Another long gap since my last post. The reason is partly a lack of momentum but mainly due to being busy on the work front.

The editing process for the latest book has begun and there's a lot of suggestions coming back from the editor for me to weigh up. The book is supposed to be accessible to first time investors which presents a problem. What may be vital information for one reader may be 'old hat' for someone else. the question is how far back to draw the starting line. Presumably the same problem faces all the journalists who write for the personal finance pages of the papers. The solution that they usually deploy - in my opinion - is fudging it by making everything seem simpler and less risky than it really is.

Granted that it's a bee in my bonnet, but I honestly believe that the problem is much more serious than people realise. Not only are levels of financial 'literacy' quite low but there's not even a common level of basic understanding.

One answer might be to make personal finance a component of secondary education. The Personal Finance Education Group have a programme for introducing the subject in secondary schools - and all power to their elbow. Specialist trainers in the subject may be the answer but expecting teachers to deliver financial education doesn't seem realistic. Given that teachers (in the main) are paid a monthly salary and should be enrolled in a fairly satisfactory occupational pension scheme, most of them are in the ranks of the financially secure. They may be part time or supply teachers or have financial pressures entirely separate to their personal income but they have the basics of sensible finances. Would it work to use them as the channel for financial education for people who could well face a working life of much less financial security and real difficulty in saving for their retirement?

In fact - I believe - that the problem of equipping everyone with the wherewithal to navigate the personal finance maze goes deeper than the difficulty of fitting it into the school curriculum. The real problem is that current culture doesn't really permit a lively discussion about how personal finance should work. The UK public accept the welfare state but it's a passive acceptance, something that has been handed down from a generation who will now be no less than eighty years old. It's probably much easier for politicians to talk about eradicating child poverty than to debate reducing inequality, even though the two subjects are really two sides of the same coin. Equality/inequality are off-limits to most politicians. The reasons for this aren't easy to diagnose.

A politician could say that they want to make poverty (or inequality) history but it would be unwise because they're unlikely to succeed. In fact, it's easier for a politician to speak out on world poverty - and all credit to the Prime Minister for his dedication to this - but the electorate are not going to pay as much attention to what actually happens as a result. It's also noteworthy that the moral argument for action on this front has come from outside politics.

It's far more likely that the age old mixture of financial winners and losers is going to continue than that any politician is going to be able to significantly reduce inequality. It's a dilemma for politicians; they can't fix it and neither can they be seen to be condoning it. More than politics is needed to gain some purchase on a problem like inequality. What's needed is some recognition that, for many people, the way in which inequality and absolute poverty flourish has a meaning. In the existing consensus the idea that inequality can have a spiritual or philosophical meaning seems controversial but that's only because society is so determinedly neutral about such matters.

Ironically, without more discussion of the meaning of inequality, there's no way of finding out how much common ground there is on the subject between religious people and materialists and peeople of different religious persuasions. Of course, there may be serious differences but the debate would surely be worth having.

If you travelled back to, say, 1850 there would have been a consensus about personal finance centring on ideas of self help, thrift and charity. This would have been the early Victorians approach to understanding the desirability of personal responsibility alongside the problem that nearly everyone has to 'navigate' through much that's beyond one's own control. In the century before John Wesley said "Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can".

Modern thought doesn't have much to offer on what inequality means but it should; wealth is a moral issue. Although a once and for all solution to inequality seems unlikely, more debate about what it means might throw up enough good ideas and public pressure to fill the politicians' sails so to speak.

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I was thinking about posting on the idea of immigrants speeding up their applications for citizenship by getting involved in party politics but I'll leave that for the time being.

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Apart from work, there's been plenty to do on the vegetable plot. Despite the digging in the spring, the vegetable beds are in danger of being overwhelmed by brambles. I've started digging up the main crop potatoes - can't remember what they're called but they're a lovel pink colour. Not so tasty just boiled (as the salad ones)but beautiful fried or roasted. This week the plums are ripening.

I've had two walks since last posting. Walk one was in and around Grayswood. when you drive through Grayswood looks just like a residential part of Haslemere with a rather nice cricket green but there's an interesting hill in the middle of it with a view to the east. This was a shortish walk but the second was longer. This started near Dunsfold (Hookhouse Road), walking to the village and out again across a couple of fields to the Godalming Road. One of the fields had about thirty young cows in it who came to check me out. I retreated to the style until they lost interest. The other side of the Godalming road the footpath crosses what looks like a park (with a dried up lake)and as the ground rises towards Hascombe Hill you have a great view of the South Downs. Closer to hand there's a stone circle but since this doesn't feature on the map, I guess it's a recreation of a stone circle. Will it be added in the next time the map surveyors come round? After that the walk winds up to the top of Hascombe Hill with lots of fir trees. The hill really was a fort in the first century BC but there doesn't appear to be any information about that. After that the walk went down rather more steeply, back across the Godalming Road and part way up and around Breakneck Hill.

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Recent good books have included 'Child 44' by Tom Rob Smith, about tracking down a Russian serial killer in the year Stalin died, and 'Sacrifice' by S J Bolton, about serial killings on Shetland narrated by a slightly irritating hospital consultant. On a more elevated level, I read ;'The Jesus Papyrus' by C P Thiede and Matthew D'Ancona. This is about redating St Matthew's Gospel and the evidence of a scrap of papyrus found in Egypt in the 1890s but now lodged at Magdalene College, Oxford.