I’ve been trying to find the time to post since the start of last weekend so today I determined that this blog had to be written before the end of July. No holiday to explain my absence; I’ve just been busy and things have taken longer than I expected. Yesterday, for instance, was car servicing day and this happens on the far side of Guildford. When I worked in Woking the car we had was MOT’d in Woking, too, so it was just a saunter round to the office from the garage. Getting home from a place that hardly has any public transport is a different kettle of fish entirely. In point of fact, I didn’t go straight home, as I’d volunteered to be helpful for the morning. I had a fruitful morning painting an outside door with sealant in glorious sunshine with the piebald horses that have appeared on Godalming’s Lammas Land for the last couple of years watching me over the fence.

I haven’t got a whole load of ideas buzzing around my head so there’ll be no ‘Contents’ today.

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I haven’t been following the news that closely but I did pick up on David Miliband’s visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It looks as if the Brown government are heeding concerns being expressed about Afghanistan regressing back under Taliban control or, possibly, no control at all and the danger of Pakistan following the militant Islamicist path also. I don’t believe in ‘domino effects’ in real life, at least, not ones involving Pakistan’s 157 million citizens. The visit looks like a vote of confidence in President Pervez Musharraf but may be the biggest effect was intended for UK citizens with links with Pakistan.

I’ve been thinking about the Foreign Secretary’s remarks about a diplomacy to influence public opinion. The first thought was it would be necessary to employ diplomats to do that but, the world being as it is, more often than not it works better to have people talking behind closed doors. The diplomats may only be staving off disaster and solving one set of problems by creating others but that’s often the best that can be expected. Diplomacy through public opinion has a checkered history: President Gorbachev achieved a big effect on Western public opinion through Glasnost but Hitler played on public opinion to bring about the appeasement policy of France and Great Britain in the 1930s.

In fact peoples speaking to each other across frontiers doesn’t seem likely just now because the politicians – who are presumably to be the mouthpieces of this new diplomacy don’t command enough respect. They can say some things which need to be said, such as President Bush admitting that Americans must be war weary but it was never likely that he might have told them they needed to borrow less, save more and stop making risky investments in real estate, say, three years ago. Things like that have to be left to central bankers to send signals about. That’s domestic policy but there is one area where politicians could make a difference by addressing public opinion:- Africa, Darfur in particular. That’s partly because Bono and Geldorf have laid a path on that theme and partly because the on-the-ground reality is so extreme.

Generally speaking, politicians in the UK have lost confidence in telling the rest of us what to do to such a degree that one wonders if some of them are questioning if it’s worth their while being a politician.

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In honour of Thursday’s dramatic falls in the stock markets I bought a copy of the FT on Friday, which I perused with some nice flat beer and a ham sandwich outside the Merry Harriers, Hambledon 9in between manic writing in the morning and research in the afternoon, I hasten to add). The FT wasn’t very reassuring but it didn’t sound as if they were expecting an imminent, cataclysmic implosion of every kind of investment. The outlook is not good but – don’t worry – it’ll be in slow(ish) motion. Commentators seem divided between the pessimists who believe that a ‘trigger’ has occurred, a lot of credit going to people and businesses that hadn’t been checked out properly has been shown to be the risky outlay it always was. This is going to cause everyone to lose confidence in every kind of investment. The optimists( well, semi-optimists), such as Anatole Kaletsky in today’s Times, say that this is rubbish and that shares are fundamentally different from loans and bonds and, therefore, safer. I think some of the semi-optimists may be whistling in the dark but it is true that lots of big companies are making lots of money and can afford to pay good dividends, so why not buy their shares.

The white knight in these times seems to be the sovereign wealth funds that are investing in stocks (notably the Chinese in Barclays Bank). Sovereign wealth in the form of Arab oil money has been channelled into Western businesses for a generation now, so the trend is hardly new. But what may seem like a convenient solution now – the Chinese stepping in with billions of dollars just when the credit situation is looking dodgy – may turn out to have been a turning point.

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There’s been no time for a proper walk recently, just a stroll beside Frensham Great Pond on Sunday evening. On Saturday we had a brief experiment with our new bucket BBQ which burned the burgers and made a burnt patch on the grass. This was just a test run; the bucket BBQ is really supposed to be taking on the beach (where burn marks shouldn’t be a problem). Having feared that all the rain would rot all the plums, we’ve just started picking ripe ones, which seems early. I’ve checked last year’s blog post and plums came up on 25th August.

Like some of blog friends I've been experiencing unexpectedly large page view numbers - 900 already today, which seems unlikely. I'm not sure what constitutes a page view but 50 per person must be a lot. I'm not exactly sure why these stats are so fascinating but I guess they do act as some kind of incentive to me to keep blogging. More comments would really feed the mind (and spirit) though.