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.