When I contacted the driver’s insurance company they refused to deal with me. They told me that they would only consider my claim for compensation once the driver had reported the accident to them. She never did that, and she soon stopped replying to my phone calls and text messages. I had no choice but to go to a solicitor and threaten to sue the insurance company. As soon as I did that they paid up.

That is why I’m very suspicious of the Insurance Industry’s moral posturing about No Win, No Fee arrangements. They are already in an outrageously advantageous position because anyone who owns a car must buy insurance from them. They share information about customers and all have the same policies and thus effectively operate a cartel. But despite this, the industry is self-regulated and complaining about an insurance company is time-consuming and complicated. For someone in the position I was in, a solicitor is the easiest and fastest solution, and it’s little wonder the insurance companies don’t like that. Their main objective is always to avoid paying, even when they should.

By the way, if you arrive at this post because you’ve had a bike accident, I’d strongly recommend the company I used www.cycle-claims.co.uk, they did a great job.

If you’ve ever seen the Stan’s Cafe show Of All the People In All The World, where every grain of rice stands for one person, you may have been surprised by the size of the pile representing all the people who died between 1998 and 2004 as a result of the civil war in the Congo. The pile is about the size of an up-turned wheelbarrow and is roughly as big as the mound representing all the slaves who were ever carried from Africa in British ships during the slave trade.

Ironically the largest proportion of slaves who were taken from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade were from West Central Africa, a region that includes modern Congo and Angola. They were almost all captured during wars between native kingdoms. In fact the desire to capture slaves was often the main cause of wars in Africa at that time.

I always imagined that the civil war in Congo, which is still going on, was an ethnic conflict. That is how it is usually portrayed and it’s quite a comforting view for people like me because it means I don’t have to feel any sense of responsibility for what’s going on there. Today I heard a dispatch by the BBC’s Mark Doyle, a man who has spent an awful lot of time working in Africa. His explanation is more complicated and convincing. Have a listen.

At the start of this year researchers at Berkeley and San Diego were doing a study into how profitable spamming could be. They set up a fake online pharmacy which was just like the real thing, offering prescription-only drugs. They counted how many people visited the site and added drugs to their basket. The only point at which the customers discovered that it was not actually working was when they submitted their credit-card details, at which point they got an error page.

So, the Edinburgh researchers probably included the Berkeley researchers in their study, and vice versa, unless they warned each other, which seems unlikely. It’s like a collaborative version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Whenever you try to measure something by doing anything on the web you are probably affecting someone else’s measurements at the same time.

It may sometimes be expedient for a man to heat the stove with his furniture. But he should not delude himself by believing that he has discovered a wonderful new method of heating his premises.

Nevertheless this is exactly the economic model that pretty much everyone apparently believes in at the moment. It seems to be the unanimous view of both journalists and politicians that we need the banks to start lending again in order to get the economy moving. But some of the banks are in trouble because of their imprudent and greedy business practices and so now all the banks are being extra-cautious and won’t lend. So the favoured solution is for governments to give the banks yet more money in the hope that they will lend it out to people. To go back to Ludwig von Mises, this is still not a wonderful method of heating; it’s just the government buying more furniture. Nobody is prepared to say the truth, which is that lots of people are going to have to accept a prolonged lowering of their standard of living.

The only problem is that it has an added feature. To keep your kitchen smelling fresh the crock has a carbon filter inside the lid. It’s a disposable plastic filter that can’t be recycled and will be regularly replaced. So now you’re actually creating more landfill waste than you were before you bought the thing.

I’m tempted to think that this is pretty characteristic of certain rural greens. They want to be eco-friendly but they also want things to be ‘nice’. So they object to wind-farms when they spoil the view and they love living in splendid isolation where public transport isn’t an option and we city dwellers must subsidise their local Post Office. But of course that’s very unfair, it’s just a bit of thoughtlessness on the part of the RSPB and I’m sure they’ll sort it out as soon as they can.

Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer “well, it’s because the terrorists have already won”. Yes, they have won.

I wonder if Amazon will allow this commie protest to continue. It’s supposed to be a super-store not a community centre!

So I don’t really feel very sympathetic towards the postal workers. In attempting to explain their grievances they have simply highlighted how out-of-touch with the real-world they are. Since their members’ pensions are protected if Royal Mail become insolvent maybe they’re calculating that it would be better to protect their cushy benefits and drive the company under than it would be to negotiate a less advantageous deal. It is of course the job of a union to protect its members’ interests, but sometimes that involves looking at the long rather than the short-term and even the CWU recognises that the current pension scheme is too expensive.

The amazing popularity of online shopping should have been a bonanza for the Royal Mail but instead they are in deeper trouble than ever. This may well be because the management is useless, or it may be because the organisation is bureaucratic and inflexible and many of the people who work there are unimaginative jobsworths, I have no way of knowing. In any case, this strike won’t help their situation. Like Millie Banerjee of Postwatch, I find it hugely disappointing to watch a great British institution tear itself apart. But on the other hand, maybe the demise of the Royal Mail will create a brilliant opportunity for a new, much better mail service. Here’s some things I’d like them to offer:

• Destination tracking – Every time a parcel addressed to me is processed they should check to see if it is too big for the letter box or if it needs a signature. If that’s the case they could send me an email or text asking if they should deliver it the next day or on some other day when I am going to be at home.
• People who are at home all the time could act as mini local post offices. Big parcels for anyone in their street would be left with them at the start of the day, outgoing parcels could be collected at the end of the day.
• Tracking the delivery man. It would be so easy to put a GPS receiver on each delivery person and then track them so that I could see an ETA for them.
• Smarter redelivery. I’m going out for the day but I still want my eBay parcel to be there when I get home so I go to their site and ask for all today’s mail to be delivered to my friend up the road.
• Parcel aggregation. It’s daft for several delivery companies to all be calling at the same address. Why don’t they set up a clearing-house for data and then they could all deliver each other’s parcels.

Crikey, I could go on all day with this. Anyone fancy going into business?