William Shepherd

In his prologue to The Return of The Ancient Mariner Nicholas John has written that it is quite a while since William Shepherd disappeared. He continues: ‘I know that his close friends think we must assume the worst and I should go ahead with publication of the manuscripts he left us.'

'Still I'm bit hesitant as it seems to be tempting fate. My sister is uncertain too. In fact last week she had this line about how Daddy was probably just waiting for some stuff to be published and then he would return from his Cannibal Kingdom in the South Seas. I was really missing him at the time so I sort of snapped back at her something about Pippi having gone to find her father instead of hanging around waiting. Anyway, no matter. I decided we should go ahead and what's done is done.’

But although the decision has been made it is still not quite so straightforward. There is for instance a note in the back of Journal Number 41 about a book by a Columbia University Professor James Shapiro entitled 1599 - A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. His booksellers…Heffers in Cambridge with whom he had an account…have confirmed that this was dispatched to his post office box in Rye in December and appears to have been collected.

Also on Page 121 of the journal...in the final entry dated Wednesday 27th December 2006...William Shepherd had written, ‘Now 2006 is behind me I can relegate my political writings to the foot of my priority list and devote 2007 to the more mundane task of making speculative gains on the Stock, Money and Derivatives markets by way of Spread Betting with IG-Index…just enough to buy a cottage in Gotland, a house near Rye Church and a place in France’…and free up my time and energy in 2008 and beyond to the novels I have outlined in my Blogging Odyssey.’

As William Shepherd always insisted that he would never take a mortgage but always hold Real Estate free and clear this means his sights were set on making millions rather than thousands. There are one or two other hints.

In this same journal entry for instance is a remark that ‘…the Contrarian Position I have taken on Global Warming and the Carbonista Theology lends itself to a Speculative Portfolio’ and another that ‘…it probably makes sense to circulate an updated Curriculum Vitae and get myself a Broom Cupboard in The City where I can go to ground for a year or so.’

But for the time being let us bring William Shepherd’s Blogging Odyssey to an end with the rest of the Prologue to the strange tale of The Ancient Mariner. Let Nicholas John takes up the narrative once again.

‘I don't know what my father would have done with the manuscript and I certainly don't feel that I have any better qualifications for deciding this than the reader. The original journal is now with the Arthur Ransome Institute at the University of Texas in Augusta.'

'Obviously Fourth World Scholars will want to compare this edition with the journal original. The list of headings and the chapter titles seem to be the last thing my father did with the manuscript so I have assumed that this was the way he wanted it. But nonetheless I think he would have edited extensively… working from the typeset and paginated transcripts of his handwritten journal extracts.’

‘At any rate I have not tried to second guess what might have been. Instead I have arranged for as accurate a transcription of the handwritten journal pages as possible. Even the changing of names from Håkan to Glenn and from Julie to Kim worried me because the journal entries don't tie in to the text if you change them.’

‘But as my sister has pointed out he was searching for a title and names as he was writing the book. At the end he decided on the Kim and Glenn Bandshow because of the play on the KGB name, so obviously he would have changed to these names right from the start. That's what I've done anyway but otherwise what you have here is my father's Unfinished Symphony transcribed without any alteration from his Novel Journal.’

‘It's quite a while now. There's nothing I wouldn't do to bring my father back…even though he said that he was in me and with me and I should look after Number One. But if it's not possible then at least I have kept the promise I made a dozen years ago. Here Daddy is the book you wanted me to make sure got published as an Academic Inn Book. For you…wherever you are…here is your Tale of The Ancient Mariner. G'Day Mate! Your son Nicholas John.’

At this year’s Winter Solstice, Ilbereth, Aslak and Nicholas John gathered in Muonio for the release of The Return of the Ancient Mariner. William Shepherd had entrusted the manuscript to them 210 turns of the moon previously.

The prologue is written by Nicholas John and starts like this. ‘It's quite a while since anyone heard from my father. Helena says she isn't worried. He'll show up. He always does. I'm not so sure. People who disappear in Colombia normally disappear forever.

But he only said he was going to South America…was Helena's response…to put everybody off the scent. He was just covering his tracks. You know how he keeps telling us that we have to think for ourselves and decide what's true and what's fantasy...and how men and women have a different way of understanding fact and fiction...men being poets and film-makers and women being novelists and members of parliament’.

Yes I know. But Helena wasn't there that last time. I can still remember every detail. The sun had gone down but they were still serving at Paviljongkonditori on the shores of Ridderfjärden. ‘How come you sit on the inside and everyone else sits on the outside?’ he had asked me. Then he started on about how when two people came into a café the second person never wanted to sit at the same place as the first person. I was feeling really good at the time.

We had just come from St. Erik's Squash Hall. I was playing off a handicap of five but I won…two sets to one. ‘Six games all,’ he said. But we were playing the best of three sets, so I knew he just said that to irritate me. In the first set it was 3-0; then I took the second set 3-2 and the third set 3-1. He was pretty pleased at how well I played…although he wouldn't admit it. ‘That's the last time you play off a five point start,’ he said at the end. ‘From now on your handicap is reduced to four’. ‘OK,’ I'd replied, ‘that’s just fine by me.’

As we sat there at his favourite Kungsholmen café...the one he wrote about in Report From A Swedish Village...I was remembering the game…how in the third set I had dropped my racquet in the middle of the rally. Back came the ball off the front wall and there I was…perfectly positioned…but without a racquet. So I hit the ball with my fist. I lost the point but I was remembering him turning to me afterwards…laughing. ‘Amazing’, he said ‘I've never seen that before. Mind you I don’t think there’s anything in the rules against it’. And he laughed again.

I won the game in the end. I hit it just right…low and just over the bar. He tried to cut across in front of me but I'd hit it just right. ‘Great shot!’ he said. That put me at 2-1 with just four points between me and my first win.

Anyway I was remembering and smiling to myself when this motor boat went by. ‘I'll tell you,’ he said, ‘because you understand what I mean when I talk about things this way. I don't think I'm going to buy a house. I think I'll buy a boat. Use it as a houseboat. Moor it at Alan's place on Ljusterö for a few weeks. Then pull up anchor and head for Gotland. Winter in Cork. It's got to be able to do the canals and lakes of Northern Europe and also get across the North Sea when the weather's good...wooden boat…one that I can work on converting to solar power. Not the North Atlantic...something that can do the North Sea and The Baltic’.

I was only half-listening as I was still going over the squash game in my mind. But then my father put this handwritten booklet in front of me and said ‘Nicholas. I’m putting this in your safe-keeping. I am leaving Stockholm next week and this is the only copy of a book I’ve been working on here in Stockholm’. I turned it over.

There was a map on the back. I asked him why Oulu was on the map and not Tarku and he talked about there being two Baltic maps that overlapped...one with the big cities and this one with the small country towns where Academic Inn Books would be sold. But he didn't dwell on that...he can really go on sometimes... that's what I mean about Helena not having been there like I was. He turned to inside the front page and pointed to something he had written.

‘You can look on this rather like my literary last will and testament,’ he said. ‘I know I can trust you.’ It was then I began to understood that he was serious. ‘In the event of my death or disappearance,’ he had written, ‘this should be published exactly as it is.’ It felt like he was telling me he was going to die…so I changed the subject and told him about the Olaus Magnus Map and the new Iceland stamps. But I took the manuscript and hid it away in a drawer.

The Grand Old Duke of York commanding ten thousand men involved in Operation Hill Freedom said, ‘It is time to admit that marching up to the top of the hill was a strategic error and we have to accept the only military option left to us is marching down the hill as soon as possible.’ The Duke of York said, ‘Look let’s be honest. When we were up we were up. And when we are down we will definitely be down. But currently we are in a situation where we are only half-way up. So frankly we are neither up nor down…which is clearly unsustainable.’

Opening Times
at the
British Consulate
in
Basra, Iraq.

Suicide Bombings
9.30am-3.30pm Monday to Friday.
Those wishing to bomb the Consulate outside these hours must apply in writing at least two weeks before they hope to embark on their journey to paradise.

Mortar Attacks
11.00am-2.00pm Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
No incoming mortar attacks will be accepted outside these times.

Small Arms Shelling
2.00pm-5.00pm Monday to Friday.
Those wishing to shell the building during these hours should form an orderly queue in the designated marked zone (A) at the right of the entrance to the building.

A Government Report hailed by Tony Blair as ‘the most important document ever published in the history of the world’ predicts a terrifying scenario for mankind in the very near future. As temperatures soar to levels which will make all life unsustainable and sea levels rise by an estimated 120 feet flooding more than 90 percent of the earth’s land mass, experts have predicted that house prices in the south-east of England may collapse by as much as 20 percent. This catastrophic end of the world scenario could mean that a typical 4-bedroom detached family house in Godalming could see as much as £75 000 wiped off its asking price overnight.

The story was the same throughout Great Britain as hard-pressed decent hardworking homeowners read through the 565-page Stern Report with a sense of mounting despair. Sidney Greenslade a 71-year old retired accountant who lives with his 69-year old wife Pearl in Chertsey Surrey said ‘We bought our executive bungalow in 1989 as our pension scheme. Now we find that the sun is about to fry the earth to a crisp and where does that leave me and Mrs Greenslade? I blame the government.’

First-time buyers wept openly in the streets as the government condemned them to death by drowning as the ice caps melt before they had even got a first foot on the property ladder.

To accompany publication of The Very Stern Report commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury the Daily Mail produced this Ten Point Summary headlined We’re All Going To Die Unless We Pay More Tax.

1. Global Warming is the greatest threat which has ever faced the human race;
2. Unless very drastic steps are taken immediately human life as we know it will end in forty-five minutes;
3. It is now an unchallenged fact that as CO2 levels soar to unsustainable levels, scalding hot giant tsunamis will sweep across the world at millions of miles an hour leaving a path of unprecedented devastation in their wake;
4. No form of life will be left unscathed from the mighty elephant to the humblest bacteria;
5. That includes the human race who face imminent and painful extinction unless extremely drastic steps are taken by responsible governments acting in the best interests of humanity as a whole and those of future generations;
6. It is too late for mere talk. It is now the time for action...and unprecedentedly drastic action at that;
7. There can be no half measures;
8. There is only one possible way in which the planet can be saved from a fate too horrible to imagine;
9. Taxes will have to be raised immediately. And by quite a lot;
10. And, to be honest, Gordon’s run out of money, so this end-of-the-world thing couldn’t have come at a better time.

Not to be upstaged the Daily Express published an article headlined Did Global Warming Kill Diana? Here it is. 'Scientists yesterday revealed that the Arctic winter that descended on Paris ten years ago causing Princess Diana’s Mercedes to skid on ice whilst trying to avoid a polar bear driving a white Fiat Uno was actually caused by global warming on the direct orders of the Duke of Edinburgh. Said one meteorological expert yesterday, ‘A thick fug reduced visibility around fuggin’ Paris because the fuggin’ Duke ordered MI6 to increase fuggin’ carbon emissions all over the fuggin’ (continued every Monday).

The Chinook is a mountain wind named after a Native American tribe from the Pacific North-West. They named it snow-eater because of the heat of the wind racing down the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Moist winds sweeping off the Pacific are lifted up over the mountain range, cool and condense into thick clouds and pour with rain. Then the winds become dried out and as they race down the other side of the mountain they warm up and dry even more.

The temperature change is so dramatic that on 14th January 1972 at Loma Montana a 57oC rise was registered from -48oC to 9oC…a world record for a 24-hour temperature increase. Boulder in Colorado often gets particularly hard hit by Chinooks as the winds are funnelled down through nearby canyons. A gust of 143 miles per hour was registered during January 1971 and in January 1982 a Chinook caused more than $10 million of damage.

This year...on my son Nicholas John’s 31st birthday...I wrote a blog that eventually found its way to the Shepherd on Climate website as a piece entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land. This website is a collection of blogs about Research In Progress…now available for download as England’s Climate & Energy Politics. The e-book and the website lack a coherent narrative so I have asked my daughter to edit my Climate Change Scribblings into a book manuscript.

In my Cloud Cuckoo Land blog I mentioned the scientific problem with Temperature Gauge Data in Temperature-Time Series. I wrote that you can either measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions. Here is some of what I wrote.

‘The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre’.

The operant conditions of your data point matter because built-up environments are typically several degrees warmer. I ended by remarking that ‘even something as simple as collecting data is far from simple’. This data quality effect might be enough to explain the fact that global temperature data from the Northern Hemisphere appears to suggest that it has warmed more than the Southern Hemisphere…something that is puzzling scientists as it is inherently unlikely.

In a scientifically-literate world this 200-word caveat about Data Quality would be unnecessary. But Public Science is now a branch of Public Relations...and truth an early casualty.

The reported average 30-year temperature in Britain from 1961 to 1990 was 9.47oC. Since 1990 every second year has been at least one degree higher than this. The top yearly averages since have been 1995-10.52o; 1997-10.53o; 1999-10.63o; 2002-10.60o; 2003-10.50o; 2004-10.48o and 2006-10.84o. This year has been particularly warm. July was billed as Britain’s warmest month ever at 19.66oC and we also had the warmest September since 1729 at 16.55oC. Globally 2006 will be our sixth warmest year since 1850.

There are Carbonistas who point the finger of suspicion at The Carbon Economy to explain all this but little of their science stands up to rigorous scrutiny. Keith Waterhouse found The Carbon Copy Economy more interesting for his journalistic attentions.

He writes of a time 60-years ago when as the most junior clerk he was left in charge of the office while his boss took a client to lunch and his Elders & Betters trooped off to the pub. Nothing usually happened to disturb his lunchtime reading of a library book except the regular visits of the Carbon Paper Salesman.

This gentleman it seems was an Ace Salesman…stationery cupboards throughout the commercial quarter of Leeds were crammed with his boxes of carbon paper…so he chose lunchtime deliberately knowing that at that hour the most senior member of staff in the place would be a gullible office boy or an impressionable typist. His line was either that there was about to be a worldwide shortage of carbon paper…’Hurry while stocks last!’…or that prices were about to rocket due to a South American Consortium having cornered the market. Notice how nothing changes.

Keith Waterhouse writes that his predecessor as Office Muggins had fallen for either or both of these spiels with the result that there was enough carbon paper in the cupboard to last to the end of the century so he was under strict standing orders never to buy any more. Goodness knows what happened to the vast stockpile of expensive carbon paper…melted down perhaps to make spitfires like the park railings and the Council Dumps of aluminium saucepans.

The creep of new technology has turned Carbon Paper into a back number…so I have to fight with my bank every time I order the neat little Paying In Book with counterfoils and carbon paper that I insist on using. But I still remember with embarrassment my discovery that Alan Pryke was spending his first winter in Stockholm trudging around the city’s business district in the snow flogging carbon paper to office clerks and typists.

I first met Alan 40-years ago onboard Tor Anglia en route from Harwich to Gothenburg and Stockholm to spend time with our girl-friends. At the time he boasted a Higher National Certificate in Business & Commerce and was holding down a well-salaried job in the City of London. But I persuaded him that Commuting was not Living and that he should throw it all in and get himself a life in Sweden. But Carbon Paper Salesman was not quite what I had in mind.

The day after Anna Lindh’s murder Boudewijn Wegerif sent an e-memo to his mailing list where he wrote. ‘I have just received this about the assassination of foreign minister Anna Lindh from list member William Shepherd…who is as at home in Sweden as in England. What William writes and quotes from the Daily Telegraph in England is very much more specific than what I intimated in the foreword to What Matters E-letter-146 just posted’.

I then made up a list of my top ten political suspects in the Anna Lindh Murder. Since then I have added notes to each of my ten files. Here is a summary of the contents of the files on the five leading suspects.

1. One World Order:

Anna Lindh made many influential friends world-wide while at the helm of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League from 1984 to 1990 and was an ardent supporter of international cooperation through the United Nations and the European Union…organisations that are regarded as the enemy by the One World State Conspirators. Rich and powerful organizations like Skull & Bones believe in a Hegelian One World Government by an Elite International Fellowship. A Public Declaration by Future Leaders of past diary, funding etc…is needed.

Lindh was a prime candidate to succeed Göran Persson as leader of the Social Democrats and Prime Minister of Sweden. As Swedish Prime Minister her celebrity interest would be at Princess Diana…and Ségolène Royale…levels.

2. Arms Traders:

Anna Lindh’s six years as the first woman president of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League were marked by a strong commitment to international affairs…for Nicaragua, Vietnam, South Africa and the Palestinians…and against the Arms Industry. Anna Lindh would have had insight and insider knowledge into the development of Climate Weapons, Passover Weapons and other top-secret Weapon Programmes from her contacts in the EU Environment, SÄPO…Sweden’s MI5 and MI6…and SIPRI.

On 3rd July 2003 Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh announced the appointment of Hans Blix as Chairman of an independent International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Lindh told reporters in Stockholm: ‘We must do everything we can to avert the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. The purpose of the Commission is to provide new impetus to the international efforts involved in Disarmament and Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and ,em>Missiles. The Commission will be formed during the autumn of 2003 under the leadership of Hans Blix and plans call for their recommendations to be submitted in 2005.’

3. The Moneychangers:

There are continuing rumours that Nixon traded gold for China to keep out of the Cold War and for the US to ignore Chinese Overseas Diaspora finance of China’s development.

Here is the list of contents of my discussion paper on Gold & Derivatives &Nine Eleven to be delivered to a Fringe Meeting at the Radical Consultation in September 2006. My proposed title for the Fringe Event was 5-Years On.

Sound Money;
NESARA;
Norway’s Gold Accounts;
2001 Diary of Dollar and Gold Related Events in Russia;
The Derivatives Monster by Adam Hamilton…published on 7th September 2001 about JPMorganChase’s domination of the enormous highly-leveraged US Derivatives Market and its links to the Gold Market;
America’s Missing Gold;
Gold and Nine Eleven by Boudewijn Wegerif and
Derivatives Electronic Trading.

4. US Imperialists:

These Flag-huggers and Liberal-haters believe in an American New Century World Hegemony. In 1969 at the age of 12 Anna Lindh joined the local branch of the Swedish Social Democrats to protest against the Vietnam War and organise an exhibition against the Vietnam War at Grillby School after meeting the Social Democrat MP for Uppsala Birgitta Dahl…Chairman of the Vietnam Committee.

Lindh was attacked on the afternoon of 10th September 2002 and died on the morning of 9-11 2002. The timing suggests a link to Nine Eleven where many have questioned the official version of events. If Anna Lindh had been about to talk out she would have been silenced…pour décourager les autres.

Lindh criticised the 2003 invasion of Iraq…‘a war being fought without support in the statutes of the United Nations is a major failure’. Lindh was very critical of US Middle East Policy and was generally Anti-US in her public speaking engagements...ridiculing Bush as The Lone Ranger.

5. Austro-Hungarian Supremacists:

The Austro-Hungarian Empire…with or without Russian involvement…is on the rise. Investigations into the East-West Institute…a transatlantic think-tank that organizes annual Security Conferences in Brussels. The institute has received considerable funding over many years from the Charles Mott Fund…whose original endowment is derived from a private General Motors fortune.

In April 2004 Anna Lindh was posthumously awarded the Statesman of the Year Award by the East-West Institute. Why? During the Swedish Presidency of the European Union during the first half of 2001 Anna Lindh was Chairman of the Council of the European Union responsible for representing the official foreign policy for the European Union.

Travelling with the EU Foreign and Security Policy Spokesman Javier Solana in Macedonia during the Kosovo Crisis, Lindh negotiated an agreement that averted a civil war in the country. Her assassin Mijailo Mijailović was reported to have been greatly angered by Anna Lindh's staunch support for the US-led military campaign against Serbia during 1999.

Somewhere there is a book about Christmas Crackers…the tradition, its origins, its future and…dread the thought…Cracker Humour. But I refuse to waste time googling to find the definitive text.

One thing to be said for this year’s offerings is that they are cheap. Rigged exchange rates and the peculiar need of the Chinese Communist Government to imprison their populations for eighteen hours a day to make junk for the Overdeveloped World are a big part of it. No doubt the Grand Asian Masterplan has African Colonial Possessions doing this two decades hence.

Apart from ranting there is little I can do about the several versions of the New World Orders planned for us. There is an American one that forgot to take account of the Asian one and the Moslem one…whose vision is as much economic as religious with monetary independence from Wall Street’s Neo-Judaic Banking Cartels as a central aim. But this is not the stuff of Christmas.

Let me instead do my bit to improve the quality of Christmas Crackers. At the end of this blog you will find a few Subversive Sayings for you to produce when Aunty Doris asks you what your cracker says. Says? No doubt Talking Crackers are not far away. In fact I may have inadvertently started the trend.

I broke with the 100-year old tradition of posting Christmas Cards four years ago. Connie and I had been in the Christmas Card Business between 1997 and 2001…with the Printing Department of Neame Designs at 13A Tower Street in Rye as our partner in the small firm of Ryeproduction.

But it seemed a little inappropriate to continue without her. So for the past four years I have sent e-cards to my digitalised contacts. The joy of these is that you can choose the day of delivery and get positive acknowledgement that your greeting has been collected.

My three internet errands in Hastings on Friday had been to send some web files to Kentucky, to get up to date on e-mails and to send out my Christmas Greeting Cards…Christmas Eve for Sweden and Christmas Day for everyone else. I should have reversed the order because my inbox included a Christmas Greeting from my PCHut Buddy Sandra Scott that creased me up. So I just had to send it to my Christmas List.

It took a while because…apart from running an animation sequence using Macromedia’s Flash technology…this American Greetings Company Card also allowed me to personalise the card by choosing from a long list of names. Father Christmas then inserted the Spoken Name into his address. ‘Hello Sandra! Have you been good this year?’ Just wonderful.

It cost a $13.99 annual subscription as I had to sign up for a 30-day trial. I can cancel but won’t because ten-pence a card…and falling…is Fair Trade by anybody’s standard. Perhaps next year I will be able to get Santa Claus to include more than one name in his Christmas Address. I wanted ‘Hello Chris and Mary !’ but couldn’t have it.

Email Inboxes can be exciting places…once the junk mail has been unceremoniously dumped into some new circle of Dante’s Hell that not even Hieronymus Bosch could imagine. Today was no exception for my inbox contained a lengthy tome from an American Gentleman who in his official capacity goes by the name of Lawrence F. Schiller, Counsel for Sue, Grabbit & Runne of Farmington Hills in Michigan.

Counsel Schiller stunned me with the news that he had in his possession some letters from 40 years ago…and had of late taken to perusing them. Let Attorney Schiller take up the tale. ‘I first mention you when I discuss your proposed trip to Canada/US, and later indicate that you were at a party/dance at the London's English Speaking Union building in mid-December…just before I went on holiday to the continent and not long before your accident.'

'I then note that I visited you at the hospital in mid-January 1965…I'd just returned from holiday a few days before Christ’s Hospital started back up…and I went to see Mike Brockbank who gave me the news. I visited you the next day.’

‘My comments in my letters home very clearly show the immediate and rather significant impact your accident had on me. Sometime that spring…after our next school holiday I believe…you unexpectedly showed up to visit me in Thornton A while you visited others at Christ’s Hospital. By that time Mike already was in Canada in your stead.'

'I even mention somewhere along the line…as I mightily struggled to learn how to hit a cricket ball…that you were CH's leading batsman in spring 1964..before my arrival…and that you would have been captain had you stayed until spring 1965 year. True?’ See what I mean about inboxes. Now for your Cracker Sayings…and, yes Larry, ‘tis true.

Love is blind but marriage is the real eye-opener;
Real women don’t have hot flushes they have power surges;
If at first you don’t succeed try it the wife’s way;
We child-proofed our house but they’re still getting in;
Both of us can’t look good…it’s either me or the house;
Women who seek equality with men should have higher standards;
My husband needs glasses…he doesn’t see things my way;
Every time I find Mr Right my husband scares him off;
Some days are a total waste of make-up; Bed &
Breakfast…two things men can’t make;
We take our kids everywhere but they keep finding their way back; Middle age is when a broad mind and a narrow waist swap places.
Boom! Boom!

So this is Christmas. And what have you done? Another year over. A new one just begun. During the year some 3000 innocent people were killed in Colombia by paramilitaries fighting to control the Cocaine Trade. During this never-ending conflict three million Colombians have been driven from their homes. Happy Christmas. War is Over.

Meanwhile Multinationalism means the poor fight the rich countries’ battles. At present the UN is in Sudan, Burundi, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Dafur, Haiti, East Timor, India, Pakistan, Cyprus, Golan Heights, Lebanon, Georgia, Kosovo and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Two thirds of UN Soldiering is done by the world’s poor. The Top Ten are Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Nepal, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Uruguay and South Africa with just 5.8% of UN soldiers coming from the European Union and 0.5% from the United States.

There are War Memorials all over England. Those for the 23rd Division of Number 8 Platoon of the 10th Duke of Wellington‘s 69th Brigade are typical. Two thousand men were sent out from Bradford to the trenches of Europe in the First World War and 223 came home…J.B.Priestley among them. Must nine Priestleys die for one to survive?

America slaughtered hundreds of thousands of its own young men in Vietnam and death tolls in the War on Terror are rising in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Falklands Conflict gets an occasional mention in the United Kingdom but otherwise little is heard about the two dozen other wars which have killed British Soldiers since the end of the 1939-1945 Hitler War.

Here is the British Military Death Count over the past sixty years. Malaya 1443, Northern Ireland 1380, Korea 1086, Palestine 747, Suez 407, Cyprus 357, Falklands 238, Aden 167, Borneo 131, Iraq 120, Kenya 94, Balkans 65, Oman 58, Gulf War 47, Yangtze 43, Malay Peninsula 38, Afghanistan 41, Dhofar 25, Brunei 7, Rhodesia 5, Sierra Leone 5, Namibia 3, Congo 2, Saudi Arabia 1, Cambodia 1. That’s about a thousand a decade. How long before New Labour’s Spin Doctors start crowing about Tony Blair’s Peaceful Ten Years in office?

As for me I’m going to die on Monday 27th April 2020 which gives me 420 483 580 seconds before falling off the twig. My Deathday has been calculated by a computer. You too can find out how long you’ve got before you croak it. An Insurance Company computer has also figured out that a retired man of 65 will live until 81.6…3½ years better than 20 years ago. But odds are ten years better if you live in Kensington or Horsham and avoid Glasgow and Manchester. A sex change is a good investment too. A woman’s Life Expectancy at 65 is 84.

But will it be worth staying around for? What has life been like in Blair’s Britain? And where is it heading? When Matthew Parris looked for something nice to write about Blair’s Ten Years he concluded that England is a nicer place than it was…and that Blair’s premiership had helped to make it so.

‘Tony Blair has placed his personal stamp on a genuinely new era for Britain…an altered culture, a permanent change in our national mood. Without any shadow of doubt Mr Blair will leave a happier country than he found. Something tolerant, something amiable, something humorous, some lightness of spirit in his own nature, has marked his premiership and left its mark on British life’.

Parris goes on to make the point that the Prime Minister was cool in a way that no predecessor in that office ever had been. ‘Call it weakness or call it a strength but people without any dominating idea of their own but with the emotional intelligence to sense the spirit of the age and let it inhabit them like a ghost…to interpret it, to give it words and gestures, even to clothe it with theory and statute…these people are change-makers every bit as revolutionary as a Thatcher but in a different way. You can grab an era by the lapels as she did or you can let an era grab you by the lapels and guide it as he has. Both are creative forces in politics.’

Parris ends by remarking that in democratic politics it is no small thing ‘to catch a changed wind early, to let it fill your sails, and to help steer the spirit of a nation into different waters.’ That, he writes is what Mr Blair has done ‘with a deftness, with a sensitivity to national mood unequalled by any British politician I can remember.’ My caveat to this assessment is my belief that the Coming Bad Times might have been avoided. The next 10 years could be very nasty...and the rot set in on Blair’s Watch.

Tony Benn was asked recently if he believed that Jesus was Lord. He answered, ‘Well, I don’t believe in lords.’ Then he was asked, ‘Do you believe in the Kingdom of Heaven?’ ‘I am a Republican…’ he responded before adding, ‘…and when I go to Hell I hope there is an energy crisis.’

Ten years ago Marianne Fredriksson the Swedish writer of Hanna’s Daughter, Simon & the Oaks, Inge & Mira and Elisabeth’s Daughter read Simone Weil’s Letter to a Dominican. Here is Marianne five years later in the introduction to According to Mary: the life of Mary Magdalene - a novel. ‘Simone Weil was a Catholic but in her letters she is fiercely critical of Christianity. She primarily turns against the appalling claims of the church to possess the only real truth…in whose name it judged and condemned human beings.’

Simone Weil asked how Jesus…whose foremost message is forgiveness and mercy…became the judgemental god and how his determined distancing himself from priests and scripture pedants could lay the foundations to a religion with such harsh regulations, domination and hierarchy? In The Person and The Sacred Simone Weil writes that a correct understanding of Christianity was impossible because of the ‘profound secrecy surrounding its early history’.

Fredriksson began reading theology, religious histories, mythology and Greek philosophy. Eventually she was ‘delighted and astonished’ to stumble across Sophia…daughter of the God Wisdom…and her preaching which were much like Jesus. She soon realised that many of the contradictions in Christianity go back to the conflicts between the Judeo-Christian Congregation in Jerusalem and the Apostles who wanted to take the new message to the heathen.

Jerusalem’s Christians maintained that all those wishing to convert must first become Jews, obey all the hundreds of decrees in the laws and be circumcised. The foreign missionaries…with Paul’s evangelical faction in the lead… opposed the Jewish Congregation, won the battle and wrote the history. After a while Fredriksson started ‘playing with a daydream’. Supposing there had been a free, clear-thinking person among Jesus’ disciples…someone open, unprejudiced and acquainted with both Jewish and Greek thinking…someone with ears to hear.

Then one day while researching in the Nag Hammadi Library Marianne Fredriksson chanced upon the fragment that remains of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In it she relates what Jesus said in personal conversations with her. This was the moment Fredriksson’s novel was born. Here perhaps was someone with ears to hear, eyes to see and a mind to understand. The disciple who Jesus loved the most was a woman with the power to influence others.

In Fredriksson’s novel the fair-haired blue-eyed Mary describes how as a child she felt an outsider in her Jewish Community. Then she witnesses the slaughter of her family by the Romans. She runs for her life and is saved by Leonidas…a Roman soldier…who takes Mary to friends at a House of Pleasure. Here she is cared for and loved until when she is twenty she falls in love with a young man from Nazareth…an encounter which changes both their lives.

The main plot of the novel finds Mary Magdalene living quietly as she tries to come to terms with Jesus’ decision to choose a cruel death instead of a life of joy and happiness with her. But an unexpected visit from Peter and Paul shatters her tranquillity. They insist that she record everything about Jesus…the man, his works and his words. Mary remembers the instructions Jesus gave her ‘to make no rules of life on this which I have revealed to you’ and ‘to write no laws as the lawmakers do’ and is deeply concerned about this latest development.

Her response is to seek out three old friends…and former disciples…Lydia, Salome and Susanna. Marianne Fredriksson’s action stops shortly afterwards. But what if gospels according to Maria, Lydia, Salome and Susanna were to appear some day to challenge the teachings in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Forgive us Our Debts for instance as we forgive those who are indebted to us.

A lecturer at the University of Glasgow has found herself unexpectedly at Number One in the download charts after she posted podcasts of her lectures about the philosopher Emmanuel Kant on iTunes’ education section. Susan Stuart’s lectures have attracted fan mail from across the world. Perhaps Ofsted should send in the inspectors?

Yesterday I braved the Christmas Shopping madness in Ashford and today I did a Lidl Run to Hastings to stock up the larder for Christmas and the New Year. While in Hastings I stopped off at Mahavi’s Internet to post onto the cesc website The Wealth of Counties and a primer on Commercial Banks, Central Banks and Governments.

The How Banking Primer has pages on the Unholy Trinities of Banks and Governments and a list entitled Ten More Financial Secrets. Our Banking System is tripartite with the three functions closely interlocked. The first part is that of Central Banking through which money is created; the second part is that of Commercial Banking through which money is distributed; and the third part is that of the Consuming Public through which money is utilised.

The Government’s Unholy Trinity refers to the way Government gets its money. This it does in not one but three ways: by taxation, by borrowing genuine savings and by the Central Bank inventing or creating the necessary amount and thereby increasing its obligations to the joint stock banks which then create new deposits for the purpose.

Here are a few of the Financial Secrets.

Money for most purposes means bank deposits which is a bank-created substitute for metallic money;

Bank deposit money chiefly comes into existence by the actions of the banks themselves which create it initially as a debt at interest. The variation in the quantity of bank deposits…and of paper money generally…is controlled by the actions of the central bank.

Bankers' profits are made out of whatever ‘money’ they can create and issue in excess of their liquid reserve assets.

Banks do not lend their customers' money when making loans or granting overdrafts but create or invent the money for the purpose.

Repaying the National Debt is impossible because it would cancel out an equivalent sum of money decimating the country’s money supply.

The latest figures from the United Nations Organisation has 20 million men and 17 million women in the world infected with HIV…and 4 million new infections a year. As world population is 6000 million this is a tiny figure…less than 1%…so what on earth is all the fuss about? Am I missing something? Has someone dropped a zero?

The UN statistics tell me that each year 2.8 million people die of AIDs and 2.7 million die of malaria…with 2.1 million of the AIDs deaths and 2.4 million of the malaria deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle has teams of world-renowned scientists…including three Nobel laureates…working to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, HIV/AIDS and other diseases. A study by three of their researchers…Laith Abu-Raddad, Padmaja Patnaik and James Kublin…published in the 8th December 2006 issue of Science has found a link between AIDs and Malaria.

They reckon that tens of thousands of new HIV cases can be attributed to malaria infections, while millions of cases of malaria develop because of immune system impairments related to HIV. According to James Kublin the weakening of the immune system by HIV infection has fuelled a rise in adult malaria infection rates and may have facilitated the expansion of malaria in Africa.

Abu-Raddad’s mathematical model based on HIV and Malaria Co-infections in Malawi was used to measure the effects of the conditions on each other. A detailed study of Kisumu in Kenya was then conducted which revealed that five per cent of HIV infections were attributable to the way in which malaria increases viral load and that ten per cent of adult malaria episodes are related to HIV.

The study was funded by the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at the University of Washington through the Mathematical Modeling Program for HIV/STD Research. The HIV Vaccine Trials Network at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center provided partial support for the study.

Geoff Garnett Professor of Microparasite Epidemiology at Imperial College London said it was an interesting synthesis that showed the potential of one infection to allow another to establish within a population. But he remarked that many other behaviours, infections and environmental factors can similarly influence the disease and that the small effect of interventions targeted at dual infections was particularly interesting.

More interesting is the lack of scientific interest in the Malaria-carrying Mosquito…the ultimate Mobile Dirty Needle…as it goes on its not-so-merry way moving from person to person injecting, mixing and contaminating the blood of its victims. But you can’t make a vaccine for this…or lecture the Ignorant Savages about their sexual habits.

Two years ago a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra triggered the biggest and most devastating tsunami known in recent history. The quake measuring more than 9.0 on the Richter Scale released monstrous waves up to 100 feet high along coastlines across the Indian Ocean from Somalia to Thailand that left 230 000 people killed or lost. The immediate cause of the Asian Tsunami was a sideways rupture of about 50 feet along a seismic fault line under the sea with the sea bed lifting up some ten feet or so.

But the moon may also have played a part in it because recent research has shown that this fault line is sensitive to the monthly lunar cycle. A team of British scientists compared the patterns of quakes and tremors including the Boxing Day 2004 Tsunami with the phases of the moon. Publishing in Geophysical Research Letters the scientists reported that quakes were 86% more likely around full moons and 38% more likely around new moons when tides are at their most extreme. The movement of huge masses of water at these tides could stress fault lines under strain.

As our planet whizzes across the face of the sun at this time of the year on its elliptical orbit…and summer is now on the way…it has always seemed surprising to me that the tilt of the earth’s axis is responsible for the difference between hot summers and cold winters. At the Winter Solstice the Northern Hemisphere is leaning away from the Sun while at the Summer Solstice it is leaning towards it. Why should a few thousand miles make so much difference in ninety three million. Perhaps someone can explain before I try to set up my life to spend half of it in New Zealand.

One person asking such questions was James Croll. In 1864 he published a ground-breaking scientific paper on how fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun could explain the coming and going of Ice Ages. He had figured out that ice ages came and went as the earth’s orbit changed from a circle to an oval-shape…and with changes in the tilt of the Earth. According to his calculations only small changes in the Earth’s Orbit were needed because the cooling was amplified by the huge ice sheets reflecting heat from their white surface back into space.

It took some 60 years for these ideas to become widely accepted…and another hundred years to be buried as Bad News by the Global Warming Conspirators. But at least Croll who died in 1890 gained recognition as an inspirational scientist in his own lifetime suggesting there was more good honest horse sense talked about our planet’s climate before the Computer Boys hijacked the subject with their Clip Boards and Computer Forecasting Models.

So here's to NASA’s Project to build a base on the Moon. The Moon was always the reflection of our dreams. Only in the most recent fraction of human history have we known that it is a place, a rock, a thing, rather than an idea, a phenomenon or a god. The Moon was a veiled ghost, the deity of time and madness. It pulled the tides, measured out our months and perhaps too the ovulation of woman, the origin of human life itself. We gave the Moon names in every culture and for every season: Harvest Moon, Blue Moon, Strawberry Moon.

The very first Inquisition victims to be burnt as witches worshipped the lunar goddess Madonna Oriente. Where some cultures detected a man in the Moon’s face, others saw a rabbit, a frog and a buffalo. Jack and Jill are Hijuki and Bil of Norse myth whose up- and down-hilling is a metaphor for the waxing and waning of the Moon. The Moon was a metaphor for the unreachable…the virgin Diana in Roman myth…unattainably distant.

In an extraordinary surge of ingenuity the Americans reached the Moon in 1969, walked upon it and gathered its rocks. Then just as suddenly in the scale of human history…like a child abandoning a gift it has long coveted…the Moon was discarded.

For the past 30 years no one from this planet has ventured further than 400 miles from the Earth. Most of us barely notice the Moon now…indeed light pollution means it is sometimes barely visible. Since the 1970s Space Science has concentrated on Unmanned Robotic Probes and Orbiting Stations more than human exploration and discovery. But this week NASA unveiled plans to build a permanent Moon Base within 20 years.

Let’s go for it. The Moon is just three days away and an ideal supply base for voyaging farther into space. The last Moon Landings were fuelled by Cold War rivalry. But for the next stage NASA is inviting contributions from China, Russia and Europe. This time around we come to the Moon not as national colonists but as interplanetary pilgrims. Getting there will be cheap at the price. The Moon Mission in the decade after 1962 cost less than a year of warring in Vietnam. Apply that accountancy to the Iraq Debacle and the Moon Project looks like quite a bargain.

My blog for Tuesday 14th November was devoted to a review of Keith Sutherland’s book The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a very English Revolution published last week in Fourth World Review (FWR141). In my review I took Sutherland to task for his listing of Crown, Lords and Commons as the Three Estates.

In my version of English History our three estates are Monarchy, Church and House of Communities. Our Lords Temporal include the social structures of the monarchy with its aristocratic landed organisation into counties, townships, bailiwicks, lathes and hundreds. Our Lords Spiritual embrace the Church of England which has the freedom to choose the details of its spiritual faith and is not bound by any past Parliament or Treaty to the Book of Common Prayer or King James' New Testament. Nowadays the key religious divide is between Materialists and Atheists...and the rest of us who ask ourselves 'Is that all there is?’...and answer 'No!'

If the English are to get to where Keith Sutherland wants them to go then Parliament needs to be put back in its place. The best way to do this is by an alliance between the other two estates represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and our future King Charles III...on the side of People and Place. 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.

Last Saturday Keith Sutherland responded on my blog to the charge that he had got it wrong about the estates. 'You're right,' he wrote, 'about the three medieval estates...Lords Temporal, Lords Spiritual and Commons. But an alternative modern view goes back to a document produced in 1642 when Charles I argued that the Constitution of England was a mixed one in which the three estates of king, lords and commons was balanced together. This is the Aristotelian principle that I try to develop in the book.' Sutherland then references the Cambridge Academic Michael Mendle...author of The Putney Debates and mentions specifically Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions.

Seventeenth Century English History is a boom industry...especially in the US...and Keith Sutherland is right to point to the scholarship behind the fluctuating definitions of the Idea of the Estates. But the practical problem is the need to broaden the English Political Debate. Conventional political options are incapable of solving 21st Century problems. It is as well to remind ourselves that each generation holds all the options and can rewrite the Constitutional Script if they wish to.

The Three Estates is an excellent place to start this debate...and why not bring the subject into Geography and History Curricula in our Secondary Schools? But any modern discussion must include the Fourth Estate with its PR Firms and Spin Controllers...as well as the Print and Electronic Media with its podcasts, blogs and internet channels. Schooling itself is just one channel among many in the Babble of the Fourth Estate.

Readers of the Guardian or the Independent or Anti-Globalisation Demonstrators will find Sutherland's book well worth reading as it does a first class job of stretching the political options within the Established Orthodoxy…an important step when an orthodoxy reaches the end of its appointed course.

Stretching the Consensus Paradigm is crucial if our English Politics are to progress in the 21st Century by Evolution. Revolutions may be unavoidable on occasions…and a Second English Civil War remains a possibility…but revolutions are best avoided because innocent people get hurt. Besides if History teaches us anything it is that no one ever knows where revolutions end up. They always take on a life of their own...with many unanticipated side-effects...most of them nasty.

This is the second extract from Five Acres & A Cow. I had been asked to give a one-hour talk about the Rural Economy at the Stroud Energy Fair in July 2001 and took the Linnaeus line that Farms and Factories don’t mix economically…something which E.F. Schumacher realised. The basis of my talk was John Seymour’s discussion in the Fat of The Land of Cow Economics…and its obscurity. For example what does a cow eat? Grass all summer, and very little else which can be considered as free for the use of our three-acre grass field naturally comes in with our twenty-five pounds a year rent...although actually it is not as simple as all that. John Seymour takes up the tale.

In the winter Brownie must have hay, roots and concentrates. The concentrates we have to buy and that is that. They consist mainly of oats and groundnut cake. And I have to admit shamefacedly enough that I have no idea what this costs me. I get a bill from Jack Hewitt the miller about twice a year depending on how energetic he is feeling in the book-keeping way, it always shakes me to the foundations, but then I know that it includes not only the little bit of food I give to the cow but also pig food and poultry food. I made a rough jumbled stab at working out what the concentrates for brownie cost and after the most devious possible workings came up with about a tanner a day averaged out through the year…winter and summer. Then there is the hay.

I cut some rough hay with a scythe the first year in my field. That lasted me until Christmas and then I had to buy hay. The second year I cut half the field with Michael's tractor and that lasted me all that winter and half of next. This year I have had to buy all my hay…and I am feeding hay now even though it is high summer. This is because of the terrible drought last year (1959), the partial drought in the early part of this year (we have had floods of rain since - but too late), and the fact that I have ploughed half of my grass field up. I suppose that this year, for the cow and the pony I shall have spent by the time the winter is over some forty pounds on hay. But it is most unlikely that such a thing will ever happen again. Nothing but a malign miracle can make us ever have to buy hay again. Roots - we have always managed to grow nearly enough…either kale or fodder beet…to feed the cow. But up to this year - not quite. This year I think we will have enough, as we have a fine piece of fodder beet on The Hill.

So all in all, our milk has certainly not been free. I would put the cost of cow food, to date, at about twenty-five to thirty pounds a year. But this must be considered - it will get less year by year until we may get it down to very near nothing. There is no reason at all why one should not feed a cow - ay, and two cows - and a horse, off five acres of land, entirely, and keep up a good milk production. But first the land must be built up to a high state of fertility - and in doing that the cow plays the most important part.

Now what do we get from the cow? When she first calves…and if it is summer and the grass is green…she gives nearly 4 gallons of milk a day. She goes down towards the end of her lactation to perhaps 1½ gallons a day. For most of the time she is giving us from 2 to 3 gallons a day. Now no family of our size can drink 2½ gallons of milk a day. After all - that is 20 pints. So there are various other things that we do with it. We make all our own butter and most of our own cheese. Further - every living thing on the place except the horse benefits from Brownie's milk.

Our pigs thrive in a manner remarkable to our scientific-farmer neighbours. Our young birds thrive and grow into healthy stock by virtue of their share of whatever butter-milk, cheese-whey, milk that has been left about too long and gone bad, cream that has been forgotten and gone mouldy. Our cat and our dog benefit. And the humans benefit by having unlimited, good, untampered with, unpasteurized, unprocessed and unbuggared-about-with milk.

Before we had a cow our milk bill came to two pounds a week, and butter and cheese cost another ten shilling. This comes to £120 a year. So whatever the calculating book-keepers and the costive cost-accountants say and they say a lot (the farming press nowadays runs an unending holy crusade to persuade people against being self-supporting - they want to turn every farmer into a money-grubber pure and simple), we make a profit of at least £90 a year. The fact that we don't actually see the money makes no difference…we are spared having to spend it.

What else does Brownie give us? Well for one thing at least a calf a year. Now we know that non-pedigree Jersey calves are not very valuable. But here is our balance sheet. We have paid out £107 10s. for cattle. We have been paid £149 4s for cattle that we have sold. Thus we have made a profit of £41 14s on the buying and selling of cattle (and rearing of calves). Added to this we still have Brownie and she is at present giving us nearly 4 gallons a day. Her last calf born a fortnight ago just before Sally's latest baby proved alas a bad-doer and I knocked her on the head and her skin is drying for a floor mat and her meat is down in pickle in a large crock for feeding the pigs and fowls. Waste not, want not!

The size of the above sums is due to the fact that we bought another cow. One cow will not give you milk consistently all the year…year after year…so you need two. We sold her again though, being in need at the time both of grass and cash. And once, when we didn't have any pigs, we bought a beef calf, reared him, and sold him at a negligible profit. A poor deal by any standard...and another lesson not to try to swim in the commercial sea.

In the view of some cultural ecologists the Hindu institution of the Sacred Cow is both ecologically and economically functional. Cows provide milk and manure…for bricks and fertiliser…and give birth to bullocks. But the thing to do when you want to get a cow is just go and get a cow. Do not start taking the measure of your ignorance. The cow will dispel your ignorance better than three years at an agricultural college. The cow is a better teacher than any book. Just get the cow. Thus spake John Seymour. Localization with Self-Sufficiency is more threatening to the Anarchy of Corporate Power…with its mindless pursuit of bigger and bigger profits…than any Anti-Capitalist Protests.

In fact the best Public Policy for the Coming Bad Times will be for the Lord Lieutenants to issue Five Acres and a Cow to every young man in the county. If the Queen can send telegrams when we reach our 100th birthday then her son can make sure that Cows and Land Deeds are handed out to every able-bodied male in his kingdom on their 18th birthday. ‘All power to the parish!’ is the fastest way to ensure that all wealth stays in the county!'

It is difficult buying a cow if you know nothing about it and don't want to be robbed. The Seymours kept blundering about trying to buy a cow but eventually they bought Brownie. Let John take up the tale. We went and looked at a herd of pedigree Jerseys and were offered one…a cull…at just the hundred and twenty guineas. You can buy an awful lot of milk for a hundred and twenty guineas. And you can pay an awful lot out in vet’s bills on a pedigree Jersey or a pedigree any other breed. We did have enough sense - or instinct - to steer us away from over-bred stock.

Eventually we saw an ad in our local rag for a Jersey House-Cow. We went and saw her. She belonged to a small-holder, an oldish man, hard and tough and honest like so many small-holders, who had reared up a heifer calf from this cow and had decided to get rid of the old girl while the going was good. Brownie was darkish brown…too dark for a Jersey…skinny and bony and swag-bellied, a bit shy in the forequarters, not too heavily bagged, a sweet silly frightened old thing, and we bought her for thirty-five quid. She was delivered in a cattle float. And there we were.

It is something suddenly to be landed with a cow. Brownie had just calved, but the vendor was keeping the calf. So there she was with a bagful of milk. We had cleaned and whitewashed out the cowshed…the middle of the two compartments of the weather-boarding shed. We led her in there and I tried to milk her. I had milked cows as a child, but not since. It came back…slowly. But milking a cow…particularly one like Brownie who is hard to milk…Jerseys are apt to be a bit slow on the titty…is a difficult job. I have taught several people to milk since and I have found that there is only one real teacher for difficult things…necessity. I milked Brownie because I had to milk her.

I believe there is no other way to learn to milk a cow. You have to sit there…until it is hard to keep the sweat of your brow from dripping into the pail…and the cow finishes the bit of grub you gave her long before to keep her quiet, and gets restive, and flicks you in the face (hard) with her hard old tail, and jigs about, and kicks the bucket, and you fumble away, and your wrists and forearms get paralytic, and only one thing keeps you at it…the knowledge that the cow has got to be milked to the last drop in each quarter and that she has got to be milked by you. It's no use calling on the Lord God. He won't come down and help you. You are alone…with a cow.

But when you learn to milk comfortably, which you do in about a week, it becomes a pleasant job. I look forward now to the morning and evening milking. There seems to me to be a friendliness between the cow and me, I put my head in her old flank and squirt away, and there is a nice smell, and a nice sound as the jets hiss into the frothing bucket, and I can think, and sum things up, and wonder what I am going to have for supper. In the winter it is dark and cold outside, but warm in Y Beudy…the cow shed…and the hurricane lantern throws fine shadows about the building. The whole job takes perhaps ten minutes - night and morning.

The economics of this are terribly obscure and I would defy all the accountants in the world to work them out. An accountant would say that Labour was the chief item. But how can you assess the cost of labour that you enjoy doing? That is where all accountancy falls down flat on its face. An accountant will say that a man's labour costs are say ten shillings an hour…or five shillings an hour. Or what have you. But supposing a man is enjoying what he is doing? Then he will do it for nothing. If I were to work in an advertising agency I would want my labour to be assessed not at ten shillings or a pound an hour, but at a million pounds an hour. But when I am milking Brownie I am not wasting ten minutes of my life. I am enjoying them. And therefore I do not wish to charge my time up for anything.

In fact I should pay Brownie for she gives me Pleasure for she is one of the family. It is surprising what an affection we feel for the old creature. And Fertility…for her dung is the basis of all husbandry and she is the cornerstone of the arch of our economy. Everything we eat is enriched by either her dung or her milk. Our crops flourish because of the priming-pump effect of her manure. Our animals…and she herself…flourish because of the flourishing of the crops. She is the prime-mover of a beneficial circle of health and fertility. I know this sounds like a lot of crankish clap-trap and fiddle-faddle. It is not though. It is true and very easily verifiable.

My mother was not a great lover of animals although she was a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ( RSPB ) and a supporter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ( RSPCA ). It was not until I was in Nairobi in the 1970s that I had an animal in my life…a Rhodesian Ridgeback whose purpose was to keep Black Kenyans away from the house…more guard dog than pet.

However my Swedish wife grew up with cats in the 1950s so when we moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1980 with our two young children cats returned to her life…and entered mine. Female cats take a shine to me…singling me out from the group for their feline affections. But unlike the English Country Set…I have never devoted significant waking hours to the care of dogs and horses…and the destruction of foxes.

I do not dislike animals and have never been instinctively cruel to them like many small boys…preferring to step over small crawly things rather than squish them underfoot. But I have never been one to form deep attachments to my fellow creatures…my vegetarian tendencies being driven by factory farming and health concerns. But I am an astute observer of human nature and notice that others have rather different Animal Lover Credentials to myself.

Over the course of the year Miss Kendall has spent many happy hours tapping away at a keyboard a couple of feet away from me in Rye Library. As her heap of scribblings got bigger and bigger my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her what she was up to. ‘Family History…everything I find out I write up and send to others in the family.’

One thing led to another…as these things do…and I enquired about other things…like the wicker basket attached to her shopping trolley. ‘That,’ I was told in no uncertain terms, ‘is Upsie!’ I peeked inside the wicker basket and…lo and behold…inside was a real live pigeon cocking its head and peering back at me. ‘That,’ I was told disdainfully, ‘is not a pigeon but a collared dove. And It is a He and has a name. Address him as Upsie if you please’.

My mother had a bird table in the back garden and dutifully fed the Robins, House Sparrows and Blue Tits each winter…and shooed away the Pigeons. My reading of Andy Capp had prepared me for the fact that ‘oop-north’ they race pigeons. But the idea of taking dickie birds out for walkies struck me as medieval. King John took hawks out hunting 800 years ago but encountering someone on Lion Street walking the dove was something else.

Mind you Connie would come home from time to time with a Swan or a Heron under her arm…broken wings usually from the power lines on Romney Marsh. Then there was Harry the Pigeon who made a mess of the Cockpit Bunk for a couple of weeks before Connie released him back into the wild…at the second attempt. The first time she let him go downstream and he never made it across to the other bank so she ended up rowing frantically to fetch a very damp pigeon in the dinghy. Pigeons don’t swim. Two days later she walked him to a copse and put him on a branch.

Upsie died four days ago. Miss Kendall came into Rye Library looking rather upset. I offered my condolences and mumbled something about an Ode to Upsie-Daisie. Two days later I got two pages of hand-written details on the Life and Times of Upsie…and a dossier of coloured pictures. Miss Kendall tells me she finds it easy to bond with other species and she is quite certain Upsie was happy being fussed over for their two years together. He loved going out with her to the fields…instead of being indoors…to see other birds and enjoy the fresh air, sunshine, trees and sky.

Upsie was ill and unable to move when Miss Kendall found him in her garden on Udimore Road. He was suffering from a virus that caused him to lose his balance. He struggled to stand up but would eventually topple over onto his back. But he was a brave little fellow and it was not long before he was walking up and down the hall…even flying short distances although his right wing was droopy. Indeed after his first moult it never regained its flight feathers.

Upsie had two years of good health but the virus he had when Miss Kendall found him is one of those that lay dormant…like Malaria in humans…and can flare up at any time. A few weeks ago Upsie started to have neck spasms…a sign that the virus was active once more. The local vet…a young South African woman…was called out and ended Upsie’s suffering with a lethal injection. To Miss Kendall Upsie was Family so she saw nothing in the slightest bit surprising about grieving for a Collared Dove as she might for a son or a sister.

Today was the high spot of my Chorister Christmas with Ryesingers Carol Concert at East Guldeford Church at 2.30 pm followed by a rush across the county to Icklesham Parish Church for their Carol Service at 4 pm. Elspeth and I arrived at Icklesham church door just as the choir were processing past so we sidled into the assembled ranks. For my first two years with Ryesingers Betty Paine sat next to me in the Tenor Row…though she has abandoned us for the altos. After the East Guldeford Concert she told me that she had never heard the men sing better. High praise indeed.

It took me two decades to call myself a Writer and a Journalist. But after two years with Ryesingers I felt ready to call myself a Journeyman Tenor. Now I tell people I am a Writer and a Singer…and don’t get paid for either of them. But I have an extensive musical pedigree that began as a Carol Singer in Eltham Park in the early 1950s. I never got paid then either so nothing changes. We would go round door-to-door in the two weeks before Christmas singing our carols and collecting for Dr Barnardos Children’s Homes. Not a penny went to ourselves. I had a beautiful treble voice back then…as did my young brother Clifford who now sings with a Male Voice Choir in Oldham.

In the 1950s my parents’ next door neighbours at 122 Crookston Road were the Taylors…Catholics who emigrated to London from Liverpool. Noel Taylor played the organ at the Catholic Church in Dunvegan Road at the top of Westmount Road. My mother had a piano at home and played herself. When I was seven my mother arranged for Mr. Taylor to give me piano lessons. I still remember Mr Taylor’s front room and the scales and arpeggios I had to learn. One of my strengths as a Singer is my ability to sight read. Others have expressed envy at my talent but unlike my sense of pitch which I would class as a talent my ability to read music has been learnt…and Mr Taylor started me off.

By the time I was nine I was singing in St Luke’s Church Choir, singing the Treble Solo for Once In Royal David’s City…although Clifford’s rendition for the same choir a few years later was better than mine…and getting paid 2/6 for weddings on Saturdays…the only time in my life I have been paid to sing. Ryesingers get contributions but We Singers are not deemed to be Charitable Objects so the money is given away in its turn to other charities.

Musical Life at my Secondary School was…and is…nothing short of awesome. The Christ’s Hospital School Band is world-famous and once a year the Chapel Choir sings for the school’s benefactors in the City of London. I was a member of the Chapel Choir and the smaller Madrigal Choir throughout my time at CH…first as a Treble, then as an Alto and finally as a Tenor. My finest hour came one Christmas when I was the school’s Top Alto and had the honour of singing with Stuart Holland…the best Tenor Voice I have ever heard. In Who’s Who one year the former Treasury Secretary in the Labour Government…and top aide to Tony Benn…lists Singing in the Bath as his hobby.

CH School Fees were means tested but despite this my schooling costs were still a big burden…on my brothers. Bringing up four boys doesn’t come cheap either now or then. I am conscious of the extent to which I have been privileged…and God willing intend to repay my debts. But money would not stretch to Music Lessons. I was given a scholarship for the piano…and then studied the organ as well. The violin was free as a School Orchestra was getting under way. But by my third year I was starting to make the grade in Rugby and Cricket where I won my School Colours…and was to become Captain and Vice-Captain respectively…and also played Soccer, Hockey, Basketball and Boxing for the school. By the third year something had to give so I dropped the Violin…and never did take up the Clarinet which I could have learnt free as no one had to pay for music lessons for the CH Band.

At university I sang with the Cambridge Gilbert & Sullivan Society which with good republican sensitivities I had joined because they were the only Cambridge Society to welcome Town & Gown as members. I had a one-line solo part in The Gondoliers in 1966 at the Cambridge Arts Theatre and sang in the chorus of Ruddigore in 1967. Since then 35 years have passed without Organised Music in my life until I joined Ryesingers the year after Connie died to give myself a Social Life…and because I was conscious of my long musical heritage and my wasting musical talents.

This is the second extract from The Wealth of Counties. Last Wednesday’s blog dealt with the Male Preserves of Work and Money. Women are more practical and worry about things like Food and Shelter. If anywhere can be self-sufficient in food then its the Garden of England...at least in essential foods. Coffee & tea will always need to be imported. But there are also local substitutes...Silver Birch Wine for Grape Wine; Chamomile Tea for China Tea and so on. Good Food must be a labour of love. So we'll start by appointing a Master Gardener in each of our Parish Regions. There'll be 500 of them. What else will they need? Six Journeymen Gardeners under the direction of each Master Gardener…each with five apprentices a-piece? Good! What is their job exactly?

These Master Gardeners of ours have sworn an oath. Let’s call the Soil Doctors oath the Hebenshausen Oath by analogy with the Hippocratic Oath of the Body Doctors. The charter of their guild requires that they prepare a beautiful garden in their parish. It sets quality and not quantity as the standard. The Journeymen's Guild requires them to be responsible for distributing produce and determining the disposal of surpluses. The Apprentices owe allegiance and obedience to their Master Gardener which means specifically to do his bidding. In practice this will entail providing for the food needs of a particular group of families. So that's sorted out the permanent staff.

But it's not enough hands for our task. What about those 300 000 privileged young people over the age of eleven...the Idle Young? There's no such thing as a free lunch. We'll invent School Enterprises and give them the job of milking cows, bringing in the harvest and making cider. Let's draft in half of them each year. That should do it. And that's a job for the apprentices. Recruit from the Hundred…for there are 100 families in their care…ten persons to help look after the garden of these thirty to fifty families. There, that wasn't hard. We've got ourselves a Food Workforce. Here they are rearing to go. All they want to know is how much they're going to get paid. Well let's work it out.

A Good Day's Pay can be related to the cost of a home by assuming that it is reasonable for one day of a good week's pay to go to pay for shelter. £ 2 500 a year for seven years gets a family of three a house. That's £ 48 per week which puts our work in the fields at a basic rate of £ 16 per person per day. For much of the year these Food Workers may only need to work an hour or so a day. So converting this to an hourly wage makes little sense. We take a long view.

If you are doing your job we'll hear about it...just as soon as if you are not doing your job...from those most affected. It's in nobody's interest that people should make work or look busy. This is a most interesting thing. Right at the very heart of our system of Just Wages the fixed hourly wage with its clocking on is condemned as contra natura and the parable of the vineyard in the Christian New Testament is seen to be the sensible way to relate work to pay.

Will you work for that? The Ayes have it so apprentices are on £ 80 a week. We'll give them four weeks unpaid leave and a Christmas Bonus to bring their salary to £ 4 000. No reason not to put the youngsters on the same pay scale. Jesus of Nazareth was a first rate political economist as Bernard Shaw pointed out and this is what he would have done. We only need them for a few months of the year so we'll budget £1 000 a year each. Some related graduated salary scales for our Journeymen and Master Gardeners and there you have it…and here is the annual wage bill.

500 Master Gardeners at £20 000, 3000 Journeymen at £10 000, 15000 Apprentices at £4 000 and 150 000 Self-Helpers at £1000. An annual Food Wage Bill of a quarter of a million pounds to feed a million and a half people. That's £500 per household per year...plus some help bringing in the harvest. There will be overheads...but fertilisers and pesticides will not be among them. Equipment, barns, sheds, so perhaps the final price will be 50% more. Does the number of people make sense? We are putting 300 youngsters between 11 and 25 under the wing of 30 apprentice gardeners in each parish producing food for 3000 people. That's 337 people out of 3000 or 11% involved in food production. Or if you make allowance for the fact that the youngsters are only involved for a quarter of the year then the percentage drops to below 4% of the parish or 12% of the current working population.

Half of England's food needs are currently produced with 6% of the working population so without regard for land, we are at least putting in sufficient people to feed Kent even with efficiencies of one half of conventional agriculture. But in fact Horticulture is reckoned to be about five times as efficient as Agriculture in terms of Production per Acre so in practice this workforce probably has the potential to produce substantial surpluses of staples as well as an abundance of more exotic vegetables...particularly as we get clever with the use of greenhouses.

And so to Animal Husbandry. Fifty years ago John Seymour bought a Jersey House Cow. This one act forced the Seymours a long way along the road to Self-Sufficiency and a Peasant Economy because having bought a cow you soon find there are a lot of other things to do. The Seymour Family could not consume four gallons of milk a day and had not learnt to turn surplus milk into cheese. So they had to get some other animals to feed it to. They could scarcely feed it back to the cow…for that would somehow be unseemly…so they had to buy pigs. And what was to be done with all that dung? The Seymours extended their gardening and farming activities to make good use of it.

To all appearances it was an expensive gold-plated ballpoint with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds and kill in three minutes. Succinylcholine is a synthetic form of curare that shuts down all the muscles…including the diaphragm. The victim can’t breath, speak or move.

The onset of symptoms is about sixty seconds with the full effects after a minute and a half when the victim collapses and breathing stops completely. The heart is starved of oxygen as it tries to beat but fails to deliver any oxygen to the body or to itself. Death is extremely painful. The brain has three minutes’ worth of oxygen in it so unconsciousness takes place at three-minutes unless the victim has been exercising beforehand. Five minutes after being struck the victim loses consciousness with complete brain death after seven minutes. It is a miserable death as the victim is fully awake but can’t breathe as his heart rapidly goes into anoxia…a massive induced heart attack.

For spooks the beauty of all this is that only a really sharp pathologist will pick up the cause of death on a toxicology scan…and then only if prepped to look for it. The only hard part is to get the victim in the buttocks. Bodies are lain out on their backs in most morgues and are hardly ever turned over. Not even drug addicts inject themselves in the buttocks. The cause of death will normally be recorded as an unexplained heart attack.

I learnt this from Tom Clancy’s 2004 novel The Teeth of the Tiger about a Black Ops Assassination Unit set up Jesuit-fashion outside the normal US Government’s Pentagon-CIA chain of command…with full pre-authorised Presidential Pardons for the assassins. Tom Clancy has a distinguished record of inventing the Real World.

Today Lord Stevens’ produced a report assuring us that although the Queen’s husband did not approve of his ex-daughter-in-law he had not instructed MI6 to murder her. When the head of RCA Records was told that Elvis Presley had been found dead at Gracelands he is said to have remarked: ‘Great career move.’ That is rather how I felt after recovering from the shock of waking up to the news that Princess Diana had died in a car crash in Paris.

At the time of her death Diana was living an ‘evanescent existence in the company of a coke-snorting Arab playboy and his Eurotrash acolytes’ in the words of Richard Littlejohn in today’s Daily Mail. The pedestal upon which she had planted her designer standard in her glory days had long since crumbled. After her divorce from Prince Charles Diana announced that she intended to remain an ‘independent member of the Royal Family’ which is rather like Yoko Ono claiming to be an independent member of The Beatles. To the Royal House Diana was Breeding Stock with just one job…to produce an ‘heir and a spare’. Job well done. Off to St Tropez and the Paris Ritz with her.

So when her drunken chauffeur ploughed into a wall pursued by foreign paparazzi it seemed a fitting end. This was Diana's James Dean moment, her Jim Morrison overdose, her Buddy Holly plane crash. The legend was assured. And so it would have remained if the nation had not been dragged into a spiral of madness as Alastair Campbell manipulated the nation’s tabloid-induced mood with his trademark cynicism. Remember the trembling lip and watery eye of our new Prime Minister as he hijacked the return of the body? ‘She was the People's Princess.’ Vote for me. For a few days it was Euro 96 with flowers. She's coming home, she's coming home, she's coming home.

Anyone who dissented from the ruthlessly-enforced mourning was treated like a heretic. One man was beaten up for not showing enough ‘respect’. His crime was to clean his car on the morning of the funeral. The Royal Family was pilloried for not grieving in public. There was an air of real menace. England seemed to be teetering on the brink of our Bastille moment. Diana would have loved every second. But the moment passed. Once the withered floral tributes were swept away the vicarious grief subsided as quickly as it had erupted. A year later there was an attempt to recreate the mood with a Lady Diana Memorial Walk setting off from Hyde Park. Millions were expected but fewer than a couple of hundred turned up. The nation had ‘moved on’…to use President Blair’s phrase.

From his grassy knoll in Knightsbridge Mohammed Al Fayed has led the accusations that Diana had been murdered, that Prince Philip was an M15 agent and that Mossad did it. He even bought the Daily Express to further his campaign. The French Investigation had already knocked this on the head so the Phoney Pharaoh sought to mastermind his own conspiracy to persuade the Celebrity World that his son was about to marry the mother of the future King of England. This is where Lord Steven’s Report is at its most persuasive. He talked to Diana’s friends.

From the Establishment’s point of view the main advantage of bringing in Lord Stevens and charging him with carrying out the definitive inquiry was to shut the door on the Conspiracy Theorists. Of course this is never possible…and we have an inquest to come in the New Year…but nonetheless the Stevens Report has shifted the balance of probability significantly by assuring us that there was no conspiracy, Diana wasn't pregnant, she wasn't about to get engaged to a Moslem…and she wasn't murdered. Perhaps he got it right? Who knows? Evenin’ all!

A few years ago China had a serious Drug Problem. So they rounded up 6 000 drug dealers and shot them in the back of the head. China no longer has a Drug Problem. I thought of this today while in a car with three women being driven to Frewen School Carol Service in Northiam Parish Church. Under discussion around me was the Suffolk Strangler whose murder of five young women has been filling the newspapers these past few days.

The Feminist in the back wanted to eliminate the demand for prostitutes by going for the men…although just how she proposed to do this was not explained. The driver beside me in the front remarked that when she had lived in Nottingham they had tried this. Clients’ names were published in the local newspaper...although she didn’t know what effect this had on prostitution. At the time I was allowed to keep my counsel. But here is my take on the issues.

The truth is that Our Feminist is living in a time warp. Her views are out-of-date. Mary Wolstencroft and political activists for Women’s Liberation like the Suffragettes were first and foremost Realists. They saw their Society as it was…and they dared to think for themselves by outgrowing their conditioning. They did not collect hand-me-down opinions from other places or other times but created their own responses to the Women’s Slavery before them.

For much of the history of the oldest profession Prostitution has been blamed on the base desires of men. There was always an element of slavery about it. Men who lived off immoral earnings had tarts under their control…the relationship was one of power and fear. But the equations have shifted…ask any policeman and he will tell you this is true.

Most decent Englishmen…a figure as high as 95 percent based on the statistic that one in eleven has paid for sex…find prostitution revolting. Those with a wider awareness of the social context also have profound sympathy for the victims of this trade and for their families. Nowadays these women are not enslaved by men but by drugs.

If you are a desperate drug addict and you are neither a trust fund babe nor a doctor with a prescription pad you have only three ways to pay for your habit. You steal, you deal or…if you are a woman and have scruples about stealing or dealing…you sell your body. There is nothing else you can do.

Our Feminist might prefer the woman to sell her body to another woman…and there might be a few nice men willing to talk things over for an hour and pay therapist rates. But the brutal reality is that beggars are in no position to be choosers. These young girls take what they can get.

According to a Home Office study 95 percent of prostitutes are problematic drug users. Drug addiction is a Medical Condition treated as a Criminal Offence. Nearly all the crime resulting from Drug Addiction is a result of its illegality not of its effects on its victims. The street gangs with their gun crimes, stabbings and intimidation; the muggers, burglars, car thieves, shoplifters, drug dealers; the pimps and prostitutes would all be wiped out with the right public policy on drugs. Globally and nationally this is impossible…but town by town the way forward might be found.

Few spectacles in English Politics have been more dispiriting than the ridicule heaped on the Conservative Party Home Affairs Spokesman Ann Widdecombe six years ago when she tried to launch a debate about drugs and to start a dialogue about the Judicial and Medical Regimes needed to deal with Drug Use and Abuse.

Between half and three quarters of prisoners are in jail for crimes related to raising money to buy drugs. Half the women prisoners are there for drug offences and three-quarters have a Drug Problem. The cost to the criminal justice system is enormous. The cost to individuals, families and the wider society is greater still. In enlightened European cities where heroin is available on prescription property crimes by drug-users have dropped by as much as a half.

Prescribing drugs instead of arresting Drug Users would have a much wider impact. Turf wars, gang violence, gun crime, street dealing and prostitution would plummet. Organised Crime’s largest profit opportunity would evaporate …and with it much police corruption. The prison population would fall by between a third and a half ending over-crowding and the need to build more jails.

Billons of pounds spent enforcing prohibition and coping with the consequences of drugs would be saved as hundreds of thousands are treated as patients instead of criminals. Drug-related deaths would fall dramatically…and desperate young women could be rescued from pimps, rapists and murderers. Is it really so hard for English Society to talk about its Drug Problem…this side of a Chinese Solution?

There are five big banks on England’s High Streets…HSBC, Lloyds-TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland-NatWest, Barclays and Halifax-Bank of Scotland…and there are rumours that one or two of the big American banks are eyeing up Barclays for their branch network rather than their Barclaycard Credit Card operation. The reported 2006 profits of these five commercial banks were £31 billion…and they are forecast to rise by 15% next year.

Ordinary people assume…incorrectly as it happens…that the Main Business of these five commercial banks is to borrow money from savers and lend it out securely to home-owners with their homes as collateral. But ordinary people are starting to notice that hundreds of millions is being spent on Media Advertising to smother complaints with spin and propaganda. They have also noticed that interest rates for savings are not the same as those for mortgages…less a small few percent for administration and profits…but actually bear little relationship to them.

Conceiving a Local Economy without the High Street Banks is not hard. Tom Paine had a good stab at it in Agrarian Justice two hundred years ago and I adopted his method in 2001 when I wrote a paper on The Wealth of Counties for the Radical Consultation. My 2001 paper begins with Economic Ideologies and the roots of Environmentalism in the Botany & Economics of Carl Linnaeus in the 18th Century. Having set the scene the paper then looks at The County of Kent in chapters entitled Counting by Bailiwick, Food by the Hundred and Shelter by the Score. Rounding off the 7500-word paper are chapters entitled Profits for Everyone; Income for The Poor; Public County Services; Money, Justice & Credit; Tickets & Tokens; and Early Retirement. Here is an extract from the Counting by Bailiwick chapter.

Kent has a population of 1 500 000. It has fine arable soil and excellent pasture. Kent can also boast of some 500 parishes from the 16th century, overlaid on a medieval structure of 7 lathes, 13 bailiwicks, 65 hundreds and two market towns...Canterbury and Sandwich. Currently about 225 000 (15%) of the population live in the Medway Towns of Maidstone, Rochester and Chatham. 375 000 (25%) live in rural hamlets, villages and small towns of 500 or less. The other 900 000 (60%) live in 450 small Parish Regions of around 2 000 souls. The County of Kent is currently served by 100 county councillors and 50 000 county council employees. There are 14 boroughs, 16 parliamentary constituencies and two euro constituencies…East and West Kent.

In this model each Parish Region is collectively responsible for its self-sufficiency in food. Half the people of each Parish Region are assumed to live in urban settings of a few hundred households, 10% or 200 people in each Parish Region live in single homesteads and the remaining several hundred households are neither Homesteaders nor Urban Dwellers but something in between. The calculus assumes only one communal association of citizens and places this at the county level with a tax base of one and a half million for its Communal Services.

To develop the dimensional aspects of the calculus a Utopian Society has been assumed, living harmoniously within the 1440 square miles of countryside of the county...three quarters of which is covered with rich food growing soil...in nested Parish Regions…i.e. within bailiwicks within lathes within the county. Food self sufficiency or 80%-90% is at the Parish Region level with progressive nested self-sufficiencies up to the level of the County at which 95%-100% Self Reliance is assumed. In other words our model is of a Walled Garden with one gate…and drawbridge…in the outer county wall but with plenty of gates for local movements in the urban centre of each parish.

From an economist's point of view we are designing for virtually Full Protectionism at the county level. Once we have that working we can start sending out some mariners to roam the world for spices and mobile phones or anything else not made or grown in Kent. The calculus assumes Kent will choose to have its own Currencies and its own Mints and will issue money directly to each of its half a million urban and rural Households in quantities based solely on the needs of its million and a half citizens. We must begin and end with people.

We now need to get a handle on the Idleness of our local race so let's look at some statistics. The current employed workforce of the county is estimated at 500 000 with 10% unemployed. One waged person is therefore supporting two unwaged people. And so the money wage per job needs to be sufficient to support not one but three people. Another way to do the calculation is to recognise that a normal working life is 40 years from 25 to 65 and planned retirement is 20 years from 65 to 85. On this basis one pound in every three pounds of wages needs to be put aside as savings for retirement.

Adding these together means that each worked wage packet must support the needs of six people. Eliminating double counting of retired people by treating these 250 000 as self-supporting, 500 000 worked wages need to support 750 000 non-workers. This brings the multiplier down from six to five.

This calculation assumes all 1 500 000 of Kent's citizens are supported monetarily by money paid out as wages to the current working population of 500 000. So we have an Idle Young, an Idle Old and an Idle Rich…much as we find things at the moment. But in my next chapter Food by the Hundred we put the Idle Young to work at Harvest Time.

In a remote house in the middle of Dartmoor six shadowy figures huddle around a small round table for a séance. Tension rises as the spirits spell out a chilling message: 'Captain Trevelyan...dead...murder'. Is this black magic? The only way to be certain is to locate Captain Trevelyan. His home is six miles away and with snow drifts blocking the roads someone will have to make the journey on foot.

The year is 1931 and the author of The Sittaford Mystery is a young writer of detective stories. American aficionados may know the book by the title from its New York publisher Dodd & Mead…Murder at Hazelmoor’s. It was the first novel by Agatha Christie to incorporate the supernatural.

Agatha Christie describes Sittaford as ‘a small remote village on Dartmoor under the shadow of Sittaford Beacon.’ ‘…they went upwards over a rough moorland road until they reached a village that was situated right on the edge of the moor. It consisted of a smithy and a combined post-office and sweet shop. From here they followed a lane and came to a row of newly-built granite bungalows…’

In the book Sittaford is six miles from Exhampton whose features match Okehampton pretty well. For Sittaford read Throwleigh…with allowance for the odd piece of artistic licence.

The trouble with nice places is hills. They look pretty but it rains a lot. But Science has the answer. It is not the rain per se that causes the trouble but being underneath it as it accelerates earthwards. With the same rain some people get wetter than others. Why?

If the children are driving you mad over Christmas then why not turn them into Gentlemen Scientists? Here is how. Mark out a 500-yard circuit around the garden and while the children are asleep weigh their clothes. In the morning when it is pouring with rain and the little brats are yelling the house down collar the one who usually gets the blame and make the little dear run the 500-yard circuit in the rain. Tell the rest to time it…or else.

By this stage the real culprit will be gloating. This is next one to send out into the rain…with the instructions to walk and not run the same circuit. Finally get them all involved in weighing the wet clothes. If more punishments are needed have at the ready a supply of toppers, bowlers…and the hat your mother wore for her wedding.

By now you will have discovered that the Walker’s clothes were 40% wetter than the Runner’s…plus or minus for the direction of the rain and the shape of the experimental object. It is a long holiday. Repeat the experiment as often as necessary to establish the relationship between wetness and (a) the shape ‘n pace of your test object and (b) the slant ‘n speed of your rain.

Your working hypothesis is that a fat person gets wetter than a skinny one…and the head and shoulders get wetter with rain that comes straight down. For a Doctorate in Displacement Activity (PhDA) find out the parts of the body that get wettest. To check your results click here for the frontiers of Experimental Science.

Should you wish to plan your Holiday Displacement Activities you can always phone the Met Office. But I should perhaps dampen your expectations. What you want to know is whether it will rain tomorrow. What you will be told is something more along these lines. ‘Over much of the European Region the situation is now finely balanced with approximately even chance that the winter will be colder or warmer than average.’ Douglas Adams almost got there before me…but I will claim it as Shepherd’s Law. ‘The more expensive the model the less useful its output’.

Forecasting Future Economic Behaviour is often taken as the proper test of an Economic Model but forecasting future conditions is a losing game…and similar considerations apply to past data. The near future is an extrapolation of the past because nothing can quickly divert the path. But the likely future range of the path diverges with time due to randomness and the dynamics inherent in the structure of the system.

The time horizon for an effective forecast is that interval during which little deviation is possible from future disturbances. Action taken at the decision time will have little effect in the forecast time horizon because it takes time for the effect of a policy change to affect the system. This means that any action at the decision time will be effective mostly in the action region…which lies beyond the forecast region.

So the usefulness of forecasting is limited by the relationship between the short time within which to make a reliable forecast and the long time required to affect the system. We can call this Forrester’s Law after the MIT Professor who discovered it.

‘One can forecast in the time zone in which one cannot act…and can act in the time zone in which one cannot forecast’. This does not mean models are useless. But effective models are different. They show how the nature of the behaviour of a system would be altered by consistently following an alternative policy.

Saturday evening was the first of my five Carol Concerts before Christmas…at St Thomas the Martyr Church in Winchelsea. It went well. Our Choirmaster Jean Taverner was pleased with us and the audience went away happy. Winchelsea Singers always make sure that the congregation gets to have a good sing.

With my next concert not until Thursday 14/12 at Frewen School in Northiam I had booked a £26 return ticket with National Express to get me from Victoria Coach Station to Exeter the day after the Winchelsea Concert…returning by 7.30 pm on Wednesday 13/12 for Ryesingers final practice before their Carol Concert at East Guldeford Church on Sunday 17/12.

Time and Space are still wondrous things to me. One moment you are in one place and a few hours later you are somewhere else. My daughter’s trusty little Peugeot 106 collected me in Exeter and drove me the 20 miles to the village of Throwleigh high on the north side of Dartmoor…10-minutes drive from Okehampton.

The journey to Exeter was not without incident as the onboard computer confounded all the efforts of both coach drivers and refused to allow the engine to deliver enough power to take us along at the 55 miles per hour programmed into it. On the motorway it wasn’t so bad as we gained on the downhill what we lost on the uphill. But Exeter is seriously hilly and it was touch and go whether we would make it to the Bus Station. We did…just 20-minutes behind schedule.

The house my daughter and her friend Lou-Anne are renting for two months while the owners are in India boasts a sauna at the bottom of the garden. There was no lake to plunge into…a garden hose had to suffice...but otherwise it was just like the Bastustuga at Rasta on Ekerö…and much the nicer for being a complete surprise.

Instead of pouring with rain at two o’clock in the customary manner, the afternoon stayed dry and bright as the wind whisked the clouds high over the tors. After two-hours beating the bounds of Throwleigh Parish we posted my cards and my daughter’s letters and drove to the nearest grocery store…10-minutes drive away in the oddly-named village of South Zeal.

Throwleigh has a Post Office which sold milk once upon a time. But over the years with the advent of refrigeration, supermarkets and Chelsea Tractors its stock has dwindled to a few cans and chocolate bars. It is a wonder it has not been shut down. But it is hard to see how it will escape the next round of closures with their whiff of Gerrymandering. Nowadays this accompanies every withdrawal of Public Subsidy…local post offices and cottage hospitals…and civil service or quango allocation of jobs and grants. But with post offices the corruption case is weak.

In the twenty-five worst hit constituencies in the country 1122 rural post offices are scheduled for closure…or removal of their Government Funding…not necessarily the same thing. The political breakdown is 608 Liberal Democrats, 338 Conservatives and 176 Labour which is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the party political colour of the English Countryside…Labour being predominantly an urban party.

Nonetheless the case is being made and will stick…irrespective of the facts…because nobody trusts New Labour anymore and can’t wait to kick the rascals out. It used to be possible to start a war and generate patriotic fervour but after the Iraq Debacle this would have the opposite effect. Gordon Brown provides no answer.

So the Labour Party’s only hope of putting up a fight at the next election is to skip a generation and find some Barbara Castle or Shirley Williams lurking in the ranks who is female, five-years younger than David Cameron and comes with a track record of competence.

It took two attempts to get the hang of the wood-burning stove at Little Burrows. I had been more respectful to the stove in the sauna earlier in the day which went first time. So I was overconfident in my approach to the modern contraption in the sitting-room…although in my defence I would confess to being a firelighters man myself.

However long experience has taught me that when a fire doesn’t take first time around it is best to rebuild it from scratch. After removing the ash and laying a base of screwed-up newspapers a good blaze welcomed my daughter’s delicious Leek & Potato Soup and an evening sharing family news updates and watching The Return of Martin Guerre on DVD.

Towards the end of the film Lou-Anne arrived back from a visit to her parents in Tewksbury on the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border where her father is Lock Keeper. An eventful trip that included rescuing Christmas Presents flooded out by the rising waters…and then leaving them at a garage twenty miles away when her car ground to a halt on the return journey. I remained in Throwleigh long enough to hear the glad tidings that the accelerator pedal was faulty…a cheap and easy thing to repair. It could have been much worse. The things people do all day!

Ninety years ago on 1st July 1916 the debacle that was the opening offensive of the Battle of the Somme took place leaving 20 000 British Soldiers dead and 40 000 wounded or missing…the army’s highest casualty rate for a single day’s fighting. The guns continued until muffled by the November snows with the Death Score standing at Germany 650 000, Britain 425 000 and France 200 000.

In June 1917 a Celebrated War Poet was shot dead while recuperating from shell shock. A conscientious objector…previously a top police detective…was sent to France to prevent a major Political Scandal at home. The story is told by Ben Elton in The First Casualty. Here is an edited extract.

Fifteen men grouped by the fire squatted down with their trousers round their ankles chatting idly as if they were in the pub. Everybody smoked and drew contentedly on their Players Navy Strength as the talk turned to the origins of their current misery.

‘The question I always ask is, why did anyone give a fuck about this bleeding Archduke Ferdinand what’s-his-face in the first place?’ one fellow said. ‘I mean, come on, nobody had even heard of the cunt till he got popped off. Now the entire fucking world is fighting ‘cos of it.’

‘You dozy arse,’ another man admonished, ‘that was just a bleeding spark, that was. It was a spark. Europe was a tinder box, wasn’t it? Everyone knows that.’

A corporal weighed in to settle the matter. ‘Listen, it’s yer Balkans, innit? You see, yer Austro-Hungarians...’

‘Who are another bunch we never gave a fuck about till all this kicked off,’ the first man interjected.

‘Shut up an’ you might learn something,’ the corporal insisted. ‘You’ve got your Austro-Hungarians supposed to be in charge in Sarajevo but most of the Bosnians is Serbs, right, or at least enough of ‘em is to cause a t’do.’

‘What’s Sarajevo got to do with Bosnia then?’

‘Sarajevo’s in Bosnia, you monkey! It’s the capital.’

‘Oh. So?’

‘Well, your Austrians ‘ave got Bosnia, right, but your Bosnians are backed by your Serbs, right? So when a Bosnian Serb Loony shoots the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Austrians think, right, here’s a chance to put Serbia back in its bleeding box for good, so they give ‘em an ultimatum. They says, “You topped our Archduke so from now on you can bleeding knuckle under or else you’re for it.” Which would have been fine except the Serbs were backed by the Russians, see, and the Russians says to the Austrians, you has a go at Serbia, you has a go at us, right?

But the Austrians is backed by the Germans who says to the Russians, you has a go at Austria, you has a go at us, right? Except the Russians is backed by the French who says to the Germans, you has a go at Russia, you has a go at us, right? And altogether they says kick off! Let’s be having you!’

‘What about us then? The first man enquired. The rest of the group seemed to feel that this was the crux of it.

‘Entente bleeding cordiale, mate,’ the corporal replied. ‘We was backing the French except it wasn’t like an alliance…it was just, well, it was a bleedin’ entente, wasn’t it?’

‘An’ what’s an entente when it’s at home?’

‘It means we wasn’t obliged to fight.’

‘Never! You mean we didn’t have to?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why the fuck did we then?’

‘Fuckin’ Belgium.’

‘Belgium?’

‘That’s right, fuckin’ Belgium.’

‘Who gives a fuck about Belgium?’

‘Well, you’d have thought no one, wouldn’t you? But we did. ‘Cos the German plan to get at the French was to go through Belgium, but we was guaranteeing ‘em, see. So we says to the Germans, you has a go at Belgium, you has a go at us. We’d guaranteed her, see. It was a matter of honour. So in we come.’

An older man interjected. ‘It wasn’t really about honour,’ he said.

’Do what?’ queried the corporal.

‘Well, we’d only guaranteed Belgium because we didn’t want either Germany or France dominating the entire Channel Coast. In the last century we thought that letting them both know that if they invaded Belgium they’d have us to deal with would deter them.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘Sadly not.’

‘So what about the Italians, an’ the Japs, an’ the Turks, an’ the Yanks, eh? How did they end up in it?’ asked the original inquisitor.

‘Fuck knows,’ said the corporal. ‘I lost track after the Belgiums.’

For a while the conversation lapsed as the soldiers concentrated on their bowels.

‘You lot make me laugh, you really do,’ said a man who had not spoken yet, a thoughtful-looking fellow in steel glasses who up until then had been staring at a book whilst he did his business.

‘Oh, that’s right,’ the corporal sneered, ‘’cos you’d know better, wouldn’t you, Price.’

‘Yes, I would, Corporal. I most certainly would. This war, like all bourgeois wars, is the inevitable result of capitalism.’

‘Oh Gawd, here we go.’

‘A bayonet is a weapon with a worker on both ends. War creates markets and generates new investment,’ Price continued. ‘It also provides a nice distraction to idiots like us who might otherwise notice that we live in a constant state of near-starvation while the owners of the means of production are too fat to get out of their Rolls-Royce cars.

War is the last stage of the capitalist cycle and as long as we have Capitalism we’ll have wars. If you want to get rid of war you’ve got to get rid of Capitalism.’

‘What, and there wouldn’t be wars if your lot was running things?'

‘Course not. Why would there be? The workers of the world are all comrades. Truth is, you’ve got more in common with Fritz and his mates having a shit just east of Wipers than you have with your own officers.’

After my failure to become the Member of Parliament for Oldham West & Royton in the spring of 1997 I went off sailing for the summer with my Agent…as in Secret Agent Connie would insist. ‘So secret that nobody ever saw me do anything.’ Nonetheless she signed off on my Election Accounts. Our Summer Cruise included two weeks in Morlaix…an old Pirate Lair on the North Brittany Coast an hour’s drive from Toni Pinschof in Mael-Pestivien.

On our return to Rye in September we started work on the Magpie Sagas leaving Rye a week before Christmas to spend the Holiday Season at Dannemoragatan in Stockholm’s Odenstan…5-minutes walk north of Odenplan.

Connie returned to Rye in the New Year to get Vemara shipshape for her Linnaeus Voyage. We reckoned to be away from May to October with eight weeks to Gotland, eight weeks for the return and eight weeks in and around the island.

After Connie left Stockholm I started work on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to The Euro…between Economic History courses and exams at Stockholm University. When it was time for my return to England at the end of March I had eight chapters drafted…with plans set out for another four. A couple more weeks and all twelve chapters would have been in draft. But things get to where they get to. There are only eighty hours in my working week.

There were gaps in the eight chapters but indications of what was destined for the empty spaces. But what I didn’t know until I had completed the first round of writing was how much of my scribbling would find its way into The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to The Euro...and how many other books had jumped onto the passing band wagon.

However this faded into insignificance in the summer of 1998 following a shift on the English Political Scene triggered by Gordon Brown’s veto of Tony Blair’s plans to abolish the pound. This meant that my Little Euro Book went onto the back burner…and has remained there ever since. Indeed when I came to write the Politics of the English Pound five years later for the Swedish Euro Referendum in September 2003 little of the Little Euro Book was incorporated into the text. It is just one of perhaps half a dozen unpublished manuscript.

The fifth chapter of the manuscript falls into four parts and begin with The Tale of the Great Tank. The rest of Part One discusses Vortices, Testing and Scaling. The second part of Chapter Five links Scale to Phase Shifts, Chaos Theory and Complexity before discussing the implications of Fritjof Capra’s 1996 publication…The Web of Life: a new understanding of living systems and its relationship to Chris Langton’s work with Cellular Automata.

Langton summarises the relationship between his own work and the phase transition characteristics of different systems by comparing Langton Categories I & II, IV and III respectively with those in Dynamic Systems…order, complexity, chaos; Matter…solid, phase transition, fluid; Computation…halting, undecodable, non-halting; and Life…too static, life/intelligence, too noisy. The Edge of Chaos is a domain between too much Order and too much Chaos. Its existence gives credence to the idea of avoiding excess and the notion of Moderation in All Things.

Yet it goes further than this in suggesting a physical measure for where the boundary might be. These ideas suggest that a model could be derived in which an Economic Domain is a mix of Agents exhibiting Diminishing Returns and Increasing Returns. By changing the proportions of each, very different economic behaviour could be elicited.

One way to shift the ratio would be by an injection of more R&D. Another way might be to alter the internal ratio in each agent between Resource Workers and Mind Workers...muscle and mind. Applying Leopold Kohr’s Theory of Skyscraper Economics may provide a way to integrate the idea of Optimum Size and the notion of a Certain Reach into an economic model.

Such a model might have very practical applications. For instance it might be possible to demonstrate that there is an optimum structure of Company Size and ratio of Muscle to Mind...e.g. operations budget to R&D budget…and Market Niche Size or Relative Size in which the proportion of man hours spent at 'the edge of chaos' is maximised...thereby providing an objective criteria for what is meant by 'optimum'.

We are a Seafaring Nation. The British Empire was an Ocean Empire constructed in a Sea Ocean World. The entire pattern of the world’s cities and their positionings grew out of the commerce and communication flows of the Water Ocean World.

Whoever commanded the unsinkable ships (islands) commanding the mouths of the local bays, harbours, estuaries, channels and passages, and commanded the islands and capes which governed the entrance to the Seven Seas governed the world.

The entrance to the Seven Seas was understood only by the Creators of the British Empire and they built their empire on this knowledge. The great one Water Ocean World pattern was unseen by world people. It was and is in fact one ocean with one central island - Antarctica - clockwise around which ever races west-to-eastbound the winds and waters.

This gigantic merry-go-round - called the roaring forties…entered into at Forty Degrees South Latitude…is known as the Southern Hemisphere’s Jet Stream area. Ships out of the Atlantic, Indian or Pacific Oceans were swiftly borne west-east by the merry-go-round to choose their re-entries into those oceans and their local lands.

The Real World that we have inherited is not the One World of Tomorrow which new emperors will doubtless construct upon the new Air Ocean World centred upon the North Pole, around which counter-clockwise west-to-eastward races the Northern Hemisphere’s Jet Stream at 200 to 400 miles per hour, but upon the interactions of this emerging Air Ocean World with the traditional established patterns of the Old Water Ocean World. The Water Ocean World has established the fundamental pattern of Today’s World Cities.

Water Trails represented the shortest distances between otherwise remote lands and peoples. Water routes represented the most economical lines of communication. Long distance communication consisted of written or face to face transmission…most swiftly completed by water. The tonnage commerce of inorganic and organic world resources could only be accomplished in Water-Borne Vessels. Only token commerce and slow messages could take place on the backs of men or animals travelling the long way…via the plains and mountains around the headwaters.

Centuries ago the masters of the unsinkable British Isles established fortified bases at the southern extremities off South America, South Africa and Austral-Asia and with the unpeopled Antarctica at their back they came from the south upon the soft-bellies of the essentially northern hemisphere dwelling people. It was the Masters of the British Isles who held secret and commanded until World War One this WaterOcean World.

But many other peoples were quick to follow along behind the Merchant Venturers from these islands. And wherever they went trade followed and great sea-faring cities grew up on the shores of the oceans. To these cities flocked all the most enterprising elements from all the peoples in the sparsely populated Land World of the time.

The Greatest Cities were those where Freedom and Tolerance won the day…often only after a bitter struggle from the entrenched land owners descended from the earlier arrivals. The Great Liberal Cities became Confederations of Tribes and each World Tribe eventually remembered its cultural roots and as these pioneers in the New Lands and the New Cities opened up by the Water Ocean Routes of the Imperial Traders grew ever more prosperous so their children and their children’s children reconnected with the families and the communities they left behind.

Twenty years ago I wrote that the Nation of Tomorrow is the Circle of your Friends but these are no longer the people in your own town or the girl on your block. Your friends are likely to be your family and likely to be friends of your family. They will be friends you met first locally in your school and then friends that you made at some other place around your local ocean where you travelled or went to college.

Webs of personal, family, ethnic and religious bonds were weaved across the Earth’s oceans…between the Old Communities in the Old Land World and the New Pioneer Townships and Cities Dwellers in the New World growing up apace at the end of the Water Ocean Trade Routes.

This is the pattern of the Real World we inhabit today. It is a series of Water Ocean Worlds around each of which are clustered great cities with their own Diversity of Tribal Community and their own particular pattern of political power which enables that diversity to be welded into a Unity.

In the much-neglected final part of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E.F. Schumacher included an essay entitled Towards A Theory of Large Scale Organisation. The essay was based on his experience at the National Coal Board during the 1950s and 1960s when coal was still being mined in the UK.

When Lord Robens and Fritz Schumacher first started to address the management problems of the largest organisation in Europe, they found themselves dealing with a typical first-generation company...defined in my radcon paper The Future for Large Organisations. These companies dominated the industrial life of the early and middle years of the 20th century and their names...Ford, Edison, du Pont, Unilever etc... were regarded as bywords for industrial efficiency.

Robens and Schumacher strongly disagreed and set about inventing something completely different. By the end of their time at the helm, the National Coal Board had been transformed into a Second-Generation Large Organisation. In North America much the same transformation took place at the General Electric.

Not everybody welcomed the shift. On Wall Street and in the City of London it gradually dawned on the Bankers and their Derivative Rrofessions that they were engaged in a fight to the death with the Industrialists for control of these Second Generation Large Organisations. By creating their own portfolios of strategic business units within their own organisation, Producing Companies can outflank the Moneylenders by effectively issuing their own currencies as transferable shares and bonds through the Stock Exchanges and through private placements through Nominee Companies and other legally sanctioned devices.

Future historians may view the shenanigans around the ignominious collapse of Pehr G. Gyllenhammer’s several attempts to merge Sweden’s Volvo Corporation with Norway’s Oil Industry as the crucial watershed in the battle between the power to organise the Means of Exchange and the Means of Production…two competing phrases introduced by Sidney Webb as Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution. Bankers are redundant when they lose the power to deploy monetary patronage to create their own portfolios and effectively hire and fire the Producers.

Henry Ford was perhaps the first industrialist to recognize this soft underbelly in the seeming omnipotence of the Money Power. But many inventors…like Thomas Edison in the USA and Gustav de Laval in Sweden…had previously fallen fowl of the counter measures deployed by both the money and production powers to protect their special privileges from encroachment by either the personal or the common weal and were destroyed.

The current crop of Transnational Corporations sitting astride today’s world of globalisation are the survivors of these civil wars. After years of trench warfare an uneasy truce has settled over the battlefield. But during the past two decades a third-generation of large organisation has emerged unnoticed into this stand-off between money and know-how. They constitute a second front in what is effectively a continuation of the classic Marxist battleground for control of the Means of Production between Labour and Capital.

These Third Generation Large Organisations are the subject of the interim report of my study of Swedish IT firms. These often vast networks of inter-working firms and individuals come in two very different genres. Sometimes they out-source the products and services they need and put these through the books as Cost of Sales to generate enormous corporate incomes per employee. Sometimes they re-source the development of products and services by burning vast amounts of speculative money in selling Future Profit Dreams.

These large Network Organisations seem to take two forms. Either they are Barrow Boys selling dear and buying cheap...preferably in that order...or they are Boffins 'n Nerds fronted by private funds and venture capitalists. The profit and loss statements of the former appear to the world as all income with no expense while that of the latter are all expense with no income.

But a Fourth Generation is silently feeling its way into being…below the radar. Its deconstruction and description is just a glint in my eye. I believe it may have a historic provenance. But to understand this fourth form of organisation a third parameter is needed that deals with the form of organisation and cuts across the two-dimensional First, Second and Third-generation Large Organisations.

I speculate that there are three relevant organisational forms…the Hierarchic, the Hanseatic and the Holonic…and that over the thousand year period from 1200 to 2200 much of the world will have undergone a transition from the Holonic to the Hanseatic to the Hierarchic...and back again.

Human life in our North Atlantic Ocean Basin has seen fit to confine itself to the shallow regions around its rim. Because most of our ancestors came to where they are today by way of an extensive network of Water Trails, they tend to be huddled about the River Estuaries.

With the advent of telephony these families and clans are just a few seconds away from each other. And with low-cost air travel any place on the planet can be reached from any other place within a day. We can get up with family and go to bed in the evening with family. This Web of Interrelationships has the ability to reclaim the power leaked to the Impersonal Megamachine…and bring us Liberty.

Engineers are great testers. They like to build scale models and carry out tests. Non-destructive tests, destructive tests, wind tunnel tests, tensile strength tests...if you can wonder about it…Engineers have a test for it. Have you ever looked at a computer magazine? That's Engineers at work. Testing everything that moves…comparing this test with that test. Have you ever looked at the car magazines? Engineers again. Road tests, tyre tests, brake tests. Test. Test. Test.

Not so the Economists. The only tests they do are full-scale tests. Even the Military play a War Game or two before committing themselves to the real thing. Not that it helps much. Perhaps they should start stimulating disaster?

Professor Jay Forrester at MIT was one of those who pointed out the foolishness of this. Forrester tried to do what Engineers do. He didn't think up a theory and model it mathematically and call that Testing. He went out into the Real Economy and found out what people with real economic power were actually doing. He then went back to the lab and tried to build a computer model that would simulate various aspects of their behaviour.

After several years work and several thousand modifications to his model of the US economy, he went back out into the real world and spoke again to key players in the US economy.

'Tell me again what you do when you get this or that piece of information?' he would ask them.
'Well,' they would reply, 'Funny you should ask, because I used to do this, but now I do the opposite.'
'Fine.' Professor Forrester would say. 'Bear with me a moment while I just check this fuse. There. That's programmed in now. Let's see what happens. First we'll do what you used to do.'
'Well, goddam it,' would come the reply...Jimmy Carter was in the White House at the time so there were a lot of Southern drawls around Washington...'That's what the son of a bitch did. Would you believe it? Say, how come your box of tricks managed to do that? What sort of Economist are you, anyway? What's it doing now? Yeah. That's it. That's the way we like it? What d'yer do? You did what I do now, huh? Well I'll be damned!'

Forrester met this reaction so often that he coined the phrase the counter-intuitive behaviour of complex systems to explain what was going on. Soon they were asking him to bring his magic box to their Senate Committee Meetings.

'There's nothing magic about it,' he would assure them. 'I ask people what they're thinking of doing and the computer tells me the sort of things that will happen if they try it. I figured it makes more sense, costs a lot less money and gives you more precise answers a lot quicker than putting Legislation through Congress and testing a policy out on 250 million Americans.'
'Damn right! Why that crazy son of a bitch...'

And of course the bigger your economy, the more people will be engulfed by the main effects, the side effects, the after effects and all the unanticipated unfortunate effects of this Full-Scale Testing.

The Euro is unprecedented. Full-blown full-scale testing...of untested theory. Lunacy for short. But before you rush off to ask MIT to build a simulation model for the Euro there's one more thing you should know about Model Testing.

Engineers have discovered there's a lot of art and quite a bit of science to Scale Testing. You can't scale back your car to a sixteenth the size of the full-scale version and shove it in a wind tunnel. Or rather you can…but you'll get the wrong answers. You have to scale down in a way that reflects relationships between Cause, Model and Effect. Volume Effects for instance tend to be 'to the power of three'...Area Effects 'to the power of two'.

Twenty years ago Kirkpatrick Sale wrote a book entitled Human Scale. He didn't know anything about Scale Testing. But he knew why giants don't exist. Their legs could never support their weight. The strength of a giant's leg would obey a square law...the area of the bone's cross section. But the giant's weight would obey a cube law being proportional to volume. Six foot turns out to be quite a sensible size for a creature like man. Giants would crush their legs with their own weight.

Sixty years ago D'Arcy Thompson had reached similar conclusions and become intrigued by their implications. He explained his thinking in a book entitled Growth and Form.

When I was young I would often cycle to Eynsford, a small village in the Shoreham Valley about two hours away by bike. I usually went by myself. I spent hours in the river with water up to my knees filling a jam jar with tiddlers. I got to know the river quite well. I loved the way it would form itself into little eddies. These little vortices appeared suddenly out of nowhere and then quietly slipped away again as quickly as they had come.

One game I used to play was to look at a piece of water, concentrate hard, and tell it to eddy. I spent one morning trapping eddies and I almost believed I could catch eddies in my hand.

I have a peculiar brain. I am not good at remembering things. My brain doesn't organise itself that way. If I am to remember something I have to be able to work it out from first principles. I can learn things by heart...I remembered all my lines in Pinter's Dumb Waiter...but however many times I learn Wordsworth's I wandered lonely as a cloud or Coleridge's Rime of The Ancient Mariner it is not there a week later.

It was partly for this reason that I jumped at the chance to play a proper talking and singing role in The Pirates of Penzance. I wanted to see how I would cope...not whether but how. Yet I've always been very quick with numbers.

I have met my match only once. Les Smith...from a Jewish family in Manchester. He had worked the local markets with his father ever since he could hold a three-penny bit in his hand. We were in the middle of the Belgian Congo waiting for a bridge to be mended and organised a Grand Challenge. He definitely had the edge. There was only a split second in it. But it was a consistent edge.

I worked hard in my second and third years at Cambridge. After the fright at the end of my first year when I was nearly thrown out, I put in enough work for a good upper second and was a little disappointed to receive a lower second. Dick Tizard let me see the results of my various papers. There was hardly a second among them. I either got a first or a third. On Thermodynamics and Materials my marks were among the best in the university. On Applied Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics they must have been among the worst…I failed.

On Fluid Dynamics it was not quite Noll Poäng...but as near as dammit. I knew I had done badly. None of the right questions came up...I had spent a lot of time analysing previous years' questions and working through the books of model answers...and I could remember nothing that might help me cobble together some half sensible responses to the questions that did appear. This happened not once, but twice. In both the second year and the third year exams. Fluid Dynamics has intrigued me ever since. I read it as well as I studied any other subject. But the problem was that it was wrong.

Fish dart. A flick of the tale and they're a dozen yards away. You can't explain this in terms of Turbulent Layers and the Aerodynamic Theory of an aircraft wing. And Vortices? Not interesting. No use for them. Just cause problems for the Oil Industry. Electrical engineers know about eddies because their transformers melt unless they make them out of wafer-thin metal sheets to eliminate them. Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by vortices. Pity electricity wasn't around in his day.

Then there's gyroscopes. Anti-gravity forces created by spin on an axis at right angles? What is this? What happens in other fluids than air? What about oil...or water...or out in the vacuum and weightlessness of space? These things interested me. But nobody wanted to know. Nobody had any theory about this. There were no formulas for students to learn by heart.

Fish, Gyroscopes and Eddies might have given me a first on Fluid Dynamics. But flow in pipes, Bernoulli’s Theory and the mechanics of plugholes were just not my scene. As I tried to go back to first principles I found either a void or a comedy of errors.

Let us consider the ideal situation where there is no this and no that and the moon is made of blue cheese. Then under this set of circumstances we can say that this force acting on that surface is represented by the equation F=ax +b where x is unknown and a and b depend on the time of the week. It set me up nicely for Economics though.

When I was very young I discovered our loft. Mother was at the shops. It was raining. And I was bored. In the corner was the biggest tank I had ever seen. Every English house has one of these and the bigger the house the bigger the tank. Somewhere in Cambridge there must be a mansion of such enormous dimensions as to boggle the Western Imagination. The tank was removed from its loft and bolted onto a concrete floor floated onto the Cambridge Fens.

As time went by a building grew up around the tank. High above where once there had been sky and clouds a delicate lattice of steel held aloft a roof.

One summer men arrived and by the autumn a road was rushing by. Then people started arriving. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Never the same faces from one year to the next. They were young. All of them. And there was not a woman among them. They all came to pay homage to the tank. They filled her up with water, pulled out her plug and then sat there quietly while her waters washed away back down into the Cambridge Fens. She wondered at their strange ways. But she kept her own counsel...and gurgled when it suited her.

To look into the great tank you climbed up a little step ladder. Chris Singleton was my Laboratory Partner. Chris and I devoted three days of our life to climbing up and down the step ladder. We got to know the Great Tank. And she got to know us. On the second day we introduced her to our bicycles. They rested contentedly against the cold cast iron sides of the Great Tank throughout the afternoon and well on into the evening.

Meanwhile we altered the rates of flow in and out of the Great Tank, attaching strange conical contraptions to the inlet and outlet, rigging up water heaters, wind generators and electric motors. We heated and cooled the water, cast storms upon the mighty lake, created whirlpools in its midst, battered its cliffs with waves, drove fast flowing rivers beneath its placid surface and swirled the waters away into the Cambridge Fens...first with this contraption in place and then with that channel replaced. Never had so much attention been showered upon the Great Tank.

On the afternoon of the third day the peace and serenity of the Cambridge Fens were shattered by the sound of angry voices. The uproar was coming from the Great Tank. A crowd had gathered round. In the middle stood a little man with glasses, a white coat and a clip-board, waving his arms, gesticulating wildly and yelling in an extremely agitated manner.

'You will do it all again. The whole experiment. And you will get the right result.' 'We will not', said Chris quietly. 'Those are our results. We have spent three days collecting them. And you will pass us on this course'.

With that, Chris turned away from the red-faced little man with the glasses, the white coat and the clip-board, gathered up his pencils and his notebooks and wheeled his bicycle out of the Cambridge Engineering Laboratories. My bike and I walked off into the sunset with him. This is one hard dude I said to myself. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. But it was a sad end to another. We never saw the Great Tank again...and never got to say goodbye.

In the Northern Hemisphere water runs out through a plughole anti-clockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere the opposite is the case. There is a theory to explain this. You need to do lots of trials and you need statistics to make a convincing case. But these have theories too. Eventually everybody finds this to be true. And eventually everybody passes the course and goes on to learn about Thermionic Valves and all the other things we can always use.

Our problem was that it wasn't true. We tried this height and that height. We even controlled the speed at which we pulled out the plug. We burnt a lot of midnight oil on the top floor of 67 Barton Road on the second night. 'It's no good,’ I said to Chris. 'It's random. There's no pattern to it. We'll wake Garnett up and tell him he's coming to the labs with us at eight.'

Robin had got the right result. 'Show us how you did it,' we said. He did. We thanked him…and sent him back to bed while we went across the road for some breakfast. 'That's what they're all doing,' I said.

Chris nodded. 'Yeah. They don't realise they're doing it. They're fiddling the results. Did you notice how Garnett always had a good explanation for what he'd done wrong when the water went the wrong way, but accepted the result when it went the right way.'

'Well I know one thing. If this course is about experimental method then we've learnt a thing or too. So OK. But I've got a party in Kensington tonight. I promised Johnny Watson. I've had enough of this tank. So what are we gong to do? Fiddle the figures like everybody else?' I had got use to that look by now.

'No way,' Chris said. 'You start writing up...you're good at that. I want to try those early trials again...the ones where everything is perfectly still. It should be quiet for an hour or so. But, yeah, I agree. We've done enough. That racing car constructor's course starts at Bromley Tech on Tuesday and we're not missing that. You're back Sunday night aren't you?' We were given a 'pass' on Experimental Design...our lab books approved without comment.

One day Economists will talk to Engineers. But such paradigm shifts take time. Old professors must die off or get discredited. Meanwhile a new kind of Systems Economics must be established and a very different kind of Economics Education developed. Younger economists are deeply disappointed in a field where abstract mathematics is considered more important than knowledge of the Real Economy. But only the most daring will break with their past.

The Global Warming Conspiracy is spilling over into the National Energy Agenda which is now marching off in quite the wrong direction. But my English Energy Agenda for a New Century and the Government’s proposals for Climate and Energy Management is quite revealing about the Who? Whom?

Here are the results of an analysis that reverses the 10-point programme inherent in my response to the official British Government's Climate & Energy Policy announced at this year’s Labour Party Conference. From this analysis real specific conspirators begin to emerge...and it is beginning to look like our usual suspects. The lines of battle are beginning to be drawn.

My first four policy recommendations for immediate action are to outlaw the use and development of Climate Weapons; withdraw from the Kyoto Treaty; decommission all Nuclear Power Plants and stop wasting electricity on space heating. Hence Enemy One is the Military Climate Weaponry Programmes in Russia, US, China and elsewhere; Enemy Two is the One World Government Conspirators; Enemy Three is the Nuclear Industry and Enemy Four is all those pulling the wool over our eyes by fraudulently claiming that Energy Need and Electricity Need are synonymous. They are not…electricity is essential for less than a tenth of our energy needs.

My next two policy recommendations were to adopt Zero Tolerance and Polluter Pays policies for emission of all substances into Landscape and Atmosphere. Hence Enemy Five is those who are using the fraudulent Carbonista Theology to limit Private Corporate Liability from their much wider responsibilities to eliminate all pollution and implement Closed Recovery & Recycling Systems throughout the Supply Production & Distribution Chain.

Enemy Six is the same as Enemy Five but the Looting Mechanism is different. Instead of avoiding paying the full public costs of their Commercial Operations the trick is to get the Public Purse to pick up the Capital Investment tab for staying in business and reaping future profits.

In my Energy Wars article I discuss Energy Chemistry in which our steady shift from Carbon Energy to Hydrogen Energy is explained. The Carbonista Theology allows the costs of this shift in raw feed material to be dumped on the public…enhancing the profits raked in for Private Gain.

Enemy Seven is the National, European and Global Economic & Political Forces intent on preserving the piping and metering mentality to energy distribution for oil, gas, hydrogen & electricity and Enemy Eight is all those centralising forces opposed to Real Subsidiarity.

National and International Piping Grids for energy, water, telephones, information…indeed for anything…are centralising and controlling devices. But to determine a policy response it is necessary to specify the Nexus of Power and to establish administrative structures at this level.

Dismantling the National Piped Energy Grids means closing the valves to the international grids, phasing out national piping infrastructures and building out local piping grids. During the transition access arrangements to the Channel Tunnel cables to France’s Nuclear Electricity and the North Sea pipelines to Norway’s gas fields would make sense.

The Peacetime equivalent of Wartime Mobilization will be needed…a task I would give to the English Counties…not by throwing money at County Councils but by empowering the Lord Lieutenants. Establishing a Lord Lieutenant’s Department with Cabinet status would be the best way…with Prince Charles as the Cabinet Minister heading up the department and doing the head-banging needed to set County Disconnection Dates. But there is another reason to set up a Parallel County Structure separated from all existing Administrative Channels.

Enemy Nine is the Money Power comprising the international network of 125 Central Banks, the Central Banking Debt-Usury Mechanism and the Commercial Banking System while Enemy Ten is the Merchants and their Poodle Parliaments. Existing National Power Structures will do everything in their power to sabotage this Energy Policy.

It is not because of any Ecclesiastic, Royalist or Republican Leanings that the Church and the Monarchy are being resurrected to mobilise the country and deliver a completely new 21st Century Energy Infrastructure but because it is the best way to introduce the Countervailing Power that will be needed. Existing structures are incapable of implementing the Energy Policy the country needs.

The only way We The People can outflank the Ten Public Enemies who will coalesce as Saboteurs and Conspirators to retain their Centrally-controlled Piped Energy Infrastructure…howbeit with ever decreasing carbon-content in their pipes paid for by the Public Purse…is to strip them of their power.

Their power originates in two crucial Social Mechanisms...money and people. Issuing money in England must be removed from the Central and Commercial Banks and retuned to County Banks and Local Mints.

Handled creatively at the county level recruiting people for the task offers opportunities for creative Public Policy. Direct Barter without Money Middling of A Good Day’s Work for a Good Day’s Pay could take the form of a Home Free & Clear after a certain number of days work on the County Energy Agenda. At a stroke such a policy at county level would remove much of the Financial Shenanigans from the Residential Housing Markets and provide a means of outmanoeuvring the key mechanism used in England to control work and job choices.

At the beginning of 1999 I wrote an essay entitled The Future for Large Organisations during a week working on my Master’s Thesis at Stockholm University’s School of Business. At the time I believed it to be 25-years ahead of its time as I found no one with whom I could discuss the ideas. Five years ago I included the paper in my Radical Consultation Workshop on Work and Human Fulfilment. It was again ignored. But on this occasion I assumed that although it may have been 25-years ahead of the Perception of Reality it was only 5-years ahead of Reality Itself.

Two years ago I associated the essay with Schumacher’s thinking on Organisation & Size and submitted the 2500-word article to Fourth World Review. But it was outside the editor’s 19th century frame of reference and so it remains unpublished and undiscussed. I will be returning to this Old Research on Diasporas & Jigsaws in my Thursday 7th December blog. But for the moment here is my concluding paragraph…with its deferential nod to E.F. Schumacher.

‘There is much more work to be done before this Rise & Fall of Large Organisations can be defended academically, but this is the hypothesis I am muddling ahead with for the time being. And I would argue that the five principles expounded by Schumacher in his essay on the theory of large scale organisations will be relevant to a theory of large-scale organisation whichever form that large organisation might take because they seek to address that most neglected factor of the theoretician the factor of scale. The practical man can never ignore it of course because nothing works unless it is taken into account. This is how Schumacher ended his essay.

‘Many of us have been struggling for years with the problems presented by large-scale organisation, problems which are becoming ever more acute. To struggle more successfully, we need a theory, built up from principles. But from where do the principles come? They come from observation and practical understanding. The best formulation of the necessary interplay of theory and practice that I know of comes from Mao Tse-tung. Go to the practical people, he says, and learn from them: then synthesise their experience into principles and theories; and then return to the practical people and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and achieve freedom and happiness.’

Recorded Remittances between families and within clans are running at $250 billion per year…equal to Foreign Direct Investment and double Official Government Aid. Unrecorded Remittances are in the same range. No wonder the banks are looking to service this money flow. Global Statisticians have no idea how to count this and produce Diaspora Accounts…although Multinational Companies have accounting practices to avoid double counting.

The Real World is one where webs of personal, family, ethnic and religious bonds are being woven across the Earth’s oceans…between the Old Communities in the Old Land World and the New Pioneer Townships and Cities Dwellers in the New World that grew up at the end of the Water Ocean Trade Routes. This complex lacework animates and inspires the invisible…but immensely strong…personal bonds and tribal loyalties between the various parts of each clan in each of the cities around their ocean. Until very recently this web was primarily a support system for the new migrant or for the old or the returning triumphant migrant of an earlier migration. But not any more.

The world is moving once more into a period of relative geo-stability on a new and expanded scale and at a new and expanded pace. The Nation State within the World Empires was never a sustainable myth. It was too far divorced from Real Life. But the Local Life within the Tribal Community and the experience over a lifetime of a number of local lives within the same tribal community geographically dispersed around your own Ocean World and located in a number of city regions around that world. This is no myth.

In Birmingham as Number One I predicted that the next thirty years would see a return to ‘the personal in business’. ‘The Personal Business,’ I explained, ‘will not be Local Business it will be Ocean Business conducted on the basis of trust and Personal Ties between friends and family in their tribal communities in their City Regions. Business will return to the Personal Style of the Mercantile Era. The way of Business will be the way of the Merchant Adventurers of a former age. The Commercial Empires of the Seven Ocean World of Tomorrow will be Ethnic Businesses and their purpose will not be unending profit but civilisation for them and theirs.’

Twenty-four days to Christmas, twenty days to the Winter Solstice and 20 000 words to the end of my Blogging Odyssey. Snow has yet to cloak our Ancient Towne but here is Rye bedecked in snowy mantles at Christmastime.

Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in Pride & Prejudice and Hugh Grant & Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral are the most watched films in my small Maritime Household over the past few months…getting on for a dozen helpings of each. There are three weddings in Jane Austen’s film…Lydia, Jane and Elizabeth…but Aficionados will remember the wedding number seven when the priest’s fateful words ‘If anyone knows of any just cause or impediment why these two should not be joined in Holy Matrimony let him speak now or forever hold his peace'...elicited a response from the midst of the congregation assembled to witness the happy event.

Richard Curtis had set things up for an ‘I do’ from Charles by Carrie’s remark before the ceremony that weddings were really quite easy. ‘You just say ‘I do!’ whenever anyone asks you a question.’ Unfortunately for the bride-to-be-no-more after a public intervention, the Vicar’s question was ‘Do you really love someone else, Charles? Do you?’

Today I was witness to just such a Liturgical Interruption…but in a Funeral. Hugh Moseley our Local Vicar who conducted the service declared afterwards at The Standard Inn that he had never had it happen before But Clifford Jordan tells me of an occasion when he was playing the organ at a funeral and a fight broke out in the front pews with cries of ‘Hussy!’ and ‘Trollop!’ echoing through the vestry.

Rye is not Brighton but over the past few years it has acquired a significant Gay Community of which David was part…as are several others involved with Ryesingers. Ian Potter was giving the tribute to David Peart and was in the midst of a slightly risqué story about a deep secret David had kept hidden all his life when he was interrupted from the pews.

Most of us had guessed that the punchline would not be David’s homosexuality. But a former boyfriend…and Gay Activist… jumped to a different conclusion and duly lectured the assembled congregation about David’s homosexuality, the pride he took in it and his active involvement in the Gay Movement. Wonderful Theatre. Richard Curtis could not have scripted it better. Fortunately this public intervention defused the issue…which was a Good Thing. Like any small town the subject has only become mentionable on such an occasion in the last few years.

I am always impressed by the courage it takes to break the Mould of Convention so I shook the chap’s hand at the end of the service. After sitting through a few dozen Quaker Meetings in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1980 and 1981 I am used to God’s mysterious way of moving people to speak out. Ian is a former mayor and a barrister, so he was quite unfazed by the interruption. He waited patiently for the fellow to get it off his chest, mentioned that it was not his homosexuality being alluded to and carried on where he had left off. It turned out that David’s father had worn a toupée…a shocking thing in Hartlepool in the sixties and deeply embarrassing for a young boy at Primary School.

One of the hardest things about living on the water is keeping your clothes in a presentable state…clothes and computers…so I minimalise, acquire frequently from Charity Shops and throw shirts and jeans away more often than I would otherwise. Currently I have one Dinner Jacket for Ryesingers concerts…and a light grey lounge suit that has to serve for all other occasions...including funerals. Ties get worn with The Suit…and keep me warm in the winter.

Strolling down the High Street after the funeral with my white shirt, sombre tie and lounge suit, I was accosted by a woman who rushed up to me expressing great consternation that I had not been to look through her four boxes of books in Camber. In a small town like Rye you know everybody...at least by sight or reputation. I had last seen this particular woman at Camber Church in the summer when her son married a Greek girl and a few Ryesingers provided Backing Vocals. Before I could get a word in edgeways she was off. Mistaken identity…but for whom?

The Greek Wedding was memorable as the bride’s family…in four People Carriers…had driven past the church and ended up in Folkéstoné…four syllables. Chaos ensued in mid-service when the Church Doors were flung open. The Bride’s Side was overwhelmed so I shared my chair with a charming young female Greek cousin…Christian charity.