This posting will include the following (mainly usual) items:

1) Work hunting and freelancing
2) Current affairs - the next stage in Iraq
3) Altered states
4) Enjoyment - holidays and reading

I'm still waiting to receive the training for the latest hopeful avenue of contract work so i telephoned to find out where things had got to. I was told that they still want to give me work but the project manager had been away for family reasons. Once I'd put the telephone down I realised that I hadn't asked anything about the terms and conditions so I rand the woman I'd been speaking to directly. The terms are favourable from my point of view and, crucially, they can be flexible as long as I give enough notice - so I will be able to take a holiday (see below).

I've been working and work hunting as a freelance for a year now so it's time to file the annual return for my company for the first time. Companies House charge £30 for this unless you do it online and the charge is only £15. However, you need an authorisation code for that and I'm still waiting for mine with only until 17th January to meet the deadline or face a further charge (fine).

Halifax Bank of Scotland have also introduced a £15 charge, for the privilege of having a business bank account with them but their charge is monthly. admittedly, they are going to drop the 57p charge for writing cheques but you would need to write at least 26 cheques every month to gain an advantage from this charge. I'm thinking of switching to the Alliance & Leicester and this morning a big application pack thudded on to the door mat. I sufficiently fed up with HBOS to take the trouble to fill this in.

A while back I posted about signing up with a web tendering site for contract work called Elance. The subscription for this is $22 a quarter and I've just paid another three months' worth. However, I'm still not sure if e-bidding is worth the expense. The invitations to tender can be interesting but the subject matter is often specialised or obscure. For example, in the area I'm most interested in - writing - one can wade through lots of requirements for the copy you're being invited to write only to find out right at the end that the subject matter is something like dog grooming. Or you find someone inviting bids for subject matter in your range, say, investment, but you're baffled in trying to establish exactly what they are hoping to achieve. A lot of the bids seem to be submitted by people who are not sure what they want but they know they are going to pay someone else to write it.

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To succeed in winning these contracts I need to be the sort of person who can convince the customer that they need what I'm telling them they n
The ground for President Bush's announcement about Iraq seems to have been laid pretty well so that we know more or less what he's going to say. The questions that remain are, firstly, will Congress allow him to do what he wants and, secondly, will his plan of action do any good.

I guess that the less the President tries to do the harder it will be for Congress to stop him doing it. The problem is that a satisfactory conclusion to the occupation of Iraq requires the commitment of more troops for a longer period of time than the Democrats are likely to countenance. Far more troops would be needed for the occupation to be effective than the 20,000 that President Bush is expected to announce and the timescale needs to be longer than the remainder of his presidency. Otherwise, the insurgents can sit it out until the allies go home.

The secret seems to be to find some way of turning the occupation back into a liberation restoring Iraq's infrastructure and economy, giving help that will make life more tolerable for ordinary Iraqis. Mr Bush is expected to outline plans for small-scale projects designed to make daily life easier for Iraqis. Presumably there are also moves afoot to find a way of sharing out control of the Iraqi oil industry and its revenues that underpins the constitutional settlement. International oil companies (IOCs) may be prevailed upon to do more to assist the process of recovery and to protect the gains made from the insurgents. The oil industry would need to become a state-within-a-state to play the part it needs to in shoring up the new Iraq. If the IOCs can be made to pay for most of this so much the better for President Bush because the Democrats won't want a big bill for whatever he plans to do.

In the light of all the problems that big oil has had with President Putin they may be prepared to go along with this. They probably know they won't be allowed to control the Iraqi oil industry but they'll be happy if they can get fairer deals than Sakhalin 2 and TNK-BP are turning out to be.

In a way the Democrats have a more difficult task than the President because they're expected to have a solution to Iraq. The White House, on the other hand, has 'messed up' and it's always easier to surprise when expectations are low.

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The other night I was lying awake thinking about the ideas that we use to establish a sense of identity. I’ve realised that these ideas are many and various but it almost goes without saying that, whatever things we hang our persona on we treat the measure of those things, be they beauty or birth or wealth or IQ, extremely seriously. We take it seriously, too, when we come across instances of people ‘cheating’ about how they score in the measurement of however they define themselves. But I wondered how people would consider someone who redefined themselves according a measure that was completely different from one they had ever used before; imaginative, or, weird, possibly. It seems to me that people would allow someone to redefine themselves as almost anyone or anything so long as that person’s self interest wasn’t served by the transformation. So you can’t be what you want to be but you can be anything except what you want to be. So dashing Mr B who owns a Jag and is reckoned the maestro of the bridge club could become punctual Mr B who arrives at the paper shop at 8.50 am and not a second later – you can set your watch by him; as long as he hasn’t any desire to be punctual. In fact, however, it’s very hard to avoid a measure of self-interest with any continuing quality – we like to define ourselves by characteristics that have a long shelf life – good exam results, a career, a fortune made etc.

So may be we can only do anything rather than be anything..

Sleep.

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Having problems with my PC so I’ll stop now