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.’

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.