ssshhh - keep this secret

We all need to tread more lightly on the earth, and I think I may have found one way of doing it!

We had a superb weekend at this place, a naturist site down in Hampshire. Everything's on the doorstep - pool, sauna, PUB! etc. Indoor and outdoor pools .. and you can buy a new caravan from £12,000 and stay all season (March till October). The pub was just a typical English pub, complete with telly and quiz machine - but no need for clothes before 7pm.

This is the secret - naturist places are not only infinitely friendlier than those chavvy caravan sites, but everything is of a much higher standard and - remarkably - often cheaper.

I could easily live here all summer, chilling out and even running the business. No need for a big house or gardens, use the Land Rover once a week (because there's an excellent village shop less than 400 metres away) and no bloody clothes washing!

Naturism's an excellent slap in the face to the christians that still try to tell the rest of us how to live. I'm already saving for that caravan ... 

werepopes

Trin had me watching Dog Soldiers last night and I still see werewolves wherever I go. We sometimes forget how strong myths are, even in a world as over developed as this, and how close we are to nature despite everything. Sometimes I can hear the wolves howling down at Longleat, when the wind's in the right direction. The forest is at the heart of the European psyche, and we'll soon be making our reaquaintance with werewolves any time now ...

the borg at bosham

Bosham was where King Canute showed his courtiers that even he didn't have the power to stop the tide. Today's Bosham residents are sanguine enough to accept that with sea levels rising and the land sinking flooding will become more and more familiar. To this end they have adapted and built the above flood defences, needed when the tide creeps up the High Street. Twice a day the road around the bay floods, many times a year the odd Londoner parks their car at the side of the road and returns a few hours later to find their car underwater.

I lived at Bosham for a couple of years, and it is a fantastic place. But it now has an air of resigned fatalism. For one day, and not that far off, it will disappear under the waves forever, as have so many other Sussex towns and villages.

But hopefully the process will be a gradual one, and the villagers will be free to move to higher ground. But the real threat of course is a sudden disaster, a huge storm coinciding with a spring tide, a Channel storm surge, another 1987 style 'hurricane'. High ground appeals more each year, and the good folk of Sussex and all of our other coastal counties will be in the front line of climate change in the UK. So visit Bosham whilst you still can, visit the Selsey peninsular, or those odd bits of Essex that jut out into the sea. Visit North Norfolk and the Lincolnshire coast. Like Canute I believe that none of us will be able to stop this new natural phenomena that is now so surely upon us. Adapt, or ... well, you know.

Resistance is Futile. 

gold and why you can't go wrong

Even if by some miracle there is not huge disruption as the twin terrors of Peak Oil and Climate Change hit gold is still a good bet. 'Modern' society is obsessed with gold as both jewellery and a safe store of wealth.

But back in the real world you really need to look at converting your surplus wealth to gold now. Bank accounts will not be safe once things really begin to collapse, the only safe way of storing your wealth is by converting it to gold. The easiest way is by buying gold sovereigns and half sovereigns. Stash it somewhere in the back garden. When things start to go awry dig it up and move to your hideaway in the country.

Now's a good time to buy. Buy in the dips, there's always a little profit taking as gold hits certain psychological ceilings. $600-$700 an ounce will look crazy in 5 or 10 years time.