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.