Yesterday Italy won the 2006 World Cup in Berlin. Next week the whole team will be up for sale as Juventus & Co. are relegated after the match-fixing scandal engulfs Italy’s top clubs. You couldn’t make it up. The Penalty Shoot-Out was the best ever. Not one of the penalty takers failed to beat the goalkeeper…including the French player who failed to score. A millimetre lower and it would have been a Geoff Hurst Special…in off the underside of the bar.

The sensation of the five-week tournament was not the football but Zinedine Zidane retaliating to a wind-up from Marco Materazzi at the end of last night’s final with a full-on head-butt. Your mother and sister are whores seemed to be the gist of it…although The Guardian succeeded in persuading the world’s press that the offending word was terrorist. Oooh! Zidane was sent off of course. But it will be interesting to see what happens to Materazzi.

Wayne Rooney’s celebrity wife got herself sent home in disgrace for snorting cocaine…which is enough to make anyone stamp on their opponent’s private parts. So he got himself sent off too. In medieval times battles always began with an exchange of insults. John Cleese gives a good imitation of how it was done in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Australian cricketers are the best at this game…but nowadays it is seen as Best Practice in all sports. What matters is to win not lose…not how you play the game. The Aussies have toned it down a bit since microphones were installed in the stumps and pick up every word. Perhaps that is why they lost the Ashes in England last year.

We drove across the island to friends...and all agreed that the French deserved to win. How the two girls managed to talk the whole time without ever missing the important plays baffled the males of the species…multi-tasking in action. Anyway a fun evening…with cheese and wine to help it along. It was a cracker of a game too. And all praise to the German organisers and the Argentinean referee. I must do it again in four year’s time…when I’m 64…almost.

Yesterday morning I was up at crack ‘o dawn putting the final touches to the Shepherd on Climate project by posting Right Science and Blog ‘n Web. A hurried breakfast then the Orient Express to the Grand Hotel and my water taxi to Lusterö. As a final bold flourish my Climate Blog opens with the words: ‘I have now said everything I have to say about Global Warming for the time being. Address to send information about Climate Weaponry Programs is P.O. Box 36, Rye, Sussex TN31 7WP England. The modern way is to Blog ‘n Web the message. So here is the Shepherd on Climate website and the blog’s Declaration of Independence. The Hathaway Great Hedge of India Fund and the US Bill Gateway Project for Privatising the United Nations Organisation are not funding this Blog ‘n Web.’

Alan had a form-filling errand to attend to at the offices of the Swedish Tax Authorities so we took ourselves off to Norrtälje for the afternoon. We were braced for a long hot frustrating afternoon but found the place completely empty. Alan did his errand. So I did one too returning to Svedudden with a print-out from the Swedish Government computers telling Awl & Sundree that I was registered in Matteusförsamling in Stockholmskommun in Stockholmslän, was married on 2/8-69 and divorced on 28/1-85, lived in Sweden from 27/9-68 to 17/9-73 and returned for another Cultural Massage on 16/1-98 before departing for 48 Regent Street in Cambridge on 4/1-02. My whole life flashes before me as if through a glass darkly…and I thought I signed in at Bromma Kyrka where I was wed.

This Personbevis of mine…duly stamped and signed…is the first stage in my Residence Permit Application Process. The next step is more daunting. I must present myself and stand in line at the Migration Office on Pyramidvägen… 10-minutes walk from Solna Centrum. Worthy Oriental Gentlemen seeking admittance to the UK can guess what lies before me. How fortunate to have been denied the pleasure of visiting Her Majesty’s Immigration Office in Croydon.

My fourth Swedish journal entry was written aboard m/s Sjöbris this morning as it navigated the deeps and shallows of Stockholm’s Norra Skärgård en route for Östernå. Blidösundsbolaget have managed to keep going with the help of a 3000-strong fan club and some shrewd wheeling and dealing in the Skärgård Steamboat Market dominated by Vaxholmsbolaget…and immortalised in song by the Swedish Troubadour Evert Taube.

Back in the 80s & 90s Alan Pryke would research, produce and present his own music programmes for Radio Sweden International. One week he had the legendary Stockholm Blues Man Roffe Wikström on his scripting board. Rolf still turns out several times a year for Blidösund’s programme of Music Cruises but Alan’s RSI Wikstrom Show has vanished into the cellars of Radiohuset along with his Benny Anderson, Björn Ulvaeus and Robert Wells shows.

Sweden is a small country with a population of between nine and ten million. But outside of Sweden…in Finland and Minnesota for instance…there are as many Swedish-speakers. Beyond this linguistic enclave there is an English-Speaking Swedish Diaspora of several times this size gathered in the great world cities like Sydney, Johannesburg, New York and Los Angeles. These are the direct descendents of Swedish Settlers who emigrated under great hardship in the 19th century and then by choice in the 20th to make a better life for their children. But this is not the whole story.

Sweden punches well above her weight on the global stage…and has done so for many decades. The success of The Swedish Model is part of the story. But Sweden’s Neutrality Diplomacy and her Human Rights Agenda in Foreign Affairs…long before the failure of the British Labour Party dissident socialist Robin Cook to implant the heresy amidst the imperial culture of the British Foreign Office…have also earned Sweden many international admirers.

Sweden’s World Broadcasting Service has only ever had a tiny fraction of the resources of the BBC World Service. But Sweden’s influence as an English Language World Broadcaster during the 50-years of the Cold War was out of all proportion to its size. Most World Listeners regarded world services as Lord Haw-Haw style propaganda exercises...with suspicions about BBC Bias steadily mounting since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. But Sweden has always been trusted. Indeed this non-bias ran so deep that even Swedish politicians rarely intervened.

Small budgets allowed producers at Radio Sweden International to introduce innovations in style, substance and format that might take decades to permeate through the top-heavy hierarchies of the BBC. Alan Pryke invented the Music Documentary with his ABBA programmes in the 1980s two decades before the BBC starting commissioning Outside Production Companies to prepare this ear food for evening listening at peak time on BBC Radio Two.

Programme formats like Andrew Marr’s Start of the Week, Libby Purves’ Midweek and Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time were features of Radio Sweden’s short-wave broadcasts…spliced into home-spun imitations of Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America or Roy Plomley’s Desert Islands Discs. Indeed 20 years before John Peel took his microphone out of the studio for the BBC’s Home Truths Alan Pryke was doing Home Truths for Radio Sweden International.

Unnoticed too has been Alan Pryke’s political interviews. In an age of the Rottweiler Interview of a Brian Redhead, John Humphries, Jeremy Paxman or Jonathan Ross and the Talk Show Approach of a David Frost, Jimmy Young, Michael Parkinson or Channel Four’s Richard & Judy, Alan Pryke’s interviews with up-and-coming politicians like Anna Lindh have a style that blends respect with curiosity and tempers scepticism with affection for the values that the Swedish politician bring to public life…consensus, cooperation, fairness, equality, decency and common courtesy.

From 1984 to 1990 Anna headed up Sweden’s Young Social Democrats and from 1991 to 1994 she chaired the board of Stockholm City Theatre and was Stockholm City Commissioner for Culture and Leisure. She was a close friend of three powerful Social Democrat Women…Birgitta Dahl, Margot Wahlström, and Mona Sahlin. Today you will find her body in Stockholm’s Katarina Kyrka…Catharine’s Church. Nearby lies the body of an inheritor of Carl-Michael Bellman’s mantle Cornelius Vreeswijk who died in 1987 at the young age of 50. Anna Lindh was assassinated on the second anniversary of 9-11 at the age of 46. Her real killers have not been brought to justice…nor have Petra Kelly’s.

England feels far away. A week after leaving Rye my thoughts are turning to the words of John Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over)…

So this is Sweden
And what have I done
Another week older
And a new one just begun.

Well one thing I have done is to slip behind on my daily blogs...ws 185 for Tuesday 4th July was posted to the blogsite only this morning. I thought I had it under control. Slippage was intentional.

Upon moving to Sweden I decided to take a Here I am in a Foreign Land approach. But I felt the need of a few days of settling in before writing my Letter From Sweden. To avoid falling behind I placed blogstuff for each day on file…Here is One I Prepared Earlier sort of thing. Not a good idea. First I canned Monday’s blogstuff and wrote about Almadalen and Ségolène Royal. The next day I canned Tuesday’s blogstuff to write about Linné af Uppsala…and it has gone on like that all week. But worse was to come. Blogstuff on file meant my Post-it Pad Tracking System was redundant. Right? Wrong. A Digital Blog Diary has now been inaugurated to keep my daily record. Post-it Pads are forthwith obsolete. Did Alistair Cooke have these problems?

Laurie Lee the author of Cider with Rosie used to write from ten in the morning to half past four in the afternoon without a break...and divide his time between Slad in Gloucestershire and Chelsea in London. J.B. Priestley, H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse found the need to set rules and introduce discipline into their writing lives. Priestley liked regular meals and an afternoon walk when on the Isle of Wight for instance. Wells left England for several months each year to write a new book. Walking the dog was an important part of Wodehouse’s daily routine in Le Touquet.

These writers also had women close to them who understood their Mode of Production and were content in their own lives. But I doubt this is a gender thing…more likely a writer’s thing. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, Ursula Le Guin, J.K. Rowling…the presence in the background of their daily working life of a sympathetic partner to acknowledge and nurture the writer and the writ was probably important for them too.

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989)…another good thing to come out of Seattle…made her fame with The Group before writing The Company She Keeps. Her second marriage was to a working writer…the American critic Edmund Wilson. Her reputation is on the up now men and women who write are being judged on their writing. A writer’s needs are more complex than those implied by the image of the starving poet scribbling away in his frozen garret might imply.

Those who have only ever written under duress or necessity rarely understand the writer’s need to write. George Orwell’s essay Why I Write is worth consulting…Colin Wilson’s Outsider and Arthur’s Koestler’s Act of Creation are also attempts by writers to explain. The best writers may also be adaptable with an ability to produce their work under almost any circumstances. For Tom Paine and Alexander Solzhenitsyn it was hardly a life of Reilly never knowing if today was to be their last as they rotted away in the Bastille and the Siberian Gulags respectively. Solzhenitsyn is even quoted as saying ‘a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him’.

I move around more than most…although Hans Christian Anderson drifted between benefactors…so I prefer a minimum of six weeks in one place…and 12-18 weeks is ideal. After this I hit my 26-week ceiling and lose enthusiasm. I pencil in two weeks of work disruption with a 50% fall in productivity when I move. My first week is for tying up loose ends from whence I came and setting up the infrastructure for whither I am headed.

By the end of the second week I expect productivity to be back to normal. Organising a new bank card, setting up my Swedish online banking, getting a Sundbyberg Library Card and an SL Season Ticket…anywhere in Stockholm County for ₤1.50 per day…are all first week errands. Next week it is Residence Permit Application and an apartment in Lund or Cambridge for the winter but these are not part of the normal moving routines. By next Saturday I hope to be up to speed with blog backlog eliminated and remedial website work completed. This gives me a clear week for William Franklin and IG-Index and another clear week to immerse myself in the idea of Fawlty Laptops.

In 175 days my blogyear will be at an end. Nights are drawing in. So I will sign off this blog with the lyrics of Happy Christmas (War is Over)…ain’t search engines wunderbarful?

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

War is over
If you want it
War is over
Now

...music & lyrics by John Lennon (1940-1980).

Stockholm has been more like Hersonissos on the Greek island of Crete or Puerto de Morgan on Gran Canarias for the past few days. The Swedish evening paper Aftonbladet refers to it as grillvädret…which is either a call for barbecues in Djursholm or a warning against making common cause with Mad Dogs and Englishmen by parading in the midday sun. Temperatures have been in the high twenties all week with no sign of abating…30o C is 86o F.

One of Cultura’s clients works from a studio on Trädgårdsgatan…the street where my son bought an apartment. Yesterday Alan had some recording to do and I had some whisky, cognac and Imperial Leather soap to pass on so we met up for lunch in no-man’s land…not the best of metaphors but distances are much the same. Lunch at 20 paces.

I came away from lunch with an invitation to visit the family seat Svedudden on the island of Ljusterö north of Stockholm up Norrtälje way for a couple of days over the weekend…Sunday to Tuesday. I am not the oldest friend of the family but as Alan’s Best Man we go back some way…37 years to the wedding…and have watched our children gradually convince themselves that they have nothing to learn from their parents…as all children do…for a while.

Over the meatballs and rice Alan mentioned that his daughter lived close by. It was as well he did because I bumped into her this evening going through the next check-out. Had Alan not forewarned me I am not sure I would have accosted the beautiful young lady with the rather sad chat-up line: ‘haven’t we met somewhere before?’ But Nikki recognised me upon the instant…unless she is in the habit of throwing her arms around strange men who make approaches to her at supermarket checkouts. In Boldness is Genius. We chatted for a while before going our separate ways. ‘Hälsningar till Mamma och Pappa! Two days later I did…and was told it made her mother’s day.

I was on my way home after parading up and down Skeppsbro in the midday sun like some demented Englishman. I was searching for the offices of the Blidösundsbolaget who ferry passengers out to Östernå Färjeläge at nine o’clock every Sunday morning. From here it would be a short 5-minute ferry ride to the southern end of Ljusterö and a waiting car…compleat with plain-clothes chauffeur. Two months in India and Pakistan in June of ’74 taught me that in hot weather…without air conditioning…the trick is to move slowly. The advice served me well.

I found out that the Östernå boat is called Sjöbris…Sea Breeze…that it departs from the Grand Hotel at 0900 and that the single fare is just five pounds…65 kronor…which is very reasonable for a 90-minutes voyage at peak season. Unfortunately it also transpired that tickets are sold onboard and not in advance so my polite questioning and everybody else’s helpful directions were of no avail. But to give myself a sense of success before returning home on the Orient Express I dropped in at Vette Katten between Centralstation and Hötorget…an old journal-writing haunt.

I must wean myself off these nostalgia trips before I turn into a grumpy old man….you are there before me. It wasn’t like it used to be…and for good reason. Just as hospitals no longer have the Matrons and Ward Sisters who once ran their world with military discipline, so the old-style Konditori Madams have disappeared…as a species. The modern style may give benefits to someone but none of them trickle down to the customer…but then trickle down never does.

I am 5-days into my 5-week sojourn in this Venice of the North so I am betwixt and between the hither and thither. A postcard is more fun on your mantelpiece than an e-greetings card from an inkjet printer so I acquired half a dozen postcards before settling down to my coffee. What joy and happiness I would unleash upon half a dozen households!

One postcard gave authority in my absence for Martin Hutchings to pour ladles-full of tender loving care upon Vemara…once his pride and joy. She needs to be pumped out now and again and there are no longer any decent batteries aboard. So instead she is set up for shore power to do the job at the flick of the pump switch. But the shore power needs connecting and disconnecting at the mains box up on the bank.

Then there is this year’s maintenance job…Vemara’s mast. Martin has been given authority to negotiate a deal with any passing crane. I was hoping for one before I left but he never came. I am thinking of taking Vemara out of the water over the winter. One reason Connie gave for not berthing Vemara in Visby over the winter of ‘98/’99 was her need to be pumped regularly. We could have rigged-up some sort of ball-cock system. But Connie had other worries.

Another recipient was a PO Box…not a household. The Occupier has received postcards from William Shepherd for years. ‘Arrived here at the weekend. Wonderful having decent digital access again. Have really been going to town. Put up a climate website. Well on the way to organising a proper site for selling books. Few more days of webwork. Then over to creative writing. Best wishes. William Shepherd.’ William Who? And why the telegramese?

One day these postcards will stop coming. Later they will provide reliable evidence of the activities of the Green Pimpernel at the turn of the century. They seek him here...they seek him there...but he moves beneath their radar everywhere. Twenty Thirty Four is set in the Baltic and on the edge of the North Atlantic Ocean. Who is William of Salisbury?

Last Saturday on the flight to Stockholm I sat next to a Finnish lady in her mid-sixties. I never took her name but we chatted in Swedish for much of the two hour flight. She lives in Nykvarn a few miles west of Södertälje…I looked it up on arrival as I thought I knew Stockholm County but could not place Nykvarn. Stockholm has continued to expand since I was part of the building industry providing the physical infrastructure for this expansion in the early 1970s.

There has been no overall growth in the Swedish population…although the immigrant population has been steadily increasing to its present ten percent…but there has been a continual movement of the population into Sweden’s three City Regions in the southern third of the country. This migration to the cities has happened since the 1930s despite massive and continuing public subsidies to the fir trees in the northern two-thirds of Sweden.

The largest of Sweden’s three city regions is Stockholm in the east of the country protected from marauding Russians by an archipelago of hundreds of tiny islands that shelters Stockholm from the Baltic and makes it a paradise for yachts and motor cruisers. Number Two is Göteborg in the west…with the Norwegian capital Oslo a few Swedish Miles to the north and Newcastle 24-hours away at the western end of the DFDS Water Trail across the North Sea.

The third significant city region is the former Danish city of Malmö in Skåne six hours away from Stockholm to the south and connected by the longest bridge in Europe to the Danish capital of Copenhagen. The medieval university town of Lund is a 20 minutes train journey away from Malmö so Malmö Centre will be an accommodation option.

My temporary Finnish companion and her husband had spent their adult lives in Sweden and although she spoke fluent in Swedish he had never learnt Swedish. She was in London for a month to visit one of their two daughters…an interior designer and college lecturer who speaks fluent English howbeit with a hybrid Swedish and London Home Counties accent. But her grandson…like most English children…had English as his only language.

The teaching of languages in English schools is so appalling that only university studies in a language…to the exclusion of everything else…produces fluency from within the education system. This is in sharp contrast to other countries in Europe where fluency in Foreign Languages is regarded as a basic right by the teachers and a rite of passage to a better world by the teachees. And fluency to a European does not mean the ability to say Manchester United in a foreign accent…too often the Englander’s interpretation of the idea of fluency in a language.

I picked up on my fellow traveller’s Finnish dialect almost immediately…within a sentence or two. This facility with accents is unusual for a non-Swedish native speaker. I was familiar with the Finnish accent in Swedish having spent time in the Baltic with Connie on a couple of occasions. We spoke English together but Connie was fluent in Swedish, Finnish and English…and her German was excellent and her French on a par with mine. Her family came from the 10% of Finns in the Swedish-speaking coastal regions of Finland…formerly part of the Old Swedish Empire. Sweden has dialects and it is easy to place Swedes geographically but they are not deviate like English dialects. Foreigners can go around for weeks in parts of England…like London…and hardly understand anything they hear.

Swedes flatter me that my Swedish is fluent…and it is true that I understand them. But I am not bilingual in the way my daughter is…this involves pronunciation too. My Swedish does not begin to compare with my English and my written and grammatical work would place me firmly in the bottom quartile of a Swedish high school class.

But also my Swedish cannot bear comparison with the English that Ingrid, Connie and Heidi have been taught and have learnt to speak and write. I never ceased to be amazed at the extent of their dexterity with the nuances of English…about which nineteen out of twenty English native-speakers are ignorant. And I would not be awarded good marks in any equivalent tests in Swedish to the Cambridge University Certificate of Proficiency in English in which they each distinguished themselves. Their exams were similar to the Use of English exams that replaced Compulsory Latin as a Cambridge entry requirement in the 1960s…taken by just a percent or two of English citizens.

The highest accolade for my Swedish came while waving farewell to a middle-age couple as they stepped off a train in Växjö. ‘It was so nice,’ they told me, ‘to pass the time of day chatting with someone from Norrland.’ Stockholmers roar with laughter when I tell them this story as it dovetails neatly with their stereotypes for both Norrlännings and Smålannings. But I was well chuffed…as they say in Oldham…because I had passed myself off as a Swede. I had broken out of my foreign ghetto and concealed my engelsk brytning…Swedish for an English accent.

Swedes call the Hjulsta line that I ride to Sundbyberg the Orient Express. The reason? It runs from the cafés in the City Centre beloved by Iranians, Turks, Ethiopian, Somalis and Kurds…and by me…to the main immigrant residential suburbs like Kista where Bill Gates has established his Swedish base camp…but more on my adventures on the Orient Express and my encounters with Microsoft…and the reasons for it…another day.

Any language is difficult to talk and write well. But you only need to do it well if you use it professionally. One of the ways I have made my living over the past 15-years has been with my skills as a wordsmith. I write very good English and this skill is in demand. Another skill that is in demand is talking well in English…and as a result my colleague Alan’s voice is in demand from an International Voiceover Brokering Service that trades in mp3 files. There is little money in translating. The market is crowded and web-based brokering has forced down wage rates.

Cultura has moved into Global Translation Brokering after income plunged 60% in 2003 and 2004 so our business now has two distinct Strategic Business Units…English Voiceovers for Swedish Filmmakers and Voice and Text Outsourcing for Swedish-based TNCs…trans-national corporations. We also did some speech writing in 2005 for Telia Sonera but it was a one-off…though very well received. We value our time at Web Designer and not Translator rates...and seek out profitable niches in a crowded and competitive market so we can command comparable rates.

When I came to Sweden in ‘68 it was Swedish Government policy for immigrants to learn Swedish. It was also an entry requirement for university. There was a debate at the time about halvspråkighet or dubbelspråkighet…this was relevant later when considering how to bring up our two young children linguistically…but it was not particularly relevant to me at the time as I was allowed to take university exams in English…and this I have always done so as it seemed slightly perverse not to. The purpose of exams is to pass so why penalise yourself unnecessarily? However lectures were usually given in Swedish and course readings were about 50:50 Swedish and English…although in the late ‘60s students were expected to take Danish and Norwegian in their stride as well. German and French were out.

When my son returned to Sweden from Australia in ‘94 he ran into a problem because, although he had attended Uppsala Katedralskolan the year prior to applying for university, he had been out of Sweden at Nambour High School near Brisbane in Queensland for the full academic year and then spent three months travelling.

This took him over the stipulated limit so he was placed in the Foreign Student category. His university career began…like his father’s…with the Swedish equivalent of English as a Foreign Language. He followed it up with a five-credit course in Swahili but that was to do with collecting credits to come high enough up the list for the course he wanted to read. The courses were a waste of his time and the Swedish taxpayers’ money. My time and their money were better spent.

As a result of all this I have a fairly accurate measure of how language learning works after puberty. My rule of thumb is that you can understand normal Swedish talk after three months, hold a decent conversation in Swedish after six months and write Swedish after nine months. But I met English people who had been in the country for decades and still hardly spoke a word of the language. They would claim…and many Swedes believe this to be true…that Swedish is a hard language to learn. They are right…but often for the wrong reason.

Sweden is a small country and English is the lingua franca of the world of the Onward & Upward Brigade. It might not survive a serious onslaught from Spanish and Mandarin but it is weathering well. Swedes…like the Danes Norwegians, Finns and the Dutch...speak excellent English and take every opportunity to practice it. This is the reason it’s hard for the English to learn Swedish. They are not allowed the three months of torture…for the Swede…necessary to reach and cross over the threshold of understanding and the six months to enter conversations.

The Swedish language itself is a mix of English and German with a core of a few hundred small Swedish words. The things Swedish has going for it is that Swedish word order is English and not German, there are hardly any gender confusions with Swedish nouns as there are with French, Spanish and German ones, irregular verbs do not exist and Swedish pronunciation follows the rules unlike English where every other word is an exception and the classic English example is that ghoti spells fish…’gh’ as in enough, ‘o’ as in women and ‘ti’ as in motion.

One beautiful barmy spring evening eight years ago David Attenborough was inaugurated into the company of the oldest scientific society in England and elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London with the right to put the initials FLS after his name. There was just one other person elected that evening…a botanical illustrator by the name of Connie Lindqvist. I know because I was there drinking tea beforehand at the society’s library in Piccadilly.

I was both proud and pleased for ‘My Connie’…but I had to drag her kicking and screaming to London and she couldn’t get away quickly enough. ‘I just draw flowers and paint tiles. They can post me the certificate. And there’s no way I’m going to use those initials. Everyone will know FLS really means ****ing Lazy Sod!’’. But a ‘just’ with Connie’s talents is an impossible dream to millions of us lesser mortals. Here are two of Connie’s popular downloads.

After that it seemed a shame not to exploit Connie’s talents as a Botanical Illustrator…and a Skilled Mariner. Connie was brought up in the small town of Moinio in Finnish Lapland…a day’s journey away from the borders with Sweden, Norway and Russia. Choose which way to point your skies when you set off in the morning. Moinio is up above the Arctic Circle and a long way from Helsinki in the south of the country. Father Christmas’ Grotto is close by…big business for a few weeks every year. I missed her when I passed through en route to Moskva’s Red Square in the summer of ’67. It then took 25 years for us to meet up. She must have been indoors when I drove by.

Carl von Linné’s international reputation started with his Lapland Journey. In a sense he never looked back and the rest of his life was a series of new Lapland Journeys…amidst much political work. Science has always been deeply political. The official party line of a fellowship of independent scientists sharing their knowledge in one big happy international community is utter nonsense. That particular dream of Francis Bacon disappeared into the coffers of corporations and down military cannon barrels within weeks of his Idea of Science entering the Public Domain.

Big Science is one of the biggest threats to the adventure of civilisation on the planet and the pursuit of happiness for its citizens…6,527 million by today’s count. The theology is political theatre…and 95% propaganda. But there is promise of a Sane Humane Ecological Future in that tiny five percent remaining. Today I sent out some thoughts on Science Wars and a strategic response by the Human Scale Movement that might eliminate Giant Wars…why not?

Carl Linnaeus invited friends, colleagues, visitors and local residents to accompany him on regular Saturday morning Public Botanical Walks. His students meanwhile were sent to foreign lands thousands of miles away to bring specimens back to Uppsala. Cook never set sail on his voyages of discovery without a Linnaeus man alongside him.

So I hatched a fiendish plan to follow in the footsteps of Linnaeus starting with a repeat of the Great Man’s visit to Gotland in the summer of 1741. Once a pattern had been set Connie and I would take Vemara up the Swedish Coast, repeat his Lapland Journey and get married in Moinio Church…although I regret not mentioning that bit to Connie.

One of the first things we discovered was that Linnaeus was on horseback. As we were travelling on foot there was no simple way to match his progress. And this was important because plants are seasonal and part of the project agenda was to compare 1998 with 1741 with the thought of setting up a system for measuring species diversity and its drift.

Fortunately our project design included the idea of approaching Gotland the way Captain James Cook's ship Endeavour approached new lands in the South Seas on his round-the-world voyages. We took Vemara into twelve Gotland harbours and picked up Linnaeus’ trail afresh each time. By the end of our Gotland Journey in ’98 I was convinced we had a workable concept. My plan was to return in two or three years time with a film crew onboard.