While I have been researching Escalator Down Times (EDT) and Mobile Phone Habits (MPH) in Stockholm my son has been investigating local life from Cape Town to the Tanzanian Border. On Thursday evening we got together in Stockholm to compare notes and concluded that Sweden needs more explaining than Malawi or Mozambique...double click below...you need a media player open and loud speakers switched on...and you may be asked to run an Internet Explorer Active X control to view.

Two facts stood out. I rode a thousand escalators in Stockholm…and not one of them was out of action. Kindergarten Children are the fellow passengers of choice on the Stockholm Subway because everyone else chatters incessantly on their mobile phones…which in the land of Ericsson work deep underground. Rambo Police Gunslingers are unlikely to blame communications failures when slaying innocent Brazilian Catholics going about their Lawful Occasions.

Conspiracy Theorists do a rather poor job of discriminating between the State of Israel, American Jewry, the Jewish Diaspora, The Zionists and International Jewish Finance when cobbling together their accusations. So I sympathise with Jewish exasperations and share their concerns about the consequences of such faulty renditions of reality.

I have come across some intriguing conspiracy theories in my time and a Zionist one found its way into the appendix of my manuscript The Jewish Question compiled in Boston in 1986. The theory explained all manner of odd facts like the presence of Mossad advisers in African Courts and the strange fascination of the African Diamond Trade.

The theory is that Zionists have conspired to link the large Jewish Communities in Johannesburg and Tel Aviv by delivering on the British Imperial Dream of a single civilization from Cape to Cairo. The argument is that Africa is the only continent still up for grabs so let the slaughter of the indigenous aboriginal population commence…in the time-honoured imperial tradition of moving yourselves in by moving the present inhabitants out.

In Wednesday’s weblog I suggested that killing the killer is off the agenda…but maybe not. Last week Mijailo Mijailović…convicted of the murder of Anna Lindh…attacked a fellow intern in his Swedish Psychiatric Clinic in Sundsvall supposedly to get himself into the safety of the clinic’s hospital wards. Apparently a local newspaper ran a story that a warden had been bribed to smuggle a gun into the clinic to be used to kill Mijailović. The story is apparently untrue but confirmed Mijailović’s suspicions that he is a target for assassination. Strange times indeed.

Another Swedish news item last week is that half the country’s nuclear reactors have been shut down. But the story is not that a country that can run thousands of escalators with impeccable efficiency cannot operate its nuclear power plants safely but that politicians of all stripes…with the exception of the Swedish Green Party…are scrambling to avoid debating Nuclear Power in the run-up to next month’s parliamentary elections. Why are they so scared?

Managing complexity is no simple matter. To get myself to Wiltshire yesterday a large number of very complex systems had to work…and these systems continue to do so day in and day out. Ordinary people take all this for granted and believe it to be the most natural thing in the world. But the overall complexity is mind-boggling and the threats of disruption innumerable. Yet nobody bats an eyelid.

To get to Stockholm’s Skavsta to catch my 0640 Ryanair Flight 051 to London Stansted I needed the Night Bus 595 from Sundbyberg to Cityterminalen to connect to Flygbussarna’s coach to the airport south of the city. On arrival in England I had to organise online credit card payments to National Express to get myself from the airport to Central London, from Victoria Coach Station to Swindon Coach Station and then to Totnes and back next week.

The complexity of the systems that keep the world going round beggars belief. One of them made available £400 in the Hole-in-the-Wall upon my arrival in England. How would the Germans cope today with another Hyperinflation like the one Ernest Hemingway wrote dispatches about as a cub reporter. ‘The first panacea for a mismanaged nation,’ he wrote, ‘is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.’