Sweden has her own Fear Factories and has no need to import fears from the Politico-Legal-Media (PLM) Complex. Last week Swedes were being encouraged to dive into ditches whenever a storm was brewing. It took me back to the Duck & Cover Campaigns of the early Cold War Years. Lightning can strike you down at any time. Be Prepared!

Ever since reading Ann McCaffrey’s books about Life on Pern I have had a rather benevolent attitude to rain. I really like it. On Pern every few generations threads fall from the sky destroying all life on the planet if they are not prevented from reaching the ground. It is a brilliant piece of invention…Harry Potter standard…and enables Ann McCaffrey to introduce thread-devouring dragons that need bonding when first emerging from the egg and harnessing by elite teams of Dragon Riders to create aerial assault squadrons to attack the threads when they are big.

Even Nils Palmgren…editor of Dagens Nyheter…could not resist adding his two-öre by advising readers that ditches, cars and homes were the safest places to be in a thunder storm. The worst place is under a lone tree, aboard a yacht or on top of a high mountain. The irony is that what prompted the hysteria was the bizarre and tragic death of a knight on horseback at a medieval tournament in Mariefred near Stockholm. He took a direct hit on his helmet and died instantly…with a smile on his lips. Just make sure the car has a metal chassis…and that nobody is on the phone when shepherding your flock to the safety of the family villa. Sweden gets struck by lightning 100 000 times a year.

At 0952 every day this week I have walked to Sundbyberg Library for use of their printer and scanner. You have doubtless noticed my skills at gluing images together with Adobe Photoshop. My one-hour session ends at eleven…but normally I do not arrive home until four in the afternoon. I go out around town gallivanting on my free travel pass. Nicholas and Mischa used to do this when they were nine so my regression back to childhood is beginning. The two things about the Boston subway that appealed to the boys were the escalators and the fares.

Michael Dukakis ran against George Bush for the US Presidency in 1988 and lost. Before this he was Governor of Massachusetts so he did the honours when the Porter Square MBTA Station opened. It was just two minutes walk from Forest Street so I went along. Dukakis was a short man but like many famous Short People…Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Pierre Trudeau, Dolly Parton…above the waist he was the size of a bigger man so he looked OK on TV.

The Dukakis dedication went like this. ‘I hereby declare this station open…and hope to hell you have enough maintenance engineers for the escalators.’ This showed great foresight. 20 years later the Open Guide to Boston website would say: ‘Porter Square is one of the deeper stations in the MBTA subway system. To exit one must ride either 2 or 3 escalators and typically at least one is out of order being repaired or worked on.’ The fare was a Franklin Half Dollar…so once the boys were through the turnstiles they stayed. Mozambique is just another subway ride.

Ode to the Common Man was my first poem but I have another one entitled Ode on Man Thinking.

Before the beginning
There was living
And the transmitting of life
For that God made woman
And woman gave to man leisure.

From this leisure arose conviviality
Which the women filled
With the good life
Both for themselves
And for their men.

From amidst the good life
Some few men emerged
Preferring honied indolence
Over love or ambition or poesy
Or the pursuit of triviality.

These few men were as gods
And in their conviviality
Their minds found words
And they made conversation
And their hearts were animated.

Conversation gave birth to the idea
And the idea was spoken
And being spoken
Was tried and tested
Back and forth.

And the idea was heard in disproportion
And was stripped of the trivial
And adorned with value
From whence in juxtaposition
Wisdom recognised humour.

And the men laughed
And joined with one another in earnest debate
The idea was argued
With reckless bias
For and against.

Until from those few men gathered together
From the conviviality that gave rise to conversation
And from the conversation that gave rise to humour
And from the humour that gave rise to debate
There came truth.

And the soul of Man
Determined that it was good.’

John Keats wrote his Ode on Indolence in the spring of 1819.

It was February 1982 and I had just returned to Boston from two weeks in Philadelphia on a 10-day Buckminster Fuller Marathon when I met Linda Blitz and fell head over heels in love with her. Three months earlier I had run the Rhode Island Marathon in 3 hours 37 minutes so was looking pretty good.

Linda lived with Marilyn Ferguson’s Production Editor Connie Zweig on Tennessee in Los Angeles. Linda liked me…and may even have loved me…but the relationship was based on a misunderstanding from the start as she believed me to have connections that I did not have…very Pride and Prejudice though perhaps the affair was more Mr Wickham than Mr D’Arcy. But it had significant consequences for myself and for those around me…which ripple on to this day.

Linda was in Boston ending a relationship…on the rebound in other words…not the best time to meet up. My son Nicholas John was six coming on seven and his two best friends at Cambridge Friends School were Jim Sumrall’s son Mischa and Zach Wiesner’s son Elisha…linguistic daddy bonding. I had an exchange going at the time with Elisha’s mother which meant child minding the boys every Wednesday afternoon when the school had its half day.

I was very happy with this arrangement. When together boys of this age look after themselves particularly when they love the Children’s Museum and the Museum of Science in Boston, enjoy hanging out with me when I have MIT errands…and are convinced that riding the Boston subway and escalators is what people do in heaven.

On this particular Wednesday it had been arranged…through the services of the mutual friend Linda was staying with in Cambridge…that we would meet at a restaurant on Huron Avenue after I had picked up the boys from school at midday. Linda had cold feet at the last minute and had to be kicked out the door so turned up half an hour late by which time my Young Arabs were starting to wreck the place. I was getting up to leave when Linda finally put in her appearance…in my memory a vision of loveliness silhouetted in the doorway with the sunlight behind her.

We hit it off at once…Buckminster Fuller and the Anti-Nuclear Movement being our connecting points. An affair was the last thing on my mind as I was happily married. Indeed Ingrid and I were regarded as the perfect couple…the only biological parents of any children in my daughter’s class still together. It was one of those whirlwind romances you read about in novels…something you catch like the flu. But such are the ways of fate that I chanced to be on full-time parenting duties at the time as Ingrid had flown to the Caribbean for two weeks to be with her brother Torsten who had sailed across the North Atlantic. This complicated the logistics of the affair but also made an affair possible.

The trouble was that Linda saw me together with Elisha…the grandson of J.F. Kennedy’s former Scientific Adviser and the President of MIT…Jerome Wiesner. Being at heart a small town girl of Polish Jewish immigrant stock from St Louis Missouri she thought she had made it big in the world of science…her first love…with the European Aristocracy opening before her. Nor did it go amiss that Zach Wiesner had grown up on Martha’s Vineyard with Carly Simon and got royalties for some songs he had written with James Taylor. But this was nothing to do with me. It was by association thrice removed. That’s a rather unfair summary but you get the drift…not easy living up to this.

Linda was and no doubt still is a remarkable woman though I have had no contact with her since the summer of ‘82…dazzlingly intelligent, knock-you-down social personality…bundled together with some insecurity and flawed self-esteem into an irresistible brew. But eventually the calls on my time and emotional energy meant that my work started to suffer. Enough was enough so I gritted my teeth and jetted back to the East Coast…alone. Mary McCartney’s The Company I Keep describes a variation of the type well…one you can’t live with or without. So Real Men eventually give up trying and take the 2-weeks of hell necessary to break the emotional and psychic bonds.

By one of those quirky coincidences-cum-synchronicities my investigation into the killing of Anna Lindh has brought me face to face with the Tides Foundation once again. In 2004 and 2005 they gave $150 million in grants to 6000 organisations. But when I knew them back in 1982 it was as much as they could do to raise the $40 000 a year to support one activist and his family…at least that was what they told me. Tides and Stewart Mott get on well together.

The Stewart Mott Foundation was to Californian 1980s Reformistas what the Rowntree Foundation is to English 2000 Reformistas with everyone around Linda collecting money from Stewart Mott whenever they passed GO. But nowadays the Tides Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation inter-fund each other in a strangely incestuous manner while pouring enormous amounts of money into the EastWest Institute…since at least 1993.

In 2004 the East-West Institute awarded Anna Lindh their Statesman of the Year Award and in 2005 gave a Statesman of the Decade Award to the strangely funded Right Honourable Tony Blair. This is odd coming from an institute created be John Edwin Mroz…a Council for Foreign Relations member who recently received the Order of the White Double-Cross (2nd level) from Slovak President Ivan Gašparovič for his work on NATO integration. Eugene Pinschof may believe the Austro-Hungarian Empire to be rather a Good Thing…but not everybody does.