was joined by her parents and her elder brother. She had been smuggled out of East Germany. How this was done she will never know. I met her 18-months ago. She drove me back from a Ryesingers Rehearsal and accepted my invitation to take coffee on Vemara. Conversation was animated.

Then a strange thing happened. As I looked across the cabin table her appearance changed. For about 15 seconds I saw her as a Young Pioneer about 12-years of age…pigtails, red kerchief and the look of fervour associated with Soviet and East European posters of the 1950s. It was a vivid impression. Even today I can still capture its vividness in my mind’s eye. In 1966…14-years after she had left the city…I crossed into East Berlin…twice.

The first was a day-trip. I passed through Checkpoint Charlie, sent some postcards and returned to West Berlin. The following day I passed through Checkpoint Charlie again and carried on walking for 3-hours until I reached a railway station on the city outskirts. I bought a ticket to the end of the line…two miles from the Polish Border. I walked across a bridge into Poland. Ten days later I was sitting in my one-man tent on the beach at Mamaia on the Black Sea…with hundreds of other East European tourists. I was bemused. I had expected to be turned back at the station.

I returned to the Eastern Bloc twice…to Romania for my honeymoon and to Russia in a Hillman Imp with my brother and a college friend. We were in Red Square when the Red Army marched into Prague and followed them.

This time we were turned back at the Czech Border…and told to head for Poland and The West…like fast. We did. My general impression of the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s was of drabness. All the buildings were grey and there was no colour in the few shops. Paint was a luxury and Plastics and Packaging were preserves of The West. I breathed a sigh of relief when returning to Western Europe. An acute sense of claustrophobia set in a few days before being free.

As I walked through the Park Meadow Shopping Centre in Hastings on Thursday I was bemused to find a shop devoted just to Calendars and another…called The Name Shop…with nothing but Personalised Products…for Teresa, Tracy, Samuel and Sean. The sheer flamboyance of it all, the exuberance and the bright colours.

The Emma Maersk is 1270 feet long and 251 feet high…the largest ship in the world. Eleven sister ships are planned. She docked at Felixstowe two weeks ago after a 63-day Maiden Voyage from China…with a crew of thirteen. Cruising speed was 25 knots and it used a tiny fraction of the fuel cargo jets would have burnt air-freighting similar quantities of goods. Emma Maersk was launched in Aarhus and got to China via Rotterdam, Suez and Singapore.

On board were 11 000 metal containers…each the size of a large lorry. Inside the containers were shoes, shorts, jeans, skirts, bras, socks, bibs, pyjamas, spectacle frames and handbags; Christmas decorations, hair curlers, toasters, microwave ovens, digital cameras, cocktail shakers, fizzy bath bombs, sofas, lampshades, carpets and kitchenware; 10 tons of mussels, 150 tons of New Zealand lamb, 138 000 tins of cat food, 63 tons of frozen pumpkins, 82 tons of rice noodles and 1548 pieces of frozen chicken. There were 1236 crates of calendars too.

And then there were the toys…dozens and dozens of containers of toys. China manufactures 80% of the world’s toys employing a million people in 5 000 factories…halls with barred windows locking workers in for 18-hour shifts and paying them less than £50 per month. The madness does not stop here.

In the world of Shipping Agents and Merchant Adventurers no hold is ever left empty. The Hanseatic League collapsed when there was no herring for their holds. For several hundred years Dutch Shipping had a Ships Monopoly in Northern Europe based on full holds other nation failed to match. The British Empire invented triangular trade to keep its holds filled. The media has shown no interest in the loading of the Emma Maersk in Felixstowe.

Rye Chamber of Commerce has received a Green Action Award for its Cardboard Recycling Project. Businesses deliver on Thursdays and Smurfit Kappa Recycling UK collects and disposes. We are being told of a 10% fall in the amount of municipal waste going to landfill in the UK…municipal waste accounts for 7% of the total…and 27% of UK rubbish being recycled last year. So that’s all right then. Or is it? What do Smurfit Kappa and Biffa and the others do with their increasing share of the 10 million tons of packaging waste? You are there before me.

On Guy Fawkes Day the Emma Maersk lifted her 29-ton anchor from our territorial waters for the return voyage to China…gathering up scrap and waste from around Europe en route. Having unloaded thousands of containers of in less than 24 hours the Emma Maersk left Felixstowe reloaded with crates of waste plastic, paper and steel.

In 1998 115 000 tons of waste was exported from the UK to China, India and other Asian countries. This year it will be over two million tons. It ends up in vast unregulated dumps with horrifying environmental conditions. So the next time Government and Local Authorities start crowing about their progress towards their EU Recycling Targets and Landfill Directives ask for a breakdown of where the waste is going…final destination. Lies, damn lies and statistics are the order of the day. Oh…and keep upwind of the Emma Maersk on her return voyage to China.

John Papworth e-mailed to let me know that he had read England’s Climate & Energy Politics and concluded that my position was that ‘the current Global Warming scare has no basis in truth and that people with their own agendas are promoting it for their own reasons’…and could he please have a letter for Fourth World Review that ‘in a couple of sentences summarises your conclusions for the general reader and indicates what you think the game is’.

My response was that I was right to start getting worried about the Global Warming Debate a couple of years ago and that it was clear to me two years on that there is something very odd going on…but that I was very uncertain about just what this was. So my current advice to colleagues is to proceed with caution and be very careful with anything they read or write about Climate Change. This was as far as I could go on the record. However the Human Scale Movement has a Climate & Energy agenda which in England stands in stark contrast to Official Government Policy.

The Prime Minister’s Address to the Labour Party Conference two months ago included a section on his government’s Energy Policy. The Times condensed what Blair had to say into 180 words. Here they are. ‘Ten years ago energy wasn’t on the agenda. Ten years ago I parked the issue of nuclear power. Today I believe without it we are going to face an energy crisis and we can’t let that happen. Global warming is the greatest long-term threat to our planet’s environment. Scarce energy resources mean rising prices and will threaten our country’s economy. In 15 years we will go from 86 percent self-sufficient in oil and gas to 80 percent imported. We need therefore the most radical overhaul of energy policy since the war.’ Blair went on to outline his strategic approach.

‘We will increase the amount of energy from renewable sources fivefold; ensure every major business in the country has responsibility for greenhouse gas reduction; treble investment in clean technology including clean coal and make sure every new home is at least 40 percent more energy efficient. We will meet our Kyoto targets by double the amount and we will take the necessary measures step by step to meet one of the most ambitious targets on the environment ever set anywhere in the world - a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050.’

I responded with a 180-word English Energy Policy for a New Century that went like this. ‘Ten years ago it was blindingly obvious that energy self-sufficiency was the right energy policy goal. Ten years ago it was blindingly obvious that nuclear power was a dead-end technology. Nothing has changed. Global warming and the greenhouse effect are fantasy not fact. To imagine Governments can stabilize the Earth’s atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. Human beings cannot control the climate and must stop meddling with it. There is no energy shortage. The sun takes 45 minutes to provide all the energy we use in one year.’ I went on to outline the barebones of my strategic approach.

‘We will outlaw the use and development of climate weapons immediately. We will withdraw from the Kyoto Treaty immediately. We will decommission all nuclear power stations immediately. We will stop wasting electricity on space heating. We will adopt zero tolerance and polluter pays policies for emission of all substances into the landscape and the atmosphere. We will establish a Lord Lieutenant’s Department with Cabinet status to direct the dismantling of the country’s national piped energy grids. Prince Charles will head the department, negotiate county disconnection dates, issue the money and provide the people.’ I hope the contrasting policies are what get published.

I emailed copies of my response to the Human Scale Movement’s Steering Group…Dr Aidan Rankin, Chris Wright, Anton Pinschof in Europe and Kirkpatrick Sale and Thomas H. Greco in America and mentioned that Tom had suggested I apply for two weeks at the Mesa Refuge…overlooking Tomales Bay in Marin County north of San Francisco in the spring of 2007. This might make sense with a place to write in Tucson for 2-weeks before and in Mexico City for 2-weeks after en route to 2-3 months in Bogotá, Colombia…and if I could find a way to pay for it all.

With dark nights upon us and the shops full of Winter Solstice Cheer…to be politically correct…my Hey Fellow Well Met! greeting is spiced with a daily rundown…not of Shopping Days to Christmas which are of little consequence to Sad Live-Alones without Festive Family Connections…but of Days to Winter Solstice. Hale and hearty I merrily declare: ‘Days Start To Get Longer in 28 Days!’ This goes down better at this time of the year than ‘Nights are Drawing In!’ immediately after Mid-Summer. My official Longest Night occurs on Thursday 21st December to allow a day of rest before my Japanese Rising Sun Celebrations two days later on the Emperor’s Birthday.

Last week I ran an experiment. Results are in. Ten Pound Coins last seven Days. Operant conditions? Warm Weather outside and Coal Stove going inside on two evenings. Some time in the next two weeks my Winter Fuel Allowance drops into my account. A two-pronged Energy Strategy had been devised to greet this happy event. Here it is.

First I will embark upon a couple of trolley runs to Sea Cruisers to fetch four 25kgs sacks of coal. Secondly the electricity meter will be force-fed Pound Coins until it can take no more. Add Fire Lighters from the supermarket and some Kindling Gleaning around the boatyard…and voilà…all set until well into the New Year.

So much for the best laid plans of mice and men. Big lift-out two weeks ago so with a lovely weekend promised up on the bank boats were being worked on…including my new neighbour. Computer, lights, radio and CD-Players do not work off an empty meter but as far as electricity usage is concerned, they can be ignored. My 2 kilowatt-hour fan heater is another matter…Hey Big Spender! But if I use the oil-filled electric heater sparingly then no problem. Wrong! Power tools use electricity and my neighbour plans to work weekends. His boat runs off Vemara’s meter.

We assured each other how laid back we both were about it. We agreed to keep an eye on the situation. And we would not mutter under our breath if we felt short-changed but talk to each other. The last thing either wanted was to record coins in and kilowatt-hours out.

Nonetheless, after briefly believing that I had total control, cooperation came as a bit of a shock. I spent today finding excuses to offer up Ten-Pound Notes at cafés and shops in Rye and Hastings. Never have so many Two-pound Coins and Five-Pound Notes been given as change for a Tenner.

November has turned wild and wet with snow on the hills up north. Not before time. I have yet to find anyone in Rye who remembers a year when the trees lining Whitehall were still in full green leaf on Remembrance Sunday. Perhaps New Labour has stealthily replaced them with Douglas Firs under EU Draft Directive THD01212881790. The good news is that last month, Westminster Road Sweepers picked up only half their normal 40-ton October Leaves Quota.

Sunny days and cool nights should be ideal for boosting the sugar content in leaves so they produce the red-coloured anthocyanins which give Maples their distinctive autumnal look. Why do they bother? One theory is that the red pigment behaves like a sun screen protecting the foliage from intense autumn sunshine while they salvage valuable nutrients from the leaves before finally shedding them.

Tree Tourism is big business in New England. It’s what to do between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. Could there be something here for Blair’s Brassy Britain? Lengthen the Tourist Season by declaring the end of October to be Leaf Week. Then bring on the Yanks for a Leaves & Fawkes Experience…complete with computers predicting daily percentages like the New Englanders. Computers can predict anything so this is for programmers and copy-writers.

The leaves of Lime Trees are a delicate yellow with the light shining through them. Beeches are a tumultuous riot of deep yellow and brilliant orange. Scarlet Oaks from New England have jagged vivid red leaves which after last night’s storm were all over the high street even though there was not a tree in site. Perhaps Henry James had them planted in the garden of Lamb House a hundred years ago so he wouldn’t feel too homesick? This might explain some of the orange-brown leaves with yellow veins mixed in amongst them. Yellow Poplars are big in Vermont and are sometimes called Tulip Trees because in spring both their leaves and flowers are tulip-shaped.

Beneath Horse Chestnut Trees are lots of long stalks. When a tree sheds its leaves the stalks separate and stay put while the leaves get blown away. Why do they do this? If Linnaeus had his way the People of Rye would take Nature Walks every weekend and discuss such matters of an evening under the auspices of the Royal Rye Botanical Society.

I am told I write well. This is no accident. I have practised hard for many years. As a slight example I dwelt on the word ‘for’ in the previous sentence, replaced it with over’, spoke the sentence aloud and then reinstated ‘for’. I am also a minimalist with punctuation. I accept Lynn Truss’ criteria in Eats Shoots & Leaves but add my own question. Is a particular item of punctuation essential? Is there misunderstanding or ambiguity without it? No. Then leave it out.

I have studied my craft. I delight in getting beneath the surface of words. I insist on knowing why a sentence works. It gives me great satisfaction to take 1000 words and reduce them to 600. To reduce the previous paragraph in this manner I would delete ‘in the previous sentence’ from the fourth sentence. Reducing to 300 is quite different. P.G. Wodehouse interested me when he refused me a 10-6 reduction and insisted I employ my 10-3 tricks of précis and synopsis…which runs off the tongue better than ‘synopsis and précis’. Span and spick jars. Spick and span is fine.

So I was all astonishment when reading Persuasion…Jane Austen’s last completed novel written in 1815 twenty years after Pride and Prejudice first saw the light of day as First Impressions. Austen had invented the literary trick of free indirect speech with its power to embody dramatic elements within the flow of the narrative...something Ernest Hemingway was much skilled at. The trick is to use actual phrases but indirectly so the narration combines the voice and moral perspective of the original speaker with those of the reporting or narrating agents.

In The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford 1972) Norman Page illustrates the point. ‘How Anne’s more rigid requisitions might have been taken is of little consequence. Lady Russell’s had no success at all – could not be put up with-were not to be borne. ‘What! Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table,-contractions and restrictions every where. To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman! No, he would sooner quit Kellynch-hall at once than remain in it on such disgraceful terms.’

Here is an example of Jane Austen’s subtlety in Mrs. Clay’s remarks to my son’s namesake John Shepherd… Estate Agent to Gentlemen of Fine Breeding & Delicate Sensibilities. ‘Certainly sailors do grow old betimes; I have often observed it; they soon lose the look of youth. But then is not it the same with many other professions, perhaps most other? Soldiers in active service are not at all better off; and even in the quieter professions there is a toil and a labour of the mind, if not of the body, which seldom leaves a man’s looks to the natural effect of time. The lawyer plods, quite care-worn; the physician is up at all hours, and travelling in all weather; and even the clergyman -‘she stopt a moment to consider what might do for the clergyman;- ‘and even the clergyman, you know, is obliged to go into infected rooms, and expose his health to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere.’ Jane Austen has her continue.

‘In fact, as I have long been convinced, though every profession is necessary and honourable in its turn, it is only the lot of those who are not obliged to follow any, who can live in a regular way, in the country, choosing their own hours, following their own pursuits, and living on their own property, without the torment of trying for more; it is only their lot, I say, to hold the blessings of health and a good appearance to the utmost: I know of no other set of men but what lose something of their personableness when they cease to be quite young.’

This passage has little immediate bearing on the plot. A 10-3 reduction would have it deleted. It could be removed for an abridged version. But the sentiments expressed are as radical as anything from Wordsworth and the Romantic Poets. Indeed we have here echoes of John Keats’ Ode to Indolence. Three hundred years on we have made little progress towards the society implied. Mrs. Clay spoke on for two reasons…and only one was relevant to the plot.

Jane Austen was acutely a-tuned to the Establishment of her age…and realised its relevance to all establishments at all times. Establishments dislike nothing more than those who blurt out loud what everybody knows but prefer to leave unsaid. It embarrasses people. Parvenues who think to join the Establishment while elbowing aside the delicate web of hypocrisies, deferences and understandings that support it infuriate the Establishment’s old guard.

This is Tony Blair’s real crime in the Cash for Peerages Scandal creeping ever closer to 10 Downing Street. Matthew Parris made the point in his column in The Times last Saturday. ‘Imagining that all he needed to do was cloak an outright gift in the garb of a soft loan was slapdash to the point of arrogance. If this was camouflage, it was cursory.’

For the past nine months Rye has had a Big Issue Seller in residence on the pavement in the High Street…and on occasions setting up his stall outside our local supermarket. He has two dogs, himself and a large rucksack. This constitutes stall dimensions…and outside Grammar School Records it monopolises one of the two benches.

One fine woman of my acquaintance…bless her…with practical experience of homelessness from devoting part of her life to setting up and running a Battered Woman’s Hostel in Central London has tried to get behind the Big Issue Seller’s situation…quizzing me about the intricacies of Working Tax Credit along the way. I don’t do guilt trips but I know someone who does…bless her…each time she walks along the High Street unsure of which side of the street to pass him by.

The Vicar of St Mary’s…bless him…wrings his hands and discusses with one of his more generously minded parishioners…bless him…the idea of putting the Big Issue Seller into a caravan for the winter. Caravans can be acquired. But a landowner willing and able to accept a caravan, two dogs and a Big Issue Seller is another matter. I suspect there are dozens of similar stories around town. Does one person have the right to generate so much unease?

There are two big issues here with half the proceeds of one going to the seller…a decent percentage by charitable standards. But the other is of interest too. John Stuart Mill argued that people can do as they wish…provided they do not stop others doing as they wish. The philosophy of the Modern Welfare State…throughout Europe…believes Welfare Recipients participate in a Social Contract with mutual rights and duties. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The Queen’s Pence is yours but in return you must make yourself available for Work. No work - no benefits.

Since 1997 Parenting and Caring have been viewed as Work and a Roof Over Your Head has become equivalent to a basic right. The moral case for pensions has also shifted. Thirty years of Past Work has long been regarded as endowing full Pension Benefit Entitlement. But Present Work is also entering the equation. Many one-, and even two-income families are only kept afloat by grandparents minding the children.

Our Big Issue Seller is entitled to shelter so either he doesn’t know this or he chooses not to avail himself of Rented Accommodation and Housing Benefit from Rother District Council. If he is homeless it is by choice or from ignorance…or by refusal or inability to work. Local people who feel guilty should not fool themselves. Old-style Liberals have no philosophical objection to someone over-nighting on The Salts in summer but in winter there is a problem. Either he will infringe on somebody’s personal property rights…trespassing to stay warm…or end up in a National Health hospital at tax payers expense. So it is time to take issue with John Bird the founder of The Big Issue.

The Big Issue was a clever entrepreneurial idea in Thatcher’s Britain. But it is past its sell-by date. There will always be a case for a Campaigning Journal on Homes, Shelter and Housing…immigrants, second homes and pre-empting residential property for commercial use are topical issues. But in the New Labour Welfare State where housing is an entitlement Big Issue Selling should be seen as Charitable Collection. The collector should not be seen as a Homeless Person but as a Charitable Object. From the Public Policy point of view the Big Issue Seller is a Stallholder. If he does not have the requisite Planning Permission or Trading Licence he should be moved on by the police.

Selling Big Issues is not a job. It is not gainful employment in any meaningful sense but a form of begging. Ayn Rand viewed Society as made up of Producers, Looters and Moochers. Producers create wealth for Society. Looters use laws to destroy the wealth of Society while Moochers use guilt. In The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand shows the degrading effects this has on the souls of the Second-Raters who live by the Looters' and Moochers' codes.

Getting the Big Issue Seller off the street yields immediate benefits to everybody. But what of the Big Issue Seller? Ayn Rand sidesteps the question of redemption…of how to turn Moochers into Producers. Virginia Woolf wrote a book entitled A Room of Your Own that considers the question. But the title is misleading. The room is just the first step…and without Money of Your Own it is of little worth.

Virginia Woolf understood Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Rooms and money are just the first steps towards Self-Esteem and Self-Actualisation. An enlightened society’s policy for its Big Issue Sellers would not seek to enforce the contractual terms of the Social Contract for the Queen’s Pence but would recognise the need for a Period of Convalescence. One week of benefit without a duty to work for each week on the streets is one form such a policy might take. Local people could even chip in a bob of two.

When you leave Rye’s Church SquareGungardens with its splendid view across the East Bank of the River Rother to Romney Marsh beyond, you come at once to the Ypres Tower. Take a sharp left turn around the corner of the tower, just before the arch into the Gungardens, and you will find yourself at the top of the Ypres Steps. Halfway down…below the Town Stocks…is the Ypres Inn. At the foot of the steps is the busy A259.

On the other side of the road is a football pitch, a putting green, the Rye Bowls Club and a children’s playground. Cross the road and keep The Salts on your left and The Chair Doctor’s workshop on your right. Ahead you will see the entrance to Rye Yacht Centre where Vemara is moored. To the left of the Boatyard Gates is a pretty red and black cottage belonging to John and Margaret Houslander. Behind Ferry Cottage is Rye's new fish quay.

Six years ago as editor of Rye Harbour Boat Owners Association’s magazine I published a Fishing Supplement. It opened with this quote: ‘Sea fisheries remain the only significant economic activity of developed countries which are a form not of harvesting or of processing, but of hunting’ and mentioned the fact that Sir Edward Heath has dismissed as ‘absurd and insulting’ the notion that he had betrayed the country’s fishermen. Insulting - yes. Absurd - no.

Four years ago the Public Forum Supplement to the last RHBOA magazine under my editorship…Number 94...included a defensive letter to the Rye Observer from John Morgan…Area Navigation Manager for the Environment Agency alongside a blistering attack on the Environment Agency from Rye’s Labour MP Michael Foster who described the delays and overspending as ‘a cock-up on a par with the overspend on London’s Jubilee Line’.

Here is an extract from John Morgan’s letter: ‘We have taken this opportunity to carry out a strategic review and to assess the value of the harbour to the local community. This will provide a sound basis for seeking investment for the Rye Fish Quay from other outside funding partners. Duncan Grant going into receivership may have caused us delays anyway as some of the land needed for the development is tied up in his leasehold.’

Mr Foster was not amused and had this to say: ‘I am furious and want to know how it could have happened. I led a delegation of fishermen to Parliament myself. The money was agreed and everything was in place. They have already spent £ 800 000 on Admiralty Jetty and it is nowhere near enough to upgrade the fishing quay. I don’t know whether it is the Environment Agency or its Consultants who are to blame but the whole thing smacks of maladministration and negligence and I want some straight answers. How can you start work without having the correct figures? I want to know what is different now to what they already knew before they started work. I feel incandescent with rage. The people of Rye and the fishermen deserve better. It is an enormous disappointment and continues to put our fishermen at risk working on a quay which falls well below EU standards. The quay will be improved. It has to happen; it is just a case of when and how.’ Mike Foster turned out to be correct.

The Simmons Quay opened on 14th July this year…named after Ronnie Simmons the Fisherman’s Representative who devoted ten years of his life to banging heads together and refusing to be fobbed off by bureaucratic excuses. It is a remarkable success story and one that Rye can take pride in. Several times a week French trucks load up. A regular visitor is Comptoir de Marée du Marche Commun of 23-25 Rue G. Honoré, 62200 Boulogne-sur-mer who makes pick-ups all along the English South Coast…Shoreham, Brighton, Newhaven, Eastbourne, Hastings, Rye, Hythe, Folkestone, Dover and Ramsgate before heading for the Cross-Channel Ferries or the Channel Tunnel.

Nearly all of England’s cod is brought into the ports of Grimsby and Hull from Norway, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands. Our local waters are not cold enough for cod. They lay their temperature-sensitive eggs just beneath the surface. Boulogne is the biggest fish market in Europe and this is where fish landed in Rye goes. For years Brian Stent fished out of Rye on Akela. This year for the first time he has seen red mullet and swordfish landed at Rye. At 13 my father started work in London’s Billingsgate Fish Market. He would have approved of Rye’s new fish quay.

Last Thursday a huge whale was washed up on Camber Sands. The local paper spoke to the Dover Coastguards who reckoned it was too big to be a Minky Whale and unlikely to be a Humpback. The Daily Mirror had no doubts. At 55 feet it was a Fin Whale…the second largest animal on Earth. It was missing its lower jaw and tail…hit by a ship said the Mirror…and had lost its skin which is what whales do when they die. It had been dead for several weeks.

The inshore waters around the British Isles are teeming with wildlife. Dolphins are being brought ashore in fishermen’s nets along the Dorset Coast and all along the East Coast seals are flourishing...so much so that the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews University decided to take a look at the situation. They estimate that grey seals are eating 8000 tons of North Sea cod a year…4% of the total catch and four times as much as 20 years ago.

Predictably this prompted the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation to call for the grey seals to be culled…and Animal Welfare Groups to call for the fishermen to be culled instead. ‘Shame seals don’t look like toads’ and ‘they may look cuddly but they’re vermin’ gives the flavour of the debate. The last official Seal Cull in Britain was 30 years ago. Seals are smart hunters. They swim together to corral the cod before swallowing as many as they can.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is torn between protecting the interests of our fishermen and kow-towing to meddling outside interests like the European Fisheries Commission in Brussels and the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas. These organisations bribe scientists with research grants to report declining fish stocks and recommend quotas and other bureaucratic devices to enhance their power over our fish. Here are two typical reports. The first is the EU 2004 Cod Recovery Plan which claims the right to limit catches by EU Member States to 26 500 tonnes a year and seeks to control how much time boats can spend at sea. The second is an article in Science by Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia.

The EU Plan reports that twice the approved catch was accidentally caught last year as bycatches by fishermen chasing other species. The idea of bycatches is a silly bureaucratic invention. Down go the nets and into them go the fish. Cod are bigger than haddock, whiting, hake and plaice so in they go too. Ban all fishing is the official response.

Boris has a computer so he prophesies. By 2048 every seafood species in his 100 fishing regions will have collapsed and no longer be commercially viable. The Global Fishing Fleet is two and a half times its sustainable level. North Atlantic Fish Stocks are a sixth of what they were 100 years ago. The Global Cod Catch is down two thirds from three million tons in 1970. Naughty Russian Trawlers are illegally catching 100 000 tons of cod in the Barents Sea. Bluefin Tuna catches in the Mediterranean are 60% above quota. Overexploitation is up 150% since 1970. And so on.

Over the years sheep on the Falkland Islands taught themselves to avoid Man by keeping out of rifle range. No doubt fish have also learnt a few tricks…like diving deeper and reacting to the tell-tale signs of approaching trawlers. The ocean’s currents shift too. The decline of the Hansa in the Middle Ages can be traced to a shift in the ocean currents which took the herring with them. And Quota Regimes cause shifts in recorded and unrecorded catches. If the statistics are unreliable…and EU’s Auditors and the European Parliament do not hold Eurostat in very high regard…then garbage in will produce garbage out with computers churning more of it much faster. There are fundamental flaws in Fish Stock Counts. The methodology is poor. Conceptual grids are stretched over the oceans, hypothetical boxes are created and the fish in the boxes counted. Keep still! We’re trying to count you!.

Anecdotal evidence is mounting. Fish move faster than scientists. The vessels of the Rye Fishing Fleet pass a few feet from my stern several times a week. I have been talking to them. They know their business and they are doing very nicely thank you. Fishermen and divers are reporting record numbers of codling and growing numbers of juvenile cod. Methinks that the best way to help our fishermen would be to get out of their way and let them get on with it.

Ten years ago I decided it was time to bring E.F. Benson’s Mapp & Lucia tales up to date. Five years ago I started to sketch some plots and characters. Out with the bridge and the golf club…and move the setting from Rye Citadel in the 1920s to the boatyards on Rock Channel in the 1990s. Up Rock Channel Creek…my everyday stories of boating folks…eventually got the working title of Creaky Tales.

In the spring of 2004 I got away to Västeräs and Hersonissos for two months. I returned to Rye with a hundred thousand words on my laptop and the ability to invent plots, create characters and write dialogue. Since then I have seen plots everywhere and don’t really need to make them up. True facts are implausible. Fiction writers lie to tell the truth. They tone down reality.

The Cheeky Girls live in Rye. In 2004 I worked out behind them at Hilden Gym. I caught glimpses of muscles I didn’t know existed…on them. Ray Semal…their father-in-law…insisted they give me their autographs. At the gym Ben taught me how to avoid being thrown off a running machine. Ben has been seen on Hove Station in the early hours with Heather Mills…who has split from her husband Paul…whose daughter Heather learnt pottery from Connie. Son James learnt karate from Mike Avery…and my daughter worked on Barnaby Rudge…moored in Rock Channel.

Mr. McCartney has a cameo part in Creaky Tales. ‘Councillor Williams reflected upon his forthcoming meeting with Mr McCartney. He had resolved a small dispute with the locals a year ago. Complaints about the danger to local children from Paul’s wildlife park had required his diplomatic touch. He saw himself as a born conciliator and was pleased with the outcome. But it was not good enough for Her Indoors. ‘All well and good until some young girl gets gored or a Jack Russell gets eaten alive by his wild boars and the paparazzi are camping out on our doorstep.’

'To show his appreciation Councillor Williams had been given permission to stroll the woodland paths of Mr. McCartney’s Peasmarsh Estate. Being nervous of wild boar he had not done so . Councillor Williams was not a brave man…nor a fast runner. In fact running was not in his repertoire. But there was a first time for everything.

Councillor Williams decided that tomorrow he would stroll. And he would invite the Efficient Morgan to ride shotgun. Having the Efficient Morgan chased by wild boar might concentrate everybody’s mind.’

The author then has a few words about our man from the ministry…and the rights and wrongs of removing him from Blandings Castle in Shropshire. After this brief interlude Councillor Williams’ phone rings in his study. It is the Efficient Morgan speaking.

‘Today’s the day. I have the solution. I need your OK.’
‘What solution? Whose problem? Where?’
‘Allotment Association. Dredging. Bypass. Skulduggery. Rock Channel. Men of Dark & Dismal Fate. Today’s the day.’ There was a pause.
‘Hello! Are you there?’
‘Yes…yes…Rock Channel...No I haven’t forgotten…You want my OK…Has anything happened?’

Councillor Williams was irritated. Morgan had this effect on him. Why on earth did he slip into Morgan’s ridiculous monosyllabic mode of address. He was on the telephone not writing a telegram.

Then he heard himself say the fateful words.
‘You have the answer…Good…But not on the phone…’
The fates began winding in their threads.

‘I am meeting the owner of Barnaby Rudge at two. Meet me at The Queen’s Head in Icklesham at one thirty. Leave your car in the car park. We’ll go up to Peasmarsh in mine. Bring the file. I want him on our side. He moors Barnaby Rudge in Rock Channel so he’s an interested party. Not that it made a blind bit of difference when his wife went for us over that Memorial Hospital business. No…not her…the first one. We’ll take a walk in the woods afterwards. No…no…just the two of us. Mr. McCartney’s a busy man. I have the run of his estate. A thank-you after that wildlife park incident last year. Well…that’s what he calls it. Yes I know what the locals call it. Wear stout shoes…steel toecaps if you have them…we might be attacked by wild boar. Now I must get on.’

Yet how can this compare with reality? Sir Paul McCartney has revised his deal for building in an area of outstanding beauty without planning permission. His ‘beloved’ log cabin would come down if he could keep his pavilion. Beanacres and two agricultural barns could go as well leaving ‘the intrinsic landscape quality and character of the High Weald’ better off than before his wooden lodge and pavilion went up.

Beats me why he doesn’t get John Prescott to nod it through. Cash for Honours? Autographs for Planning Permission? Can’t see the difference myself!

In Act II of The Pirate of Penzance Major-General Stanley is tormented with the anguish dread of falsehood unatoned for telling his terrible story. He is no orphan…and never was one. But had he not in elegant diction indulged in an innocent fiction then the Men of Dark and Dismal Fate would have taken his daughters over the billowy waters. A Lesser of Two Evils Paradox if ever I saw one.

So he sings a ballad about the sad lot of poplar trees courted by a fickle breeze while they wave their leafy arms above and woo a rippling brook. But why Poplar Trees?

Most trees in Southern England do not shed their leaves until November. Around Rye there is still plenty of green foliage although Oaks have bright yellow patches on them, Beech trees have turned orange and yellow, Ash trees are dropping faintly yellow leaves and Sycamores are a law unto themselves producing an unexpected show of brilliant lemon-yellow leaves some years.. But Poplars?

The White Poplar drop its leaves early…like Horse Chestnuts whose branches are already bare. These were brought here from Holland in the 16th century and are often planted in parks. In spring they have silvery-white shoots and the emerging leaves are snowy-white both above and below. Later the top side of the leaves turns green as the white hairs rub off but the underside remains white. The bark of the tree is also silvery and is curiously pitted with holes. Just the tree for a man tossing and turning with an aching conscience.

Men create more than a thousand sperm a second…and each one contains three hundred and eighty one proteins. So after two hours at the movies…with my beloved by my side…I have ten million of the little critters rearing to go. No wonder I feel bad when she tells me she’s got a headache. Three billion proteins going to waste. No doubt they’ll be dead by morning. Perhaps I should feed them to the pigs. Here is a sneak preview of some of them inside a testicle. How quaint to think that we can manage Nature. A humble dose of Mystery and Wonder would not go amiss.

After a few days sperm production tails off...wet dreams as well. A good virile male of the Human Species can boast a normal sperm count of anywhere between 20 million and 200 million sperms per millilitre. However sheer weight of number is not enough for the job in hand. A sperm also needs to be the Right Shape, have Astonishing Mobility and display Mind-blowing Viability to stand any chance of being The Chosen One. Yes Albert, chance plays a big part in the Divine Plan…though the Metaphysics of the Individual…any individual including a Selfish Gene…is most odd.

15-years ago I devoted one of my weekly two-page Cinque Ports Letter to the worries of Poet Laureate Ted Hughes about the State of the National Sperm…in particular its sharp decline. A few weeks ago at an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting in New Orleans, Ashok Agarwal...from a clinic at the Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio…sent shivers through the jeans of Swedish Directors when he reported that mobile phones cause a significant fall in sperm mobility and viability…thirty percent to be precise.

Agarwal divided his cohort of 361 into four groups. Average sperm count was 86 million for non-users, 69 million for those on their mobile phones for less than 2-hours a day, 59 million at 2-4 hours and 50 million at 4-hours. Agarwal’s theory was that mobile phone radiation may harm sperm by damaging the DNA…which might in turn disrupt the cells that produce Testerone in the testes or shrink the Tubules where the sperm is made.

The trouble with this sort of study is that it begs more questions than it answers. Heavy Witterers of the four hours a day variety probably spend all day in their Company Cars with a mobile phone in their trouser pocket. This was a Fertility Clinic too so the whole cohort had signed up for Infertility Treatment which would seem to skew the results. But perhaps there were control groups. And then sperm is temperature sensitive. One of the suggested response to Ted Hughes concerns was to get Englishmen out of underpants and into skirts…like the Scots…to cool their privates.

Worldwide there are a billion people with mobile phones. Annual growth rates are 20-30% so this will be two billion by 2011. 25-years ago when I produced a special issue of Marilyn Ferguson’s Brain-Mind Bulletin on Bioelectricity, frequency was as much a worry as dosage. Living cells are sensitive within a fairly narrow frequency range. Nowadays studies never seem to mention frequency. Perhaps this is because 50-60 cycles per second is the critical range…which is the frequency of the Alternating Current in the Ring Main surrounding every room in your home.

Mobile Telephony is a strange business. I researched the sector for a couple of weeks at the time of the 3G Licence Auctions but failed to find an angle. Had I done so I would have packaged it and sought to put together a Consortium. But Spread Betting firms like Cantor Index…or IG-Index who I use…also have no idea what to make of the business.

Take Vodafone…the last stand-alone mobile listing to join the cut-throat Broadband market. Their shares were trading at 130p six months ago and are 133.5p at the moment. Cantor’s December spread is 133.5-134.1p. Looks perfectly sensible for shares in a non-volatile Blue Chip company…if there are any left. But seven years ago…at the height of the DotCom Boom…Vodafone was trading at 400p which gives punters something worth calling a Spread.

But Vodafone’s Seven Year Spread is nothing compared to Cable & Wireless…the last Fixed Line listing. C&W rode the Dotcom Bubble to peak at 1500p in 2000, bottomed out at 96p six months ago and is now at 157.75p. Cantor’s December spread is 158.1-159.6. Seven Year Spreads on other Telcom Businesses…and Convergence is the buzz word…are similar. BT fell from 1000p at its dotcom peak to 208p and recovered to 285p; Deutsche Telecom…€105 to €13; France Telecom…€175 to €16 and now trading at €20; Telefonica…€38 to €15.

One of my theories about Trading for Big Gains assumes what makes sense to me makes sense to everyone else…but later on. Next year I plan to devote my time and intelligence to staking out a few Six-Month Opportunities…the Vodafone 130p to 133.5p vis-à-vis time-frame but not for returns.

For this particular investment model…and I will be looking for others…I will need to be a couple of years ahead of the time Future Customers realise the good sense of a particular business model and start buying whatever items their Future Product and Service Supplier offers them.

Leaders of the Herd…Hedge Funds this year…typically pile in 6-12 months ahead of the Pension Funds, Insurance Companies and other Institutional Players who are a year ahead of Jack Public. Old investments…with no way to go but down…get dumped on Jack & Jill along the way. Really smart investors might watch Star Traders like me too.

All this is by way of explaining why I have been giving more thought than your average Jack Public to my Telcom Strategy. ‘When will you make an end?’ the Pope famously yelled at Michelangelo furiously painting frescoes on the ceiling of the Cistern Chapel forty feet away. The artist’s patron would yell this several times a week. Each time he received the same response. ‘When it is done, my Lord! When it is done!’ Well I’m done. Here’s the strategy.

Last week I wrote, phoned and e-mailed Vodafone to inform them that I would not be renewing my 18-month contract when it comes due for renewal on 12/11-2006. In the summer I paid a hundred Swedish kronor (£7.50) for a Swedish Vodafone Simcard and a Pay As You Go account. I will keep my UK Vodafone number on a similar basis and swap Sim-Cards 30 000 feet over the German Sea.

Two years ago I took the Skype name ‘williamnorrisshepherd’ but now I have paid £20 for a 12-month SkypeIn account which provides me with ‘the convenience of a real Personal Number that friends and family can call from normal phones at cheap rates’…together with free Skype Voicemail.

My decision could be seen as Decision Deferment…choosing Telephone and Computer Flexibility rather than a Telcom Platform. But I view my choice as a Strategic Technology Decision that embraces Internet Telephony and moves me free of copper-wired/glass-fibre-cabled Fixed Line Telephony and wireless-based Mobile Telephony.

I think this is in line with my recent Internet Web Hosting moves where I instructed my London-based Domain Name Administrator (easily.co.uk) to transfer cesc.net from their own Web Hosting Service to my new Kentucky-based Internet Service Provider…IX Webhosting. As Easily are agents for an Australian Domain Name Registry I will probably be taking my domain names down under in the next few weeks as well…or sending them to Kentucky.

The Internet Satellite Array placed in space by the Pentagon and kept aloft by NASA provides a Global Telcom Ring for William Norris Shepherd and his Domain Names, Web Pages, Blogs and GPS hand-held set in Vemara’s cabin table…top-of-the-range in 2002 a week but yet to be used in Maritime Engagement and doubtless in need of an upgrade. I can then tap into my Global Telcom Ring from Lund, Cambridge, Bogotá, Eyre, Mumbai, Ningbo or Marin County using any terrestrial means at hand...Skype Edge-Core WM4201 Wi-Fi Phone, Edimax EW-7317LDg Signal Detector, Polycom Communicator, Nokia E61, Internet Café or humble laptop. Little Individuals can outsource too.

My dentist is back from Ramadan. Last week my tooth underwent the final stage of preparation for a silver crowning next week. My dentist has two older brothers and a 10-year old sister. How different must be their world to that of their parents...brought up in Istanbul? Yet Can we ask more than to be born in interesting times? It is a funny old world, n’est-ce pas? And incidentally that is Dewsbury in Yorkshire on the left and Lahore, Pakistan on the right.

This year broke the record for the hottest September. UK temperatures averaged sixty degrees Fahrenheit and broke the previous record from 1949 by one and a half degrees. Ireland also broke its September record…as did Oslo. The other side of the world has been unusually warm too. It is spring in New Zealand which has had the third warmest September on record. And Melbourne logged its warmest September since records began in 1907.

Australia has been unusually dry with drought meaning poor grain harvests and rising bread prices next year. Price hikes may be a Dead Cert but not for this reason. Three quarters of the world’s corn exports come from the US but these are vanishing fast.

In South Dakota Ethanol Distilleries now claim half the corn harvest. And if all the Ethanol Plants proposed for Iowa get built they would use all the corn grown in the state. There is a US Ethanol Subsidy of 51¢ per gallon until 2010 so with oil at $70 per barrel distilling Fuel Alcohol promises huge profits. World grain consumption grew by 20 million tons in 2006…with 14 million tons of it going into the fuel tanks of American cars.

Almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel so the line between Food and Energy Economics is rapidly disappearing. Ten years ago Food Processors and Livestock Producers converted Farm Commodities into products for Supermarket Shelves. Now the Ethanol Distilleries and Biodiesel Refineries are piling into the market for Farm Commodities to supply fuel to service stations.

So the Oil Price is now the support price for Food Commodities. The vast number of distilleries coming on stream is also drawing grain away from beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs production. Another problem is that corn and soybean production in the American Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. It produces massive topsoil erosion and pollutes surface and groundwater with pesticides and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

The world’s crop-based fuel production is concentrated in Brazil, the United States and Europe. Last year the US and Brazil each produced over four billion gallons of ethanol. Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock while the US distillers use grain…mostly corn. The 55 million tons of US corn going into ethanol this year represent 16% of the country’s grain harvest…and supplies 3% of its automotive fuel.

Brazil is converting half of its sugar harvest into Fuel Ethanol…doubling the world sugar price by effectively withdrawing 10% of the harvest. In 2005 the European Union produced 1600 million gallons of biofuels…half of it biodiesel produced from vegetable oil in Germany and France and the other half ethanol from grain in France, Spain and Germany.

Last year China converted two million tons of grain into ethanol mostly corn but also some wheat and rice. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations as well as biodiesel refineries. Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries but has also had the sense to call a pause to assess the future for Palm Oil Supplies.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol can feed one person for a year. Ominously the world grain stocks are at their lowest level in 34 years with 76 million more mouths to feed each year. As the reality of this trade-off works its way through global markets the poorest 2 000 million people in the world who already spend well over half of any income they have on food will be priced out. Grain importers like Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Mexico will need to find the money to match their grain imports with imports of tanks and guns and riot gear.

A week ago I was sent The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a very English Revolution to review for Fourth World Review. Keith Sutherland the author is an interesting chap…Executive Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies and praised by Robert Hazell of the Editorial Advisory Board of Societas as ‘the Hazlitt of our age’. Here is what I wrote.

Keith Sutherland fears that David Beckham and Richard Branson have taken over the governance of England and mentions Max Beloff’s comparison of Tony Blair’s Third Way with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Ten years ago Sutherland was commissioned to edit The Rape of the Constitution and chose to include Tony Benn’s essay ‘How Democratic is Britain?’ In this essay Benn updated Bagehot’s 1867 summary of the ‘dignified’ and ‘efficient’ elements in the English constitution and the power of The Cabinet. ‘Today,’ wrote Benn, ‘the House of Commons is the dignified part…there to excite and preserve the reverence of the population…while the powers of the Crown controlled by the Prime Minister are the efficient part by which government works and rules.’

James Stuart Mill once observed that the country’s constitutional problem was the monopoly exercised by the monarchy and the aristocracy and this caused Macaulay to remark in 1832 that ‘…the House of Commons was more the Council of the Government than the Defender of the People.’ But, as Sutherland comments…and as Kohr explains in his essay The Four Radicalisms…extension of the suffrage by the Victorians though sensible in its day could not empower people because ‘once the political cake has grown past a critical size each voter’s slice becomes so small as to be causally irrelevant.’ Echoes here of an understanding of Papworth’s Ten Laws of Political Dynamics.

By 2001 in Elective Dictatorship: the Unholy Trinity of the British Constitution Sutherland had realised the game was up. Any reverence the population might once have felt for Parliament and Politicians had disappeared under Blair’s abuse. Sutherland’s radical conversion continues in The Party’s Over. Scepticism about Democracy sits deep in our English Political Tradition. It began in Plato’s Republic when Socrates remarks that ‘A system of government that is not based on knowledge and competence and puts power in the hands of rhetoricians is a corrupt and decadent system.’ What are Spin Controllers, Public Relation Firms and Dodgy Dossiers if not rhetoricians and their devices?

Sutherland has taken to heart Michael Oakeshott’s essays on The Masses in Representative Democracy and On the Relation of Philosophy Poetry and Reality. He also makes favourable mention of Montesquieu whose analysis of the key concept of Relative Power was updated by Leopold Kohr in Breakdown of Nations (1955) and of the long-forgotten pamphleteer James Harrington…a contemporary of Hobbes…who was thrown into the Tower of London for sedition. ‘I would like to think,’ writes Sutherland, ‘that this essay is just an updated version of the Aristotle-Harrington vision.’ The metaphor of the political cake began with Harrington.

Sutherland wants to see an aristocracy of wisdom and talent…Lords Advocates…presenting the arguments to a Jury of Commoners…the Oxford Union’s debating format with good men and true instead of a rabble of students. Abolishing political parties would be a necessary reform. As less than one percent of the population are actively engaged in party political activities public subsidy should be removed instead of being wasted on billboard electioneering and television commercials. The genius of the British Constitution,’ writes Sutherland, ‘has been the ability at certain times in history to meld all three estates into one while retaining the independence of all three.’ Elsewhere he remarks that British institutions are rarely abolished but continue in theory…and in ceremonial practice…shorn of their essential functions. ‘Names remain in constant use but they represent different things.’

Here are Sutherland’s final words. The political party is an anachronism and the notion of a democratic mandate is without foundation. The dominant position of the political party should be replaced with a modern system of representation based on the way juries are selected. The British constitution understood ‘efficiently’ is an elected dictatorship and the answer is not to seek to separate powers and functions in the American way but to ‘reinterpret our own constitution more literally.’ Well and good as far as it goes. But in Keith Sutherland’s next book I hope he will go further because the English must resist attempts to impose a European Constitution upon this Sceptered Isle and revisit King John’s Magna Carta of 1215...not the one signed by Henry III in 1225 which omitted many clauses.

Mistakenly Sutherland lists Crown, Lords and Commons as the Three Estates. Our Lords Temporal are the Monarchy and its aristocratic landed structures of counties and townships. Our Lords Spiritual are the Church of England which has the freedom to choose the details of its spiritual faith…the key divide is between those who believe ‘this is not all there is’ and the Materialists and Atheists who do.

Monarchy, Church and Parliament are the Three Estates and an alliance between the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and our future King Charles III will be crucial if we are to get to where Keith Sutherland wants us to go. Halford Mackinder got it right a century ago when he remarked in Democratic Ideals & Reality that the real political battle is always between Locality and Outside Interests.

It was warm on Saturday night…and for once there was no cloudburst in the afternoon to soak the Rye Bonfire on The Salts. I had spent the afternoon in Ashford and came back to Rye on a packed 1730 train bringing hundreds of revellers from all over Kent and Sussex to Rye’s Guy Fawkes Celebrations.

Vemara had a Grandstand View of the Fireworks Display set off on the opposite bank. But first was the procession through the town. So at 7.30 pm it was up the Ypres Steps, through St Mary’s Churchyard, down Lion Street and along the High Street to The Mint. But I was back on Vemara by nine o’clock. This was my second free show of the Fireworks Season. Last Sunday…on the real November the Fifth…I had joined Françoise de Naillat on her balcony in St Leonard’s. Money is still no object for people. Fireworks are cheap…and the bank rate is still only five percent.

It is so easy to transfer manufacturing to low-cost economies that Dell, Nokia, Ikea, Glaxo and L’Oréal sell everywhere and produce nowhere. By outsourcing their manufacturing these Global Gamblers leave themselves with just the Design and Marketing.

But Manufacturing is volatile and capital-intensive so outsourcing transfers Economic Volatility of Capital Investment and Inventory Cycles alongside the Job Slavery and the Dark Satanic Mills. Trade Surpluses used to indicate Economic Dynamism but in this World Gone Mad (WGM) a reluctance to integrate fully with the Global Economy and pursue WTO-style Free Trade is regarded as evidence of a need for destabilisation.

In Britain and the United States, globalisation seems to have brought economic stability and made borrowing safe. Integration of global capital markets has also allowed countries with a high Propensity to Borrow…like America, Britain and Spain…to take advantage of the Private Savings of more cautious cultures like Japan and Germany.

Nobody can explain any of this…and nobody seems to believe that it can go any other way than to Crash. This is one thing where the opinion of the Man in the Street is little different from that of the Academic Economist in her Ivory Tower and the City Banker in his Knightsbidge Palace. The difference is that ordinary people are now talking openly about The Crash and no longer feel the need to keep up the pretence that what is going on makes any sense.

Finance-led globalisation has opened a Pandora’s Box with the tails of the Merchant Class wagging the dog of the Statesmen. At the end of the 19th century when Britain ruled the waves no one had the vaguest notion that a hundred years hence imperial expansion would lead to Reverse Colonisation and Intra-Diaspora Global Trading.

Forty years ago Enoch Powell insisted there were questions to be addressed. And forty years before that Mahatma Gandhi glimpsed the shape of things to come when he addressed the Manchester Textile Workers. But not even his visionary mind was capable of grasping the idea that three quarters of century hence an Indian Steel Company would buy the Mighty Steelworks of South Wales…lock, stock and barrel. But that is exactly what happened last month.

In the late 19th century in the days of the British Raj the 130-room Watson Hotel in downtown Bombay was the classiest place in town. There is a legend that Jamshedji Tata…a Parsi textile trader and the founding father of India’s foremost industrial house…was so angry to be turned away at its richly carpeted door on the ground that he had brown skin that he built his own luxury hotel in defiance. The Tata Group’s majestic Taj Mahal Hotel overlooking the Gateway of India is now the place to be seen in Mumbai for anybody who is anybody.

Meanwhile the sad-looking building that was once Watson’s is home to nondescript law firms, courier companies and photocopying shops. Watson Hotel stands as a salutary lesson to those who underestimate the ambitions of Indian Businessmen.

With last month’s £4.3 billion takeover of Corus…once British Steel and the very epitome of Western Industrialism and British Imperial Strength…Ratan Tata, the Indian Group’s present-day patriarch has proved that Indian Business is a force to reckon with globally. There is a whole lot more to Indian Business than Call Centres.

Instead of being acquired Indian Companies are now acquiring. Ranbaxy Laboratories is a top player in the European Generic Drug market after buying RPG Aventis; Mahindra has picked up Stokes a British automotive forging company, the tractor manufacturing assets of China’s Jiangling Motor and the German Jeco Holdings; Vijay Mallya’s UB Group is planning a £400 million bid for Scotland’s Whyte & Mackay. Where will it all end? Globalisation will have too much impact on the future of too many people to be left to Merchants and Moneylenders.

Dr Benny Peiser is a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University and the editor of the Cambridge Conference Network (CCNet). His research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution. In my 17/5 blog…posted to my climate blog as Majority Against Orthodoxy…I mentioned his analysis of scientific papers on Climate Change which Dr Dennis Bray of the German-based GKSS National Research Centre checked out and endorsed. The Peiser Analysis concluded that dissenters were in a healthy majority. Here is my edited version of the letter Peisner sent to Science Magazine for publication.

‘On December 3rd 2004, only days before the start of the 10th UN Conference on Climate Change, Science Magazine published the results of a study by Naomi Oreskes. For the first time, empirical evidence was presented that appeared to show a unanimous scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of recent Global Warming.

Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the ISI Database using the keywords "climate change". However, a search on the ISI Database using the keywords "climate change" for the years 1993-2003 reveals that almost 12 000 papers were published during the decade in question. What happened to the countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that Solar Variability is a key driver of recent climate change; and that Climate Modelling is highly uncertain?

These objections were put to Oreskes by science writer David Appell. On 15 December 2004 she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes her study was not based on the keywords "climate change" but on "global climate change". Her use of three keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications by one order of magnitude. On the UK ISI Databank the keyword search "global climate change" comes up with 1247 documents. Since the results looked questionable I replicated the Oreskes Study by analysing all abstracts listed on the ISI Databank for 1993 to 2003 using Oreskes’ keywords.

1117 of the 1247 documents listed included abstracts…130 listed only titles, author' details and keywords. The 1117 abstracts analysed were divided into Oreskes’ six categories plus two which I added: explicit endorsement of the consensus position; evaluation of impacts; mitigation proposals; methods; paleoclimate analysis; rejection of the consensus position; natural factors of global climate change and unrelated to the recent global climate change issues.

My results contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study: Only 13 (1%) of the 1117 abstracts explicitly endorse the Consensus View. 322 abstracts (29%) implicitly accept the Consensus View but mainly focus on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change. 89 (less than 10%) focus on mitigation; 67 on methodological questions; 87 deal exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change; 34 reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years’ and 44 focus on natural factors of global climate change. 470 abstracts (42%) include the keywords "global climate change" but do not include links or reference to greenhouse gas emissions or anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.

According to Oreskes, 695 of the 928 abstracts (75%) ‘either explicitly or implicitly accepting the Consensus View’. This claim is incorrect on two counts. Only 424 abstracts…less than a third…fall into Categories 1 to 3 and many abstracts on ‘evaluation of impact’ and ‘mitigation’ do not discuss the drivers of global climate change but concern themselves with the effects of elevated CO2 levels on plant growth and vegetation. Many do not include any implicit endorsement of the Consensus View but discuss hypothetical impact assessments or mitigation strategies.

Quite a number of papers emphasise that Natural Factors play a major if not the key role in recent climate change. There are almost three times as many abstracts that are sceptical of the notion of anthropogenic climate change as explicitly endorse it. In fact, the explicit and implicit rejection of the Consensus View includes distinguished scientific organisations. This is not to deny that a majority of publications go along with the view of anthropogenic climate change and apply models based on its basic assumptions. Yet it is beyond doubt that a sound and unbiased analysis of the full ISI Databank will find hundreds of papers…many by the world's leading experts in the field…that have raised serious reservations and outright rejection of the concept of a Scientific Consensus on climate change.’

On 18th February 2005 Peisner received the following reply from Etta Kavanagh, Associate Letters Editor at Science Magazine. ‘Dear Dr. Peiser, a couple of weeks ago you submitted a Letter to the Editor on Naomi Oreskes' Essay The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. In its current form it is too long for a letter but we would consider a shorter version if you are willing to edit it. It should be 500 words or less, not counting the references. A correction dealing with the mistake in the search terms "global climate change" vs. "climate change" was published in our Jan. 14 issue.’ Well that’s all right then. My tip is to sell shares in companies trading in Carbon Emissions…or bet on their collapse.

Two centuries ago the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations when he noticed that grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Temperature tends to be warmer at solar maxima so grain grows faster. Better harvests. Lower prices. Farmers always complain of terrible harvests or ruinous prices. In the second half of the 20th century the sun has been at its hottest for over ten thousand years. This is a fact. The influence of this particular Forcing on the temperature of Planet Earth is the very stuff of Skulduggery and High Treason.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dates its Temperature Forcings from 1750 when the sun was as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature is 1900 when the sun was much cooler. This is just a little too contrived…Scientific Fraud in fact…because the warmer the air the more water vapour it holds.

Water is a very odd substance. School Physics has taught my generation that water expands when it freezes which is why unlagged pipes spray water everywhere in the thaw after The Big Freeze…and why there are fish to catch beneath the thin layer of air under the two feet of ice in which Swedish Sports Fishermen cut their holes in the depths of winter. Afterwards they pile into their saunas, drink beer…and sweat profusely before diving into the ice-cold lakes to join the fish they failed to catch. Sweating only makes sense because of the odd properties of water.

In the Climate Changelings’ Theology Carbon Dioxide is just one of several Greenhouse Gases. Methane is another. And Water another. Both Methane and Water have an impact many times greater than Carbon Dioxide. In scientific terms demonising Carbon Emissions means slaughtering cows and eradicating termites to reduce Methane Emissions. According to the Carbonistas the H2O molecule is four times better at destroying the planet than the humble CO2 molecule. But not even the IPCC has the nerve to ignore water vapour...though they have a damn good try.

The IPCC expresses Heat-Energy Forcings in watts per square metre per second. Twentieth Century warming from all sources is around two watts per square metre per second. Not only must IPCC get rid of the Medieval Warm Period they must also ensure that man-made Carbon Emissions are responsible for a significant proportion of this 2.0 watts. Otherwise there is no case to answer and its case would be thrown out of court. So IPCC fiddled the figures.

The first trick was to contrive 0.3 watts for the extent of Solar Temperature Feedback Forcings. The figure would have been 0.7 watts if the IPCC had adopted 1900 instead of 1750 for its start-date and…1.9 watts if it had adopted the Royal Society’s climate feedback 2.7 multiplier guideline. Next the IPCC slashed the Natural Greenhouse Effect by 40 percent from 33C in the climate physics textbooks to 20C making the man-made additions appear bigger.

Finally there is the Battle of the Lambdas…the factor converting Forcings to Temperature. The Stefan-Boltzman Law is to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is to astrophysics. Boltzman relates energy to the square of the speed of light but by reference to temperature rather than mass. It was derived experimentally 100-years ago by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student. Buried in the small print of IPCC’s third assessment report is the bizarre statement that its climate models had found lambda to be 0.5C per watt of Forcing. Lambda from the Boltzman Equation is half this…based on Experiments with Nature not Manipulations with Computers.

Lambda Inflation is in fashion because the bigger the value of lambda the bigger the temperature increase you can predict from any particular set of Forcings Data. James Hansen who invented Global Warming in his evidence to Senate Hearings in the middle of a Washington Heatwave offers lambdas of 0.67, 0.75 or 1.0. John Houghton who chaired the IPCC working group trumps this with 0.8 while IPCC’s computer models now use 1.0. But The Stern Report deserves an Oscar for its implied lambda of 1.9…between six and eight times the Boltzman lambda.

Multiply by Boltzman’s lambda and temperature rise this century is in line with observation at 0.44 to 0.6C. Stern’s lambda gives nonsense. The Hadley Centre had the same problem so they now have one lambda to predict with and another…lambda divided by three…to match actual 20th Century temperatures. My Texan artist friend Bob Stuart had a parrot in his studio. He had trained it to say ‘Get A Rope and Hang The Bastards!’ Hark! I hear it even now!

In 2004 John Youngdahl was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with Securities Fraud and Insider Trading. In October 2001 Youngdahl found out that sales of the Treasury Department’s 30-year bonds were going to be cut off. He found this out before the news was made public…and gave his firm’s Bond Traders the tip-off. In a matter of minutes they made a killing estimated at £3.5 million. Youngdahl was working for Goldman Sachs at the time and is now behind bars…incarcerated in the Land of Striped Sunshine.

Ways need to be found to put scientists in the dock too. They have their own forms of Insider Trading and need to be held publicly accountable for their Scientific Fraud. So far they have had an easy ride. This particular buck starts and stops at the top with the United Nations and its corrupt Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which stands accused of knowingly undervaluing the sun’s effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashing the greenhouse effect, overstating the past century’s temperature increase, arbitrarily repealing a fundamental law of physics for political convenience and tripling the man-made greenhouse effect to shoehorn its computer data into its prejudices.

IPCC’s third assessment report released four years ago is a Scientific Fraud…right up there with the Blair Dodgy Dossier on non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The report implies that carbon dioxide caused the last four ice ages by displaying two 450 000 year graphs…a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that is scaled to look similar. Usually similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The IPCC Report didn’t. If it had the truth would have shown…the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

In 1995 David Deming…a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma…reconstructed North America’s historical temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: ‘With the publication of my article in Science I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them…someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes.’ One of the more important players foolishly let his guard slip and sent Deming an email that said ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’ So they did.

The second IPCC Report in 1996 showed a 1000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the third IPCC Report in 2001 contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1000 years. This is wrong. Here is how it was done.

Firstly IPCC gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature four hundred times more weight than any other…and omitted to mention the fact. The overweighted technique was one which IPCC’s second report had said was unsafe…measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years because temperature speeds up growth. But tree fertiliser speeds up growth too and one of them is carbon dioxide so this distorts the calculations unless some way is found to make allowance for shifting carbon dioxide levels.

This might be bad science but need not be criminal. But closer scrutiny shows that the deception goes deeper…a domain of barefaced lying and Scientific Fraud. IPCC stated that 24 data sets were included going back to 1400. But without saying so they left out the set showing the medieval warm period...tucking it away in a folder marked ‘censored data’.

IPCC then used a computer model to draw the graph from the data. Now anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of statistics knows you can best fit data to any curve. Give it a=x+b and you will get a straight line. Give it a=x to the power of b and you will get a curve. IPCC asked for hockey-sticks so it got them…even from random electronic ‘red noise’.

The large full-colour hockey stick was the only graph to appear six times in the IPCC Third Report in 2001. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. It is a lie. It took four years for a leading scientific journal to publish the truth. It was ignored. The Canadian Government did not apologise...and IPCC still uses it. The good news is that the US Senate investigated. They unearthed a conspiracy, labelling the graph ‘meretricious’ and noting that known associates of the scientists who had compiled the graph wrote many of the papers supporting its conclusions.

IPCC…and the Stern Report…pretend the graph is not important. But scores of scientific papers show the medieval warm period was real, global and up the 3C warmer than now. There were no glaciers in the tropical Andes, Viking farms in Greenland and little ice at the North Pole when a Chinese naval squadron sailed round the Arctic in 1421.

‘Given by the hand of John by the grace of God King of England in the meadow that is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign for the better ordering of our kingdom to all Free Men of our Kingdom we have granted for us and our heirs for ever all the liberties written out below to have and to keep for them and their heirs of us and our heirs.’

Thus ran Magna Carta in 1215. Clause 13 was still valid with a few minor amendments when it was released under Royal Seal by John’s son King Henry III ten years later in 1225. It ran thus. ‘The city of London shall enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water. We also will and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall enjoy all their liberties and free customs.’

Two other clauses would have been of particular interest to the London Merchants with their Guilds and Companies and Antient Traditions. Clause 41 allowed that ‘All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear and may stay or travel within it by land or water for purposes of trade free from all illegal exactions in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. This however does not apply in time of war to merchants from a country that is at war with us. Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too.’

In King John’s Charter of 1215 a Clause 42 was also to be found that ran thus. ‘In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear by land or water preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war for some short period for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land people from a country that is at war with us and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision.’ This clause was one of several omitted from King Henry III’s Charter of 1225.

Another of King John’s Clauses that fell out of royal favour between 1215 and 1225 was Clause 61 which was omitted from King Henry III’s Charter. At 540 words in its English translation it is the longest clause in King John’s Magna Carta of 1215 and it began thus. ‘Since we have granted all these things for God for the better ordering of our kingdom and to allay the discord that has arisen between us and our barons and since we desire that they shall be enjoyed in their entirety with lasting strength for ever we give and grant to the barons the following security’. Eight sub-clauses then follow regarding specific contingencies. The first three sub-clauses ran thus.

‘The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep and cause to be observed with all their might the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.’

‘If we, our chief justice our officials or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons they shall come to us…or in our absence to the chief justice…to declare it and claim immediate redress.’

‘If we…or in our absence abroad the chief justice…make no redress within forty days reckoning from the day on which the offence was declared to us or to him the four barons shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons, who may distrain upon and assail us in every way possible with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing our castles lands, possessions or anything else saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children until they have secured such redress as they have determined upon. Having secured the redress they may then resume their normal obedience to us.’ That’s a devil of an incentive for Central Power to pull its finger out…and quite the clearest statements of Real Subsidiarity…with teeth…to be found anywhere.

The Guilds and Companies of the City of London clearly thought so too because they adopted Clause 61 for their own governance and have stuck with it through thick and thin for nigh on 800 years…until now. Instead of the Good Burghers of the City of London seeking to spread their particular form of enlightened governance throughout Her Majesty’s Kingdom…for a similar manner of governance should be embraced by every town and village and not just one square mile of it...moves are afoot to force the Council of 25 Barons to share power with a Court of 100.

An application from Julian Malins…a barrister whose brother is an Member of Parliament…is to be heard by a closed session of Common Council. It seeks to scrap the exclusive rights of the 25 aldermen to provide and elect the Lord Mayor by tagging a clause onto some existing piece of Parliamentary Legislation and sneaking it through on a Bad News Day. Why? Because the last thing the Plotters want is to open up the matter of their governance…or anybody else’s…to public scrutiny by either house of parliament. Keeping the king at bay is one thing. The lid of this particular Pandora’s Box must be kept firmly shut…lest a Baying Mob escapes with Real Power within its grasp.

At seven o’clock yesterday evening I listened to the 15 000th episode of The Archers which first began broadcasting 57 years ago on New Year’s Day 1951 and is the longest running soap opera in the world. The day was not marked by a crowd-pleasing celebrity appearance…such as the visit by Princess Margaret in 1984 to celebrate the Borchester NSPCC Gala Dinner…but by something altogether more seismic. Would Ruth Archer finally consummate her potentially adulterous relationship with herdsman Sam Barton? There has not been so much simulated media tension since someone shot JR in Dallas. I can now tell you that Ruth has backed off…although a twist in the tail is possible.

The affair has caused much heart-searching among listeners with many claiming that the protagonists are being made to act in uncharacteristic ways and that the script has been sexed-up. But not everyone agrees. Listening to Ruth and Sam thrash out their dilemma over the past few weeks has been no different from overhearing a BBC producer and a Westminster PPS discuss their adulterous affair. The talk is all of personal happiness, self-esteem and a fresh start. The shock this will give to children, husband or extended family hardly counts against the reality of How I Feel.

Unfortunately The Archers is not East Enders or Friends or just any soap opera. The ‘everyday story of country folk’ taps into our romance with the countryside which in our soft-focused vision is inhabited by the virtuous descendants of Olde England. The rural moral code is infinitely superior to the urban one. Villages are mutually helpful communities where people share sterling values and never shy away from their duties. And vice stops at the M25.

Vanessa Whitburn…editor of The Archers…has appeared several times on BBC Radio 4 in recent days. She has not got to where she is by being too candid with her public. But in defending her scriptwriters Vanessa seems to take the view that The Archers should strive for realism. Mythical worlds played out against a background of real-life farming concerns can be taken too far. In reality the shenanigans of the metropolitan middle classes have nothing on the frisky rural hicks whose pastimes include drinking to excess, gambling away fortunes and stealing one another’s wives.

The Archers has always been an everyday story of the kind of countryfolk who have affairs straight out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover…as in Christine Archer falling for the alcoholic gamekeeper George Barford…or Footballers’ Wives…as with Jack Woolley’s first wife having affairs with the husbands of future stepdaughters Jennifer and Lillian. Here are some more.

Middle-aged publican Sid had adulterous sex in the shower; Ambridge’s token Gay Couple fell into each other’s arms in a polytunnel; a plane crashed into Dan Archer’s 5-acre field; Shula Archer lost her virginity to a journalist from the Barchester Echo; Tom Forrest was in the dock for shooting Clarrie Grundy’s poacher uncle Bob Larkin; unmarried Jennifer Archer had a baby…by another cowhand; Mrs Perkins’ nephew Bill was beaten to death outside The Bull…and the vicar had an affair with a Hindu parishioner.

So The Archers has always been racy, sometimes improbable but never dull…until now. Some of the dullest scenes in the programme’s history have been created about Ruth and Sam’s love in the cowshed. Internet message boards have been flooded. Here are some examples.

‘This is getting somewhat unbelievable. I’m getting very bored with this storyline.’
‘I feel bilious every time I hear Sam and Ruth kissing.
Are we expected to believe that Ruth will disappear into the sunset with Sam?’
‘This sordid little liaison is making me feel dirty already. It is a mere excuse for the ghastly cowman to get his wellie-booted leg over.’
‘I was almost physically sick after last night’s episode. I really can’t cope with any more slurping. Have mercy I sometimes listen during the evening meal.’
‘Are we really supposed to believe in Ruth’s passion for dour boring cowman Sam?’

The real scandal at The Archers is not the potential nookie between a member of Ambridge’s ruling family and a hired hand who thinks her name is Roof…the class and puritanical overtones in the internet postings would have amused D.H. Lawrence…but the fact that it had been so tedious drawing it out until yesterday’s 15 000th anniversary edition. Most diehard fans are sick to death…not to mention embarrassed…by the amateurish production of episodes consisting entirely of ‘Aww Sam! And ‘Oohh Roof!’…with background mooing from a compliant herd of cows.

We performed The Pirates of Penzance to two very appreciative audiences at the weekend. Samuel is not a big part but in the programme he gets top billing alongside the Major-General, the Pirate King, the Sergeant of Police and the Pirate Apprentice. I didn’t miss a cue…spoken or sung…so my reputation as a Journeyman Tenor is enhanced.

An early mention of The Pirates of Penzance is in a letter from Gilbert to Sullivan on 7th August 1879. ‘I have broken the neck of Act II,’ he wrote, ‘and see my way clearly to the end. I think it comes out very well. I’ve made great use of the Tarantara business in Act II. The police always sing Tarantara when they desire to work their courage to sticking-point. Through the agency of this talisman they are enabled to acquit themselves well when concealed.’

On 5th November 1879 Gilbert and Sullivan arrived in New York aboard the liner Bothnia. D’Oyly Carte came over a week later. The plan was to produce an authorized version of H.M.S. Pinafore. But in their bags were the words and music of The Pirates of Penzance and the outrageous plan of presenting it themselves in New York as the first ever premiere of an English opera in America. There were sound practical reasons for doing so.

In 1879 international copyright law was in such chaos that simultaneous production of The Pirates of Penzance in England and America seemed the only practical way to deal with the problem. So on 31st December 1879 there was to be a quiet début at the Royal Bijou Theatre in Paignton, Devon while simultaneously in New York they would have an American première. The first London production would follow 3-months later. So much for the best laid plans of mice and men.

There was a problem. Only half of The Pirates of Penzance had been written. Then there was another problem. Here is Sullivan in a letter to his mother: ‘I fear I left all my sketches of the last Act at home as I have searched everywhere for them. I would have telegraphed for them, but they could not have arrived in time. It is a great nuisance as I have to rewrite it all now, and can’t recollect every number I did.’ Whoops!

Arthur Sullivan locked himself away in his New York hotel in a desperate attempt to meet all the deadlines. He was promptly stricken with an old illness. As he dragged himself from his couch…writing all day and long into the nights…he was in considerable pain.

Sullivan’s diary records that on 17th December that ‘most of the music of Act I was shipped to England’ Then ’Went to rehearsal at theatre, 11 to 4. Came home tired, couldn’t work, dined at Betts. Very pleasant. Conducted at the theatre…’ He was conducting Pinafore in the evening, rehearsing Pirates in the day and there was still a lot of music to compose. ‘Returned to the Betts until 12. Then home. Wrote trio (2nd Act) and Ruth’s song 1st Act. Went to bed at 5.’ These are two of the most loved songs in the G&S repertoire…performed many hundreds of times every year.

Sullivan would often deliberately ‘keep the music down’ so that Gilbert’s all-important words would come over clearly. Those who deride the um-cha-um-cha accompaniments in some G & S songs fail to understand the need for such considerations. Sullivan would take the opportunity to build up the music elsewhere in an opera. Indeed the Pirates of Penzance was coming from his pen as the most operatic opera to date…and even included some burlesquing of ‘the farm-yard effects’ in Italian Grand Opera…notably in the waltz song Poor Wandering One.

This had consequences. The band went on strike. Sullivan explains. ‘We had been rehearsing the Pirates and it was but two or three days before the performance that the whole band went on strike. They explained that the music was not ordinary operetta music but more like grand opera…their method is to charge according to a scale, so much per week for entr’acte music, with an ascending scale for operetta, and so on.’

Sullivan called the band together, told them he was flattered by the compliment they had paid his music and then explained that he would bring the Covent Garden orchestra across to New York and pending their arrival carry on rehearsing by ‘playing the pianoforte himself…with his friend Mr Alfred Cellier at the harmonium’. He then did an article for the New York Herald. The band backed down. Sometimes it is a useful thing to be up to your eyes in absurd plots. They have their uses in real life. Nonetheless a Composer’s Lot is not a Happy One…Happy One!

Kate Phillips’ husband died of cancer ten days ago at the age of 62 after surviving a musket ball in Aden and an all-night card-game in Hamburg with John Lennon. When I first arrived in Sweden in 1966 TT was a sports journalist with a daily column in Svenska Dagbladet…and an old orienteering buddy of my future father-in-law Erik Lundell. Nowadays Swedes know TT as a Press Agency. What few of them know is that it is probably the most reliable press agency around since the CIA took to spreading disinformation by way of most of the others.

Then in 1988 I met another TT. AppleMac Aficionados can now be told that TT3 moonlighted as the anarchic Charles Murray in magazines like MacUser and Computer Shopper. TT3 was Kate’s husband and the only time we met was in The George in Rye when his Books of Erotica were big hits in Kazakhstan. As they were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet he claimed to have no idea if what he had written was what the Kazakhs were reading. But as it was his name on the title page and his bank account that received the royalties he was far from unhappy about his situation.

This third TT to pass fleetingly across my karas was Tony Tyler…former Features Editor at New Musical Express in its Real Journalism days in the 1970s. TT3 gave Rock Music a political agenda. Three decades later this lives on in the spectacle of Bono and Sir Bob Geldorf travelling the globe to hobnob with political and corporate elites in a vain…but worthy…attempt to make the case for a Clean Slate…and touch the rich and powerful for a bob or two.

TT3 was born in Bristol and raised in Liverpool where he attended Liverpool College before stowing away to Hamburg on a merchant navy vessel and hanging out with soon-to-be-famous Liverpool bands like the Beatles. Stowing away is no mean achievement at six foot five. More people meet their future life partners in the workplace than anywhere else…though friends and internet dating are catching up fast. Kate and Tony fell in love at NME. In 1975 TT3 collaborated with his NME colleague Roy Carr to write The Beatles: an Illustrated Record and a year later came out with The Tolkien Companion. The two books graced the New York Times best-seller lists at the same time.

There are twelve Beatles Studio Albums. But in some ways the most interesting is Number Thirteen which was released today. Titled Love it was produced by Sir George and Giles Martin. From the harmonies of Because…love is all, love is you…through to the sigh of the French horn at the close of Goodnight it cites and samples well over a hundred Beatles songs. The result is a long and winding fugue of juxtapositions, layerings, self-references and assorted magic tricks that may very well rank as the best compilation album ever made and a Christmas Number One.

As the Beatles swapped the baseball stadium for the recording studio they started Intertextual Songwriting…John Lennon singing ‘I told you about Strawberry Fields’ in Glass Onion for instance and Paul McCartney chanting ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’ in the fade-out to All You Need Is Love. Love takes this template and imagines a sort of Fabscape in which a good part of the Beatles back catalogue speaks across the years, albums and perceived differences of style and temperament within the band. The open guitar chord from A Hard Day’s Night for instance morphs into the atonal orchestral crescendo of A Day In The Life and on via a locomotive drum intro into Get Back.

The project started with the transfer of the entire 250-item Beatles Songbook onto a single digital drive. Love needed some form of emotional narrative so while Ringo Starr lobbied for Octopus’s Garden Olivia Harrison, Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney came up with other ideas. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole project is that the final product has the enthusiastic support of these four living Beatles Players. George Martin’s legendary diplomatic charm must have been crucial. Giles Martin remarked that his father had sought permission for every fresh surprise. ‘I thought they were going to go mad about meddling with the holy grail. But they didn’t. They loved it!’

The album is the soundtrack to a new show by Cirque du Soleil which opened in Las Vegas a few months ago. Critics flown in from the Fab Four’s homeland came out in goosebumps at the show’s blissful union of new sights and old sounds. The spectacle is apparently too unwieldy to tour so it seems that the closest we will come to Love the Musical is Love The Music.

Bonfire Societies are very big in Sussex. For four consecutive Saturdays there are Night-time Torchlight Processions through the centres of Battle, Lewes, Hastings and Rye followed by a Public Bonfire and Fireworks Display. Towns take turns for the best Saturday…closest to the Fifth of November. In the 1950s a Penny for the Guy tradition still existed but this has morphed into the imported Halloween Trick or Treat…which arrived in America onboard ships bearing Irish, German and Scandinavians immigrants fleeing famine or fighting in Europe.

By the 1550s Rye was the largest port in Sussex and…with Dover…the chief port of transit for the Continent. The Royal Mail passed through Rye. In France the Huguenots were much feared by the French Catholic State…a political and military force to be reckoned with. In 1561 the 11-year old King Charles IX of France was instructed to issue an edict authorising imprisonment and confiscation of property for those attending heretical services…public or private.

This was a declaration of war on Protestants by Catholics. Behind the boy king were powerful Catholic forces including France’s Regent…his mother Catharine de Medici…the de Guise Family and The Pope. The spark that set France alight was the massacre of 1200 Protestants at Sunday worship in April 1562. 10-years later in August 1572 the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre took place in Paris. 30 000 Huguenots were slaughtered while celebrating the wedding of the Protestant Henry de Navarre to the Catholic Marguerite de Valois. Killing continued for three days.

Jo Kirkham in Huguenots in Rye tells of reports reaching Rye of 1800 killed in Lyons and 600 killed in Rouen. Refugees flooded into Rye from Dieppe and other French towns seeking asylum. Despite seven attempted Cease-Fires the religious civil war raged in France for 30-years. An estimated 100 000 innocent civilians were killed. As a proportion of the population this compares with the 650 00 killed in Iraq since the 2003 Invasion.

Intricate diplomacy by Queen Elizabeth’s Private Secretary William Cecil and constant vigilance by her Spymaster Francis Walsingham kept the religious civil wars at bay on the other side of the English Channel. But in 1603 Elizabeth I died after 44 years on the English Throne and was succeeded by the Catholic King James IV from Scotland who added the title of King James I of England to his Scottish title. Just five days after arriving in London from Scotland James met with a Huguenot Delegation at Greenwich to assure them of his good intentions.

I like the cut of King James' jib. He seems to have been shrewd. Like Canute the Great he was ever conscious of the limits of his power…and acted accordingly. He held moderate opinions himself and was tolerant of the beliefs of others. He sought consensus. And he did his level best to avoid getting embroiled in foreign wars. The two things that have reverberated down the centuries with his name on them are the King James’ Bible and The Irish Problem…on which Gladstone famously remarked: ‘No sooner do I answer The Irish Question than they change the question.’

This is the background to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Here is the case for the prosecution. ‘The accused in December made a mine under the House of Parliament purposing to place their powder there; in Lent following they hired the vault and placed therein 20 barrels of powder; on 20 July they laid in another 10 barrels of powder, laying upon them divers great bars of iron and pieces of timber and great massy stones and covered the same with faggots; on 20 September they laid in 4 more hogsheads of powder with other stores and bars of iron thereupon; and on 4 November at 11 a clock at night, Fawkes had prepared touchwood and match to give fire to the powder the next day.’

In Victorian Times the expert on King James I was S.R. Gardiner who in 1884 produced a 10-volume History of England 1603-42 and followed it up in 1893 with a 4-volume History of the Great Civil War and in 1903 with a further four volumes on the History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Does anybody read Victorian Historians nowadays? Read Gardiner and post anything interesting on the internet. Send me the URL Address. If I like your research I will link it to this blog. Let’s write our own Guy Fawkes Wikihistory Book. Why not?

In 2005 I wrote Loves of My Life as Part Three of Aspects of Autobiography. It forced me to face up to some unsavoury episodes in my Life of Selfishness. The epicentre of this selfishness has shifted from The Man in my 20s and 30s to His Work in my 40s and 50s. I am proud to refer to myself in terms of One Man and His Work. But my approach to One Life as a Work of Art has a heavy cost…on others.

Any woman who wishes to share my life is given Hobson’s Choice. It comes wrapped up in charm and consideration but the bottom line is to accept second place. I am wary of the female of the species and…rightly or wrongly…I also regard myself as a very good catch for the right woman. I have yet to sell myself cheaply. The results have been excellent…I have enjoyed a series of long and happy relationships with remarkable women…and have escaped quickly before getting bogged down in bad relationships.

In Jane Austen’s day a farmer’s wife had a pretty good idea of what her husband did…and he about her. But the soldier’s wife understood little of her husband’s regimental life. In modern times the husband goes off to work each day so the wife has little idea what he does…and he about her. Both may make assumptions and at times both have glimpses. Connie probably had a fair idea of what I worked at when living with her in Rye but had little idea…and never asked…about my long periods away in Stockholm. We both made assumptions…which may have been right or wrong. Ingrid on the other hand had little idea about what I did all day. But she made assumptions and had glimpses.

One of these glimpses came in Welwyn Garden City in the spring of 1979. Our Massachusetts-based Corporate Paymasters visited occasionally…one boss at a time. But for reasons I forget a bunch of high-powered executives showed up with the lowliest being the boss of the boss of my boss. A reception was laid on and I just scraped onto the list in 12th place…out of 12 invited. The Americans brought their wives so we were commanded to display ours.

Ingrid and I were ten years younger than anyone else. For the first time she saw me as a Corporate Success. I saw it too…but reacted differently. I was horrified by my glimpse of what lay in store for me. Two days later I started planning my escape. Ingrid however was impressed at how far I had come…and how well she had coped in this alien world. So she was bewildered when I announced six weeks later that I was off to the States for three weeks…not on company business but to interview with Northern Telecom in Toronto, IFC in Washington and Bain & Co. in Boston. ‘I’ll be handing in my notice when I get back. The children will start at their American schools in September 1980'.

In the summer of 1979 the International Finance Corporation in Washington turned me down and so did Nixdorf and Bain & Co. in Boston…although they spent an inordinate amount of time and energy before doing so. But to Ingrid’s delight Northern Telecom wanted me in Toronto. Her joy was short-lived. I thought about it for 48-hours and then turned it down. Ingrid didn’t know I had fallen in love with Cambridge Massachusetts. Perhaps I should have taken the Toronto job. Two years later I discovered that my old college buddy Johnny Kingsley Watson was there making films. I would have left Telecoms and gone into Films, moved with him to Hollywood, met Victoria Tennant, saved her from Steve Martin and worked with Kevin Costner on Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Aah! The paths not trod!

Ingrid’s next glimpse of my Workworld was in the spring of 1981. But I will begin the tale 10-years on in the 1990s when Salomons…America’s top Bond House as in Government Bond not James Bond…was embroiled in scandal. Dealers could only bid for 35% of new Government Bonds. Being greedy Salomons put in eight false bids totalling $13.5 billion in seven Treasury Bond Auctions between 1989 and 1991. Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis tells the tale. Salomon’s sold the bonds on to favoured clients but were unlucky…or stupid…and got caught red-handed. In 1994 Paul Mozer…former head of the Government Securities Trading desk at Salomons…went to prison.

This marked the end of an era for Saloman Brothers who eventually merged with the insurance group Travelers and Smith Barney to form Salomon Smith Barney. When Travelers merged with Citibank later on the Saloman name disappeared. Today six out of ten want to quit The Rat Race for The Good Life. But 25 years ago this was far from being the majority view. I was still publicly on a fast track and felt the need to be circumspect. I was officially in high tech looking for opportunities when I met John Koch from Smith Barney’s Chicago Office at an MIT gathering.

Koch offered me loads of money to put together a team to pick Wall Street winners with System Dynamics models. Two months later we gave our presentation on High-Tech High-Growth companies…and the difference in Research Spending at Data General and Digital Equipment. Koch was working the phones the moment we finished…pulling his clients’ money out of Data General and piling it into Digital. By year-end he was seriously rich.

After that I saw Koch just once. Our invoice was paid immediately but he insisted on taking us out to dinner...all wives included. For one evening Ingrid had a fleeting glimpse of her husband high-rolling with…and being lavishly praised by…Serious Money and Academic Excellence. Tangible evidence that our move to the States was a success. Two months later I fell in love with another woman...and left Ingrid alone in a strange country with no family or friends and two young children. She was bewildered. Fortunately she was and is a remarkable woman.

Premiere Night at the Royal Albert Hall for Sir Paul McCartney’s Ecce Cor Meum tonight. I was impressed with his underappreciated Liverpool Oratorio. Lesley Brownbill was dismissive of the idea of a Ryesingers performance next year. ‘Out of his depth’ was her reaction…with ‘He didn’t write it himself anyway!’ thrown in for good measure.

Fiona wrote in the Daily Mirror on Saturday 21st October…the page was marked 2004 but the rest of the paper was 2006…about the time she met Paul McCartney. ‘He offered me a cuppa as soon as we shook hands and he talked passionately about his wife.’ ‘I love her because she interests me. Every day she does something that interests me,’ he had said when she asked about his marriage. But he was not talking about Heather Mills…but Linda Eastman.

Linda was the love of Paul’s life. He could have done with her wise counsel in the torrid weeks since he split from Heather…his second wife. Their separation and divorce proceedings become nastier by the week. Fiona again. ‘Linda was never one to talk about their relationship but it was clear that family was at the heart of everything she did. She once asked for my mum’s address after I told her mum couldn’t understand why I was vegetarian. ‘I’ll write to her,’ she said. And she did.’ The evidence suggests Heather is not like that. Her priority is Heather…and always has been.

I have known the type…and it is not good news. The type is driven by deep feelings of inadequacy which spring from low self-esteem following perceived or actual rejection by the father. A particular intriguing feature is the ability to mask true personality. Outside the intimacy of the relationship…and inside too before winning the man…this type comes across as charming and caring. But it is a pose.

Alone together with her man, low self-esteem kicks in…laced with resentment of his success and fear of her own failure and ‘being found out’. The natural behavioural outlet for the subsequent frustration is to take every opportunity to put the man down. Initially this will only happen in private. But the better the man and the bigger his success the greater the frequency. I would guess she made Paul’s life hell.

I make a point of listening to The Archers on BBC Radio Four if I am back onboard by seven in the evening. David and Ruth’s 18-year marriage is on the rocks. First David was charmed and flattered by ex-girlfriend Sophie who suddenly turns up…divorced. Sophie has the makings of my Bad News Type but the scriptwriters did not develop the character. Eventually David sees the error of his ways. But too late…perhaps…because meanwhile Ruth has fallen head over heels in love with Farmhand Sam. Which way will she jump? We are all sitting on the edge of our seats!

Perhaps Paul’s money would be better spent on the Genetic Scientist Giovanna Cominero at the University of Pavia in Italy instead of a Fleece of Barristers at the Inns of Court in London. Giovanna studied a family of four sons…who should have been women...and discovered a gene that provides the Essence of Womanhood.

I have long known that the male has two different chromosomes…an X and a Y…while the female has a double helping of one or the other. But I never managed to remember if the double helping was a Y or an X until I looked at the shape of the letter ‘Y’ and decided it looked like percy being pointed at the porcelain...with acknowledgements to Barry Humphries.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around the idea of a Genetic Revolution transforming the Human Condition I get a niggling Valves-in-the-Television feeling. Understanding a valve does not explain the pictures. Woman has this stunning ability to replicate herself…and many himselves too. The sperm-giving male has big mobility advantages over the egg-bearing female. But how much does any of this matter if we are Receivers and Transmitters?

Cast your eyes over a crowd and you will be looking at trillions upon trillions of genes. Look at the same crowd three years later and every cell, gene and chromosome you gazed upon 3-years earlier will have been replaced. We completely reproduce ourselves every few years…something that intrigues Personality and Consciousness researchers.

In this crowd there are three times as many X-chromosomes as Y-ones. Is this significant? Mendel and many generations of Fruitfly Aficionados never make predictions…they assess probabilities. Dominant and Recessive Genes, a Double Helix Structure that combines bits from one parent with bits from the other…and much else that has yet to be discovered…would seem to swamp any diversity effects imparted by one chromosome buried in the DNA.

Cominero’s team studied the case of a family of four infertile brothers and told their tale in The Journal of Nature Genetics. Gender is chiefly determined by sex chromosomes. In rare cases people with the male X-Y profile develop as women. More rarely those with the female Double-X profile become male. A gene called SRY that sits on the Y-chromosome seems to be the primary trigger of male development.

But the Italians have now shown that every woman owes her femininity to another gene…RSPO1. At least one copy of this RSPO1-gene must be present for an embryo to develop as a female…or it develops as a male…even with two X-chromosomes and no SRY-gene. Strange.

Each brother had the Double-X female profile. Each brother also had the SRY-gene in the wrong place. But each brother had a mutated version of this RSPO1-gene. ‘Poor Boy! Poor Boy!’ as I have been exclaiming all week. Sir W.S. Gilbert’s words were first heard on 13th April 1880 at the Opéra Comique. It is hard to be an Orphan Boy. But having a Double X with no SRY and a mutant RSPO1 must be the Essence of Genetic Poverty...and in Italy too.

Until 1955 Sweden employed a Personal Alcohol Rationing System. How would this scheme work with the latest ID Cards? Binge-Drinking solved by controlling alcohol consumption? ‘Sorry sir the Home Office says you’ve had too many today’. Obesity cured by rationing calories? ‘I’d ask if you wanted fries but I see there is a block on your account. Enjoy!’ Global Warming? ‘Before I activate your fuel pump I will need to see your iris. Have a nice day!’

There are rather too many vested interests in the Identity Theft business for me to feel certain of my ground…anti-virus software companies, illegal immigrants, East European fraudsters, private investigators on company and perhaps even government payrolls, commercial banks and credit card companies anxious to cover up the insecurity of their plastic money and hole-in-the-wall systems and so on. But it is a concern. And we should share our experiences.

Five years ago a thief walked into Jempson’s Winchelsea Road offices one Saturday morning, entered my office and took my passport, driving licence and credit cards from a desk drawer. The office wing was either kept locked or there were people around. It never occurred to me to lock my desk…or install a safe. I assumed a locked office door would suffice.

It seemed a strange thing to do On Spec so I reported it to the police and was surprised when a full forensic Swat Team…white overalls and all…turned up within two hours to dust for finger prints. Curiously it was my prints they seemed interested in…’To eliminate them, Sir.’ Hmm! A few years earlier I had a break-in at my Custom House office which left me puzzled as it looked more like a Watergate job than a casual burglary. Strange.

As for the rest here are some hints. Treat all e-mails with suspicion and trash as many as possible without opening them. Use the bulk mail filters in e-mail hosting options. If you are open to the public and selling online…as I am with my Academic Inn Books publishing business...this may not be an option. Be wary of clicking links on e-mails. The link address may not be the one on the screen. Type the address directly into the address bar instead.

Where public computers are concerned there is some disagreement. I prefer others to worry abut viruses…and pay for the Broadband account…so all my internet connections go through library computers or internet cafes…like using a local call box instead of a home phone. But the experts tell us not to use public computers to access personal information though I am not sure why. I do almost all my banking transactions online from public computers so this is worrying. Do not put all your eggs in one basket and keep credit limits and working bank balances to a minimum.

I move money out of my online PayPal account…and from my Barclays business account to my Nationwide cash account at the earliest opportunity. The rationale is that PayPal and Barclays are open to the world but Nationwide is not. I can look at my statement online but cannot carry out transactions…which mean that nobody else can either. And check your monthly statements to make sure you have authorised everything. I know three people in my limited local acquaintance who have had large sums of money fraudulently removed from their accounts.

The two other concerns the experts have are phone calls and waste bins. Scams with both seem to have reached epidemic proportions in the United States…which means they will be on this side of the pond shortly. Use a criss-cross shredder to dispose of personal documents. You will end up with confetti rather than strips. And never throw away bank statements, phone bills or unsolicited junk mail into a bin or a recycling bin. Seems obvious. But…

The phone numbers of everyone I want to talk to are programmed into my mobile phone so their name is displayed when they ring from their normal number. I have become abrupt with any other call and demand to know who, what and why before agreeing to enter into conversation. I believe my instincts are sound.

Standard advice in America nowadays goes like this. If you take a call from an organisation you deal with make sure you are confident they are who they say they are. If you have any doubts ring them back on their company’s listed number. Never give your credit card details or any other personal information over the phone unless the call was initiated by you.

As governments push ahead with their Identity Card Schemes they seem to be ignoring the increasing concern of their citizens about identity and personal data. I consider myself fortunate. Replacing passports and credit cards is a pain. But I have yet to lose any money…although I believe it is just a matter of time before I do. However I tell an amusing anecdote about the time I needed to replace my passport following the Winchelsea Road break-in. Here it is.

When applying for a passport or a driving licence you must send off your original Birth Certificate. Mine went walkabout many years ago so in 2001 I wrote to the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Greenwich for a replacement. In 1946 my arrival was registered in the Borough of Eltham. But Woolwich took them over…and then Greenwich took Woolwich over.

To my surprise a reply came back two days later. ‘Dear Mr Shepherd. Thank you for your application for a Birth Certificate. We regret that the relevant file was recently removed from our Greenwich Office illegally. As a result we are unable to comply with your request.’ The only thing to do was laugh. Fortunately Greenwich had back-up. Copies are held in Southport…hopefully securely…but I wouldn’t bank on it.