William Shepherd

Today on my way to check out the new Science City at Kista I hopped off at Hallonbergen…one stop before…and took a quick 20-minute tour to see how the place was looking 35 years after I built it. There were trees for a start…which makes a big difference…and the feeling of a mature urban environment. So much so that I was not sure I had the right place. Perhaps my memory had failed me? So I took the lift down a few floors to my little bit of the action. Everything was fine…just as I had left it. So I took a few photos on my mobile phone to convince myself.

My last job as a Civil Engineer in Sweden was all Panic & Crisis. It was 1970. New suburbs were shooting up all over Stockholm as the Swedish Construction Industry moved their cranes from site to site. I caught the tail-end of Tensta and Rinkeby and the full brunt of the southward expansion towards Södertälje.

I was working for the Stockholm office of A-Betong with head office in Växjö Småland. The firm had started life selling concrete railway sleepers to the Swedish Railways and then diversified into apartment building. My boss Roger Everett…a Cambridge man…persuaded the Swedish Government that I was essential to the National Economy as we were agents for some black gooey stuff called Synthaprufe produced by the British Coal Board and used to waterproof concrete floors.

Stockholm sits on granite so the way construction works is that Alfred Nobel goes in first and blows the building site to smithereens. This takes some blasting. Next comes the contractor who puts in the foundations and the pipe work. Then it’s our turn. Our closest factory was an hour away in Strängnäs. From here 30-metre long reinforced concrete floor sections…state of the art…were sent on low loaders to the building site for craning into position.

Our job was to put up a sturdy concrete box for the five-story apartment building to sit on…and for cars to be stored in later. Our main rival in prefabricated housing was Strängbetong…although in situ construction often gave us a run for our money. But it was boom time and the era of Keynesian Special Investment Funds so factories were working flat out.

Production problems at the factory were always a nightmare. They happen because concrete is more art than science and because we were always on tight schedules to get on site, crane the concrete into place, bolt the slabs together, clean up and get away before the next gang of contractors came on site. Winter construction in Sweden is an art-form.

Then two things happened. A-System…A-Betong’s Stockholm Sales Office…took home a contract they expected Strängbetong to get. I think they shared contracts out over lunch but don’t quote me. It was tight but with an extra production line and some juggling of shifts it could be done. The job was between Solna and Sundbyberg on a green field site called Hallonbergen…Berry Hill…which it was until we poured concrete over all the blueberries.

So far so good…but on the back burner was a massive project in the centre of Stockholm to give the Swedish Riksdag a new home. This project was big enough to exhaust Sweden’s reinforced concrete factory capacity requiring low loaders coming in from Denmark. Moreover it was a political hot potato. The members wanted more space but they also liked it where they were. The debate looked set to run and run.

But then suddenly the MPs decided to go for a completely new building…and of course they wanted it up and running yesterday. A-Betong and Strängbetong were encouraged to make their collusion official. So they did…and came up with a plan. It quickly got the go-ahead.

Murphy had been watching all this from the sidelines with some amusement. He timed his run well. With Hallonbergen at Peak Delivery and with First Deliveries in place for the Parliament Building several consignments of floor sections from Strängbetong‘s factory failed their Strength Tests. You can’t re-melt concrete and re-cycle it. It is only good for hardcore. We got very little sleep that week. The plan we came up with meant stripping units from Hallonbergen, sending them to Sergels Torg and reworking them on site to fit a completely different set of blueprints.

Both contracts were completed on schedule…though we were scrambling. But the irony is that the new parliament building was never used. The Riksdag stayed put…and built another floor instead. My building became Stockholm’s equivalent of The London Dome…before Anna Lindh and Elisabet Spens had it re-branded as Kulturhuset.

There will be two very sad boys next summer at their mother’s 50th birthday…for she will not be there. She was murdered three years ago. When she was their age she wanted to be a librarian…so she could read books all day. But her life changed dramatically in 1969 when at the age of 12 she wrote to the Uppsala MP Birgitta Dahl…chair of Olof Palme’s Vietnam Committee…telling her of the Vietnam War Display she was planning for her Local School.

Her sons’ interests might have been better served if Birgitta Dahl had advised their mother to work hard, play hard…and take to heart John Keats’ Ode on Indolence. Had Anna Lindh received and heeded this advice her grandchildren might be celebrating Farmor’s 80th birthday on 19th June 2037 by which time she would have become a Local Hero idolised by several generations of local children who had loved her and been loved by her.

At the first Radical Consultation five years ago I convened the Work and Human Fulfilment Workshop. In the first session we recorded each key point made in the course of the discussion. After two hours the number of key points had reached one hundred so we adjourned for lunch. After lunch a rating of 1 (irrelevant) to 5 (crucial) was attributed to them. Our workshop’s presentation to the Full Plenary Session is in the Conference Proceedings.

On the issue of Vocation and Toil we took the view that one of the aims of society should be to liberate people from toil. But the purpose of doing so was not to turn them into Leisure Consumers but to direct their attention towards Good Work…by which we meant work that was socially useful, ecologically acceptable and humanly fulfilling.

In our summary of the discussion we remarked that Schooling was indoctrinating young people with the Career Mentality rather than instilling in them the idea of Good Work; that School Career Fairs were dominated by Big Business…Price Waterhouse instead of Purton Farm…and that Big Problems were perceived as requiring Global Organisations…which is where all the really Big Jobs were to be found. We believed this was wrong.

Instead we suggested the encouragement of the idea that a myriad of little local personal responses might be a better approach; that Food Work should be an integral part of everyone’s Annual Round and that work needed to become Personal and Proximate...rather than Impersonal and serving Distant Needs. We recommended more Own Work and wider circulation of books like Future Work and Future Wealth by James Robertson.

I do not intend to speculate about Anna Lindh’s killers. I have no Insider Knowledge, no Deep Throat to point me in the right direction and no Investigative Resources to call upon. But it is quite wrong to dismiss people as Assassination Freaks…arguing the improbable complexity of any Conspiracy Theory…just because they believe there was a reason for getting rid of Anna Lindh. I accept the argument. But the Random Lone Assassin Scenario shares this complexity. On the face of it both explanations are wildly improbable. Yet one of them is correct.

My own position is that the more you weigh the improbabilities the more implausible suicides…Petra and David Kelly…become and the more a pattern seems to be emerging where turbulent priests whatever their persuasion are removed by Lone Assassins and Violent Accidental Death…John Lennon, Princess Diana, Olof Palme.

Killing the killers is no longer necessary…Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan…it is enough to effect the assassin’s escape and delay his capture until the Men In White Coats get to work to wipe clean the mental slate…or neuro-linguistically cover up previous traces. At John Grinder’s NLP and Hypnosis seminar in Provincetown in 1982 he mentioned sitting in on Therapy Sessions and counting the number of times therapists unwittingly implanted NLP triggers…and then removed them a little while later. Then you must avoid cross-examination and control the enquiry.

And just how difficult is it to plant a sleeper at a hospital or gain access to the patient during the chaos of an emergency? If the blood sample from Princess Diana’s chauffeur can be replaced…and this appears increasingly likely…then how improbable is it that blood for transfusions can be poisoned and switched? Hospitals are Dangerous Places at the best of time…and security is never at the top of their agenda. Even in Sweden the precaution of a Castro Strategy would seem now to make sense. Why make it possible to predict the destination hospital for high ARIs?