William Shepherd

Yesterday I returned to a place that may one day be immortalised by the radioscript Report from a Swedish Village. The village is Kungsholmen and my old haunt was the Chinese Pavilion built out over the water on Mälarstrand. It was here that I wrote the afterword of The Return of the Ancient Mariner 15-years ago in the form of an introduction to the book by my son Nicholas John…after William Shepherd had disappeared while on a trip to Colombia. Here is yesterday’s journal entry…my seventh from Sweden this summer…written at Mälarstrand Konditori.

William Shepherd * born 17/07-1946 * Eltham, London

I have almost come to terms intellectually with the idea that I am 60 and entering the final third or quarter of my life on earth. Life is the damndest thing…you come from nothing, you're going back to nothing, what have you lost? Nothing. I can get my head round the Priestley Metaphysical Option…the individual is everything in life and nothing beyond life. The transfer of life through the species is the meaning of life…a variation on the Selfish Gene approach. Nonetheless I have not yet given up on the individual and his Is That All There Is question.

The little individual has two roads to immortality…passing on himself or passing on his acts…as in Acts of the Apostles…thinking not only of art, books and memes but also of attitudes, values and ways of going about things. This thought dovetails with Buckminster Fuller’s idea that the universe somehow manages to give more individual brownie points for work that is done for all people and all time than…at the other extreme…for instant gratification of the little individual’s own needs…with a sliding scale in between. However the arithmetic is crucial.

To produce something for everyone and everytime…Lao Tzu’s Tao-Te and Albert Einstein’s e=mc2 get close…is so infinitesimally improbable for the little individual that the expectation of doing so is a kind of madness. You can improve the odds during the course of a lifetime. But it is still wildly improbable. However the odds start to improve when instead of everyone everywhere and everytime you go for one family half a dozen generations hence. With luck the Fuller curve may even be non-linear with a Cosmic Pareto’s Principle that gives you 80% of the brownie points for breaking 20% of the bonds of Kierkegaard’s Paradox…living in time with society and in eternity with yourself.

When I dwelt upon such weighty matters a few years ago for my Last Will and Testament I stipulated that my journals...forty one and rising…should remain in the family for at least 200 years. I gave this a little more thought yesterday on Mälarstrand and decided to stick with it. Here is the other…preceding…part of yesterday’s entry.

Another of my old Stockholm haunts turns out to be quite unchanged. There is something a little eerie about returning to a place two decades later and finding that everything looks and feels the same…while knowing that all the people are either new or have shed their complete collection of trillions of cells six or seven times during those twenty years. It is the same uneasiness I get with the idea of a Neutron Bomb that destroys people leaving property unscathed.

Our governing structures give me similar feelings. They remain unchanged while the actors are swapped around, die off or get replaced. Similar thoughts arose riding the Orient Express to Rådhuset and listening to two Kenyan couples chatting and laughing in Swahili and English across from me. How incredible were the odds against just those particular individuals being there at all. However there is another side to the coin which is just as spooky.

Over a longer time span…take 200 years as I was watching the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice last night that Helena sent in my 60th Birthday Package...almost the whole of the physical infrastructure is completely replaced. People are the same as they have always been…but only in their bodies; not on their bodies or in their heads.

Taken together these Rates of Renewal represents a delicate mechanism that we meddle with at our peril. The Koyaanisqatsi that the Hopi speak of has been thrown out of balance not by Modern Man but by the structures constructed to adjust these rates. One of these is the Rule of Five unleashed by the Mechanism of Central Banking. Life Rates are where it is at...metaphysically. And Political Economy is not good with Time...theoretically.

I never met Anna Lindh…the Swedish Foreign Minister who was assassinated three years ago. There was a time in the early 90s when I thought it inevitable that our paths would cross. But that was before her star shot high into the political stratosphere…while mine crashed to earth with the UK Referendum Party's failure to enter parliament in 1997. From 1991 to 1994 Anna was in charge of Culture and Leisure in Stockholm while I was involved with Green Party affairs in Sweden and was friends with Elisabet Spens who worked with Anna on women and green issues.

Whenever I was in Stockholm Elisabet would suggest some gathering where Anna would be present so she could make an introduction. Elisabet’s real strength was as a networker and I should have trusted her judgement…in the 18th century she would have been running a salon in Gamla Stan. But I am not a natural politician…though I can switch on the charm when I am in the mood. D’Arcy is my second name...seeking an English Miss Bennett. My first question is to ask why it is necessary, what is the agenda and what do we have to talk about…not the right questions.

It was Sabine Kurjo McNeill who put me in touch with Elisabet. ‘You must promise me you will call her the moment you get to Sweden!’ I have only met Sabine once in person…at the 1981 Fourth World Assembly…but we hold a watching brief on each other’s activities and regularly copy emails to one another. Some day this might burst into active collaboration on some project or other but has yet to do so. Sabine may be the most intelligent woman I have ever met. A few months ago I tried to get my head round her research into financial markets but eventually gave up.

I would meet Elisabet at one of the Vete Kattens in Stockholm…Östermalm or Kungsgatan…as we were connoisseurs of this particular Coffee House Genre. Elisabet once took me to meet someone living in August Strindberg’s old rooms on Drottninggatan…opposite the Holographic Museum near the old university campus at Odenplan. I had a brief flurry with holograms after buying a supply of pendants and watches in Canterbury imported from Hong Kong. On my return to Old England I got the idea of Det Holografiska Bolaget…but have yet to make it happen. I still have ₤1500 of stock in store…worth either ₤100 or ₤10000 today…if I can find a buyer.

Fourth World Review published four of my articles during the early 90s…Real Questions on Land (1990 fwr 38); The Luddites (1991 fwr 43); Not Guilty (1991 fwr 48) and Peaceful Anarchy (1995 fwr 69). Then there was The Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997) and my translation of Lena Rainer’s book For Sweden Carl XVI Gustav In Keeping With The Times published for the 50th birthday of the King of Sweden on 30th April 1996. This is enough to put me in the Monarchists Camp if another English Civil War breaks out…and it is not out of the question.

In Sweden’s equivalent of Books In Print…the library data base…I pop up as the translator of this book…put out in English for the Minnesotan branch of the Swedish Diaspora. At the time I was more interested in the forty thousand kronor I got for my work. I gave a copy of the book to Alan’s wife Magdalena for her 50th Birthday. As she rather likes the king’s wife my dedication was: ‘to Magdalena as the closest I will ever come to Drottning Sylvia. Best wishes on your 50th birthday from William Shepherd by appointment Court Translator to King Carl XVI Gustav.’

When I started writing the Swedish politics book I was a poor penniless poet living on ₤40 a week of Enterprise Allowance and commuting between a Bed & Breakfast establishment in St John’s Court in Canterbury and a small room at the top of my old college friend Peter Mechlin Thompson’s house on Church Road in Watford. My daughter was 16 years old at the time and had been asking all sorts of questions about politics and economics so I wrote it for her and her generation…and conceived it as a book that would one day be used for English language teaching in China. I dedicated it to those who lost their lives in Tiananmen Square in the year of its birth…1989.

I had no inclination to tout my wares around the publishing houses suspecting…quite rightly it turns out with the hindsight of 15 years in the game…that my book would end up on the slush pile with a few hundred other unsolicited manuscripts. Publishers occasionally take on an unknown fiction writer but non-fiction is always commissioned. I started up my own publishing company…and called it Academic Inn Books in memory of Professor Leopold Kohr.

But it was not all smooth sailing. Just as I was gearing up to write the book my daughter ran away from Mummy in Uppsala and turned up on her Daddy’s doorstep declaring that she wanted a job in England and had done with Sweden. It was wonderful having her around but my living conditions were not conducive to taking in lodgers. So I appealed to my elder brother John…and he agreed to let me have the use of his house at Regent Square in Rye for six weeks…bless him…long enough to help my daughter settle and his young brother fulfil his writing ambitions.

In the beginning the book did not come easy because it got itself entangled with two other manuscripts. But once I realised this and split it off from a manuscripts on Nuclear Power Politics and some remarks about Maps and Models things fell into place. By the time I embarked on Tor Anglia for a few months on Kungsholmen the book was with the typesetters in Glastonbury and Helena was in a rented room in Canterbury…waiting at tables in the evening.

Some time in the 1980s I decided to become a writer. But I did not become one until the 1990s. And not until the mid-2000s…twenty years after my career change…did I start calling myself a writer. However my first ever published piece was The Practicability of a Fixed Channel Link that was published in 1966 in the Journal of the Cambridge University Engineering Society after I had won that year’s Cambridge Engineering Essay Prize.

This gave me my first taste of creative writing on non-fictional subjects…although the first glimpse I had of my potential as a writer came when I won the History Prize in my Greater Erasmus year at Christ’s Hospital Bluecoat School ahead of half a dozen future Oxford History Scholars…including te Latin American scholar Alan Knight. My Channel Tunnel Essay was actually pretty close to being plagiarism but as I had used two sources and not just one I am told it was research. Besides after a few drafts there is not much left of the original source material.

After that nothing entered the public domain until the 1980s...although I was writing plenty of private reports. From 1972 to 1974 three reports found their way to the World Bank…Oman Regional Roads Development Programme, Central Rift Valley Water Development Programme and the City of Blantyre Water Development Programme. And between 1975 and 1980 my private reports became the property of Norton Company of Worcester Massachusetts so nowadays they are the copyrighted property of the French multinational giant Compagnie de Saint-Gobain.

It would take me nearly two decades to escape from the Natural Sciences to which boys who were clever at arithmetic were condemned even if they were really Generalists who could turn their brain to most things. My route seems with hindsight to have been particularly tortuous involving slipping out of Natural Sciences into Mechanical Sciences between school and university and then manoeuvring from Mechanical Sciences to Business Economics and from there to National Economics before a sideways lurch to the soft scientific domain of Economic History.

In the literary record that I put together in 1998 my work for Fourth World Review in the mid-1980s marks the start of my career as a writer. I separate my published work into articles, book reviews and published correspondence. Under Articles there is an essay Towards a Society of the Free in 1982 in the short-lived Fourth World News (1982 fwn26) which was published under my editorship so could be regarded as Vanity Publishing. At the time we were experimenting with a rotating editorship which worked well until Liz Nathaniels slipped in too many Resurgence sentiments for John Papworth’s liking. John was sixty in 1982 so perhaps he was flirting with retirement when he thought up the rotation plan and later thought better of it? Besides he needs to be his own editor as well as publisher.

My first contribution to Fourth World Review was published in 1982 and was called The Fourth Way (1982 fwr20). My next piece was not until four years later when I wrote a Letter from America in the form of a book review entitled Cities, Tribes & Empowerment (1986 fwr29). In 1987 a piece of published correspondence with the title Tutorial on Work (1987 fwr22) was published followed by two articles in 1988…The Future of The Home (1988 fwr27) and Moneyquakes (1988 fwr28). I rounded off my published works for the 1980s with two articles…A Nation of Gardeners (1989 fwr31) and a published correspondence piece on Money & Debt (1989 fwr34).

These eight published pieces set the agenda for my political research over the next two decades. In my 1998 Literary Record my unpublished work was divided up into Radioscripts and Manuscripts. Proverbial Talks (1987) was the only radioscript I showed to anyone. Later it was incorporated into a course given at Färnebo Folkhögskola and is well-suited for an Advanced English Course for Chinese Students…a sequel to the Swedish politics book.

There were three other radioscripts in my 1980s listing…Report from a Swedish Village (1988); Ribbons, Robbers & Robins (1988) and a comedy sketch The Karlsson Affair (1989)….and six manuscripts were…Education for a Virtuous Society (1983)…from my time in Early Childhood Education in Boston; Birmingham as Number One (1986); The Jewish Question (1987); Let The People Sing (1988); Maps Mapping & Modelling (1989) and Green Houses or Blue Moonwaves (1989). Those last two have an interesting provenance…but more on that another day.

In the summer of 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge…poet, essayist and sage…retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton ‘on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire’. The editor of the 1816 edition takes up the tale. ‘In consequence of a slight indisposition an anodyne was prescribed from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading in Purchas's Pilgrimage: Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

Coleridge ‘continued for about three hours in a profound sleep…at least of the external senses…during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions without any sensation or consciousness of effort.’

‘On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. ‘A person on business from Porlock’ interrupted him and he was never able to recapture more than ‘some eight or ten scattered lines and images.’’

To cut a long story short around this time I was prompted to take up the Poet’s mantle to show that Christ’s Hospital could still produce poets. Coleridge’s poem begins like this: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.’

The poem ends like this…with the rap on the door knocker breaking the connection with the Muse just as you reach the word: His flashing eyes, / his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise. I make that 54 lines rather than ‘eight or ten scattered lines and images’ but perhaps editors have felt the need to stretch it out and make a little go a long way.

There is more but these opening few stanzas gave me the rhythm for my poem…part of an epic yet to be written…called Ode For The Common Man. It goes like this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
But lofty thoughts were led astray
By withered minds too blind to see.

Now comes the ancient mariner
With grim tales yet untold
Of troubadours and knights of yore
Cast on a cross of gold.

Their trust they place in graven words
Their sophists speak to lie
But those whom force of law can make
Can law of force defy.

In England’s green and pleasant land
Man thinking heard that Grecian sound
And he allowed that hearth and home
Should n’er be harmed by clerk or gnome.

In truth and justice will we live
With hope and honour in our breast
Out out damn mystics let us be
Farms for people towns for free.

By the end of the 1980s I had figured out that a writer needed to have a book published and had chanced across a short book by Karl Marx about French Politics in the 1840s…two decades before Das Capital. It was a short readable tract that ordinary people could take in a couple of sittings and gave the broad sweep of his Magnus Opus. Others have tried to summarise Marx’ take on the world. But the best job was done by Marx himself before devoting 20 years of his life proving that he had been thinking along the right lines. As there was a chance my scholarly life would tread a similar path I told the gods to dream away to their hearts content…and use me as their scribe.

The initial outline took just a couple of sittings. But for two weeks Swedish politics refused to disentangle itself from two other manuscripts. With hindsight these can be said to have a similar provenance to my Swedish politics book as all three started life as a single manuscript before going their separate ways. One was eventually entitled Maps Mapping & Modelling and the other Green Houses or Blue Moonwaves. My interest in models and climate goes back 15 years and was always mixed up with my interest in the deep politics behind our political parties.

Last month at the annual Grosvenor House Arts & Antiques Fair a portrait was auctioned off at a reserve price of ₤800 000. The portrait had been around since 1932 when it was sold at an auction for ₤54…₤2500 in today’s prices…and shows Queen Elizabeth twelve years before she ascended the throne in 1558 and started her long 44 year reign which ended with her natural death in 1603. Here are the big four portraits of Good Queen Bess.

The new portrait is by an unknown artist and a copy of one in the Royal Collection. Elizabeth moved in circles where portraiture was taken seriously and authorised only a few to be painted during her reign. This latest portrait shows Elizabeth as a young teenager and was thought to have been painted in the 18th or 19th century until a specialist in historical portraits bought it at auction from a private Spanish vendor suspecting that there was a painting hidden beneath. Over the past 300 years artists had brightened the face and added side panels to expand Elizabeth’s sleeves. But parts of the portrait had not been over painted and contained colours consistent with 16th-century pigments.

I was tempted to use the word allegedly about this fortunate find because the art market is awash with forgeries and there are plenty of nervous insurance companies uncertain who to believe. At this level the whole art market is pretty suspect with price fixing, bogus sales, insurance jobs and tax evasion alongside good old run-of-the mill hubris. Indeed art markets can be looked upon as financial devices to ensure the rich stay rich while the poor get poorer.

But there are no grounds for doubting Philip Mould’s version of events. He knows his stuff, did his research, took a gamble and won big. His suspicions were confirmed when tests on the wooden panel also came up with the right date…1546…for the felling of the tree used to make the panel….you look at the space between the grain and match it to weather records with larger spaces between the lines signifying a hotter year. Better than working for your living.

Philippa Gregory is a novelist so she lies to reveal the truth…there is more to love and power than historians unearth in court records. An earlier novel The Virgin’s Lover is about the young Elizabeth while her latest novel The Constant Princess tells the story of Katherine of Aragon…daughter of a warrior queen brought up in the Alhambra...who married for love only to be rejected when King Henry VIII fell in love with Ann Boleyn…Elizabeth’s mother. The Boleyn Inheritance comes out in November. Here is Philippa’s take on the portrait of the young princess.

She is her mother’s daughter…from the rich vanity of the rings on her fingers to the pearl choker necklace at her throat. Typical too of the stylish Boleyn fashion sense is the French hood pushed daringly back on the head to show off the crimson brocade. That is how Ann Boleyn wore her hood…to the very steps of the scaffold. And what an enchanting young woman she is. She has the long Boleyn face with that slightly horsey nose which the Tudors found so beautiful and well-shaped eyebrows set in a high forehead.

This is the girl who became the beauty poets adored and who was courted by every bachelor in Christendom. Her small mouth looks ready to laugh and the round chin has the set of a determined woman who will become a formidable plotter and a powerful politician. Within months of her coronation she was fighting for her life using a combination of female wiles, a brilliant spy service and a whole new definition of a nation and national interest.

I can also see in this portrait the tough indomitable woman she will become and yet also the shades of the frightened child who lost her mother when she was little more than a toddler and learned only when her maids started calling her Lady Elizabeth that she was no longer royal. This is the Elizabeth who schemed unceasingly for the throne, who could face the greatest sea power the world had ever seen and yet could take to her bed to avoid a decision genuinely sick with fear. Here we have a unique glimpse of a girl who had tasted the glamour of royal favour and the shame of royal disdain. She had been declared sole heir to the throne and then proclaimed a bastard and disinherited.

Three months ago I wrote about the idea of a Center for Conspiracy Studies. Such an institute would interest itself in assassinations and develop a danger rating system…one to five, colours of the rainbow, that sort of thing. I had in mind an Assassination Risk Index and league tables. I was not planning to go as far as John Marlan Poindexter…80 next month…and set up a Futures Market in ARIs. But as with the Theoretical Physicist’s Thought Experiments, the methodology…how and who to aggregate, criteria to adopt, measurement and analysis of data…would be interesting.

After an assassination…Olof Palme, John Lennon, Princess Diana…or a failed assassination attempt…President Reagan, Pope John Paul II…investigations veer off in two directions…the WhoDunnit and the WhyDunnit. The police, charged with finding the killer and the evidence to have him convicted, interest themselves in motive if it helps get their man. Once they have him they turn to gathering the evidence the prosecutors need to get a conviction. Here the Swedish system of calibrating arrest warrants with the Quality of Suspicion is a good one.

In the Anna Lindh case for instance Per-Olof Svensson was apprehended on Tuesday 16th September 2003…five days after the murder…and detained as a suspect on justifiable grounds…the lowest degree of suspicion. Then on Wednesday 24th September 2003…two weeks after the attack that killed the Swedish Foreign Minister…Mijailo Mijailović was apprehended on the higher level of suspicion of probable cause. And Per-Olof Svensson was released.

This seems to be the right way to proceed. My sympathies are with the police. They need to be cautious. They may not be sure they have the right man but they are reluctant to let him go if there is a chance they have got it right. Of course an innocent man should not be deprived of his freedom just as a guilty man should be charged with his crime. But nobody has any problems with these cases. It is the grey areas that are difficult when the police are not sure they have the right man. In practice there may be conflicting views within the police or they may be worried about having insufficient evidence to win a conviction so they hope something will come up if they hold the man in custody.

But this is a problem for police and prosecutors. The ordinary Agatha Christie reading middle classes are more interested in the WhyDunnit than the WhoDunnit…as are Public Authorities responsible for protecting law-abiding citizens. They do not cry over spilt milk. They learn what they can and move on. Their job is to prevent new killings. Prosecutors are also interested in the motive. Magistrates and Jurors need convincing. Arguments of defending counsel need deflecting. Victims too have an interest in a murderer being apprehended and punished…and Islamic Law deals with this better than our own legal systems.

But the Search for Motive has fallen between too many stools as it gets parcelled out between Investigating Journalists, Police Detectives, Crown Prosecutors and in high profile cases…the killing of Dr David Kelly for instance...a shadowy Fourth Estate which the press delight in referring to as the Intelligence Services. Singly none of these groups are up to the job…and each looks over his shoulder and locks his desk at night. Their theoretical framework is inadequate…and will remain so until there is a paradigm shift in the definition of Killing and Killingry.

Mr & Mrs Public may be for or against capital punishment or think 20-years incarceration is too much or too little…and the broadcast media and the tabloid press can always whip up a debate. But while Joe Public might express an opinion if you ask him he is indifferent to the fate of the murderer…as likely to feel pity as fury. Jennie Public feels she understands the WhyDunnit with crimes of passion because she has been there…and stepped back from the brink. She understands how others might not be able to. Senseless killings too can be explained in terms of the lottery of life…the victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time and there are evil people out there.

Even Killing for a Cause is understandable if you get into the mind of the Suicide Bomber. It was the planes and not the fighter pilots and Bomber Crews that were in short supply in the early years of the Hitler War. Men went off to certain death in response to patriotic fervour and social pressure…particularly from women. Moreover dying is glamorous. Beowolf‘s purpose was to die gloriously so future generations would honour his memory in song.

Neither Olof Palme nor Anna Lindh died Glorious Deaths. Nor do I accept for one moment that their deaths were from Indiscriminate Slaughter. They were murdered. Orders were given. Instructions were carried out that should have been ignored. Just as the Vocation and Toil of the Medieval World have disappeared and been replaced by something Ivan Illich calls Shadow Work. So Glorious Death and Indiscriminate Slaughter are being replaced by Shadow Death…Stalin Purges, Nazi Holocausts, Genocide in Darfur, Srebrenica and Rwanda, Starvation by World Trade Terrorism, Killing for Profits, Annihilation by Debt…and the Political Assassination is returning.

Shadow Killing may be Impersonal and Killingry may be Depersonalised but the Human Race must strive to move beyond Contract Killings and the Nuremberg Defence as the way to settle differences…just as our forefathers moved beyond Slavery as an organising principle for society. An Assassination Risk Index is one place to start.