I’ve a rule with this blogging/webbing malarkey: print nothing out, save none of it. My blog is a cyberspace trash can. (Why bother to fill it I don’t hear you ask.) Well it takes up no space and I want to be part of the party, of the now if not here. There are more than 100 million blogs worldwide. There are more than 40 million members of Facebook (I think God has an account), then there’s MySpace and YouTube (or is it Utube) and WotNext. Geer Lovink of the Blog Herald sees this as ‘part of an unfolding process of massification of the internet’. Who’d want to be left out of that.

‘What you put in your head is there forever’ says Cormac McCarthy somewhere in The Road. What you put on the airwaves is there forever, until the signals fail. Strange to arrive at nowhere in a search for communication: mind you love can seem a dead end place and blogging can feel cosy when measured against life.

There’s trouble in the country and it’s not just blight on the tomatoes. Five calves which should have gone to the cattle market last Monday are still in the shed.

When a calf is born and taken from its mother, for about two days the cow bellows and the calf bleats. The cows are made to give birth each year, this bereavement is repeated and the cows are kept lactating and machine-milked all their lives.

If you want to know about human cruelty, visit the countryside. It’s a concentration camp for the product of the meat and dairy industry. There’s a euphemistic vocabulary for the imprisonment and killing of creatures.

J.M.Coetzee asks for a change of heart towards animals. He believes that children provide the brightest hope - that a glimpse into the slaughterhouse would make them vegan.

I wish we were all vegan and ate artichokes braised in broth with broad beans fennel and polenta, or mushroom risotto, or sweet potatoes, or okra stewed with tomatoes, or apple tart and brownies. I wish we’d free animals into a better life.

Pigs have the intelligence of dogs. Scratch them under the chin and they laugh. Years ago on Lundy Island there was a tame sheep called Happiness. She’d graze with the others but was exempt from slaughter. If you stood in her field with corn flakes in your pocket and called her name she’d come running.

Perhaps farm animals are aware of the violence we plan for them. Perhaps they communicate their fate to each other. When I walk the lanes I try not to meet their eyes.

The five calves wait in a shed. Until the f and m scare ends they’ve another few days of a short non-life. Escalope Milanese?

If it’s true that 150 thousand (or even up to 600 thousand) Iraqi civilians have been killed since the beginning of the US/UK invasion, that 40 per cent of the professional class have left the country, that one in three Iraqis now live in poverty, that 21 per cent of the children are chronically malnourished, that inflation runs at 50 per cent, that 70 per cent of Iraqis don’t have access to clean water, that the average number of daily hours of electricity in Baghdad is 6.5, that there are 2 million Iraqi refugees, that 96 per cent of Iraqi Sunnis think al Maliki’s not up to his job, that only 1 per cent of US/UK employees in Baghdad have a working knowledge of Arabic, … If all that’s true, then it does seem a bit rich to go on about those who come over here and threaten our way of life.

But here’s hoping Gordon Brown will be an enlightened public servant, build affordable houses, improve our health service, protect the vulnerable and shape this island into a model place to live. Pity about the multi-billion-pound arms’ trade though and no objection raised to all that stuff lobbed on Iraq: cruise missiles, cluster bombs, white phosphorus and God knows what.

That line I didn’t write that’s on the imprint page of my books: ‘Diana Souhami asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work’ – it sounds odd, sort of defensive and aggressive.

Of course there are issues to do with ‘intellectual property’, plagiarism and copyright law behind this assertion made on my behalf. The struggle for ownership control of words images and music is not going well for those on the high moral ground. Attempts to stop copyright misuse often seem silly - like that exhortation on cinema screens for us to snitch on anyone we see downloading the movie to their ipod. What might follow? A citizen’s arrest of a Shrek goon by the usherette. The goon’s thirteenth caution, a fine, six months in prison.

It seems there’s an unbridgeable gap between copyright and the ‘digital environment’. From this web page zillions of people worldwide may at this moment be downloading multiple copies of excerpts of my works and lavishly distributing them for impermissible use. And if I Google my name in that solipsistic anxious way (do lots of authors with fragile identities do this) and go into Images, among pictures of me and my book jackets there’s a Guidebook for Lesbian Parents, a woman’s bottom captioned Diana Swimwear, a violet-grower by the name of Richard Battenfield and publications by sundry Souhamis most of whom are anxious not to be related to me. Anarchy rules. I assert the moral right not to be identified as the author of these works.

Meanwhile with all this free flow of words authors get poorer by the hour. According to research commissioned by the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society and carried out by the University of Bournemouth, the average income of a UK author is one-third below the national average wage. Only one in five makes their living just by writing….But even so I’m on the side of anarchy. I’m far more anxious about the consequences of infringing some ferocious individual’s copyright than protecting my own stuff. I’m not going to assert I don’t want that peculiar pompous sentence asserted because I don’t want to be worse off than I am, but I view it as an ineffectual paper dart.

Blog sounds like clag. My ranty clag will be a bin for stuff that’s not for publication. Emptied often into cyberspace.

These words to do with computing - blogs and downloads, widgets and bollocks, who coins them I wonder. Naughty boys I suppose.

And I’m not the only person in the world who can’t tell a widget from a geek and is scared of their computer and its psychotic ways.I need my computer to write my books for me. More of us now write books than read them and we’re all on the margins of publishing except for celebrities. If you’re not a celebrity you’re an oik or a mortal. Do you know publishers pay stores like Waterstones to put their chosen books in the window or front of the shop or in dump bins or even to stock titles at all. And they pay for all this 3 for 2 malarkey. Coconut Chaos got stuck under Travel to make it unfindable. Consigned to dust.

The computer screen is a mirror and microchips are now embedded in our brains. As a species we’ve evolved into narcissists. In the hallowed Apple Store in Regent Street machines rule. They are beautiful. Gurus in blue, circle to help and reassure and instruct novices like me. The place is a sanctuary of promise. Soon I’ll be as clean and cool and clever as my machine.

I take my genius MacBook down to Mill Cottage. Can’t get my email. I phone the Apple helpline. For fifteen minutes an electronic voice tells me to hold. Then the line goes dead. I try again. And again. After a lifetime of frustration a person tells me I need an external modem. My machine only understands wireless. I trudge up the lane in the rain to the farm with my machine in a backpack. I ask Annie if she’s got wireless. She says they’ve got lots and do I want one. I ask Tim. I download offload upload via Netgear and trudge back home. The power’s now down in the cottage because of the wind and the rain. I light candles and settle by the stove with a lined pad and a pencil. O perfect peace.