Twenty four years ago in the summer of 1982 I drove my hired car up Hollywood’s Mulholland Drive to collect Laura Huxley and take her to meet Dr. Rupert Sheldrake who had been invited to Los Angeles to give a talk about his new book The Presence of the Past. Two weeks ago I was reminded of that evening when the latest research on unexplained human abilities from the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project found its way into the newspapers.

If you think telepathy is baloney you will be relieved to know that many scientists agree with you. But then many scientists believe in Global Warming. In both cases their belief flies in the face of the evidence and is caused by a preference to have faith in their unexamined prejudices and avoid impartial examination of the scientific evidence.

Trinity College in Cambridge has been funding Dr Sheldrake to investigate Telephone Telepathy. This is no fringe phenomenon. Three out of four people have had experiences in which they think of someone for no apparent reason and then the person calls; or they know who is calling when the phone rings before picking it up. Many people have similar experiences with emails. This is easy to test experimentally. Strange nobody has done so…until now.

Dr Sheldrake asked volunteers to give the names and telephone numbers of four people they knew well. During the test session each subject was videotaped continuously sitting by a landline telephone. One caller was selected at random by the throw of a dice. The person was then asked to call the subject. When the telephone rang the participant guessed who was calling before lifting the receiver.

The elegance of the experimental design is that the outcome of each call is right or wrong. Participants get it right one time in four if telephone telepathy is tosh. In fact the results are one time in two…45% at the University of Cambridge with similar results at the University of Amsterdam. This is Nobel Prize stuff. Tests with callers on the far side of the planet…in Australia and New Zealand…indicates that the effect does not fall off with distance. According to Dr Sheldrake ‘emotional closeness rather than physical proximity seemed to be the most important factor’.

But ignorance and prejudice know no bounds. Mind, Heart and Soul do not exist we are told. Man has a clever Brain. Consciousness is all…and only…in the head we are assured. Out come the dogmas…untested, unproven and unwavering in their certainty.

Yet talk to someone who knows what they are talking about…for which they must be familiar with the scientific research…and you will discover that no one understands very much about the nature of our minds.

Indeed the very existence of consciousness is unexplained. But this will not be the case for much longer. Consciousness Research is one of our most exciting scientific endeavours. There is accumulating evidence that brain activity is only one component in such acts as Consciousness, Creativity, Dreaming and Understanding.

Dr Sheldrake’s theoretical work postulates the existence of Morphogenetic Fields. Our minds may extend far beyond our brains and our bodies stretching out through fields that link us to our environment and to each other.

Fields are more extensive than material objects…magnetic fields around magnets and electromagnetic fields around mobile phones. Likewise mental fields can extend beyond our brains and bodies…with their structure and properties being influenced by attention and intention…and perhaps much else.

In principle there is no reason for such fields to be limited by either Space or Time…even though Gravity seems to be one field that does so in accordance with Isaac Newton’s Inverse Square Law. Tom Lethbridge’s experiments for instance have found evidence of a time-less zone between our time-space world and another time-ful zone. Lethbridge’s training as an archaeologist also enabled him to build a convincing case that ancient civilisations in these offshore islands might have understood the nature of space-time better than we do. More Nobel Prize stuff.

My failure to arrange £3000 over the summer to pack me off to Lund University for six months may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Together with the fortuitous cancellation of the Radical Consultation…I was never very keen on the idea and expected very little of it…has given me the chance to study the History of Monarchy in England. For the past few weeks my cabin table has been littered with books about kings and queens and revolutions.

What seems to have happened is that the Good Old Law was thrown out when Duke William of Normandy usurped the throne of England by Right of Conquest in 1066 and imposed Roman Legal Practice on us. In Roman Law the holder of highest authority makes the laws…and his Royal Subjects obey it or suffer the consequences.

The English Legal Tradition was reinstated in 1215 at Runnymede with the signing of Magna Carta where Conditional Power was placed in the king’s hands by the ad hoc reinstatement of the old Witan or English Council. The Social Contract between Barons and King was a written agreement rather than the oath-making of earlier times.

Since Magna Carta the English Way of doing things has had a chequered history as the English Monarchy found it necessary to navigate the cataracts and rapids of 400 years of continental Religious and Dynastic Wars.

John Seymour wrote thirty books and numerous articles on land and money reform, the good life and the forgotten arts and crafts of self-reliance. John spent the summer of 1994 celebrating his 80th birthday…retreating between parties to his homestead in Ireland to milk cows in the morning and impart skills in self-sufficiency in the afternoon.

Connie Lindqvist was born in Finland in 1950, spending her formative years amidst Lapps, reindeer and fir trees. She was the only female skipper of a gaff-rigged vessel cruising the French and English Channel coasts and the owner of a design studio in Rye that created monumental ceramic panels for the shopkeepers of Knightsbridge.

In 1993 I put on my publisher’s hat and brought together my old political colleague and my new acquaintance for Rye From the Water’s Edge. John took one look at Connie’s illustrations for the book and wrote that ‘as a marine artist Connie was beyond compare, her boats and her sea really feel like boats and sea’…adding for good measure that ‘if ever Connie needed something to do he might try to persuade her to illustrate some sea-poems I have written’.

As a publisher I immediately disowned the project on the grounds that ‘nobody made money from poetry books’…remarks that can be found on Page 67 of the first edition of Seymour’s Seamarks published in 500 examples by Academic Inn Books in Spring 1995.

The book is now out of print after being sold directly to the public at £4.95 each by AIB’s two Sales Agents John Seymour and Connie Lindqvist…and producing £600 profit for the three of us.

In my Few Words I went on that ‘…even Rudyard Kipling would be hard pressed to find a publisher nowadays. Yet here are John’s sea-poems…and illustrated by Connie Lindqvist. How does the old codger do it? Old Head of Kinsale was rejected in a vain attempt to shipwreck the project…yet it survived.'

'My mistake was forking out in November 1993 to send Connie across to Ireland. Over booze and baccy the conspiracy was hatched. Perhaps real poetry will start to make a comeback with this volume of Seymour’s Seamarks? You bought a copy after all!’

Seymour’s Seamarks starts with a warning to the reader that ‘the poet takes no responsibility for any shipwrecks caused by pilots using this volume as a Pilot’s Guide’ and then includes the following dozen poems: Cape Comorin; Roaring Middle; Pelican Point; Danger Point; Tusker; Galloper; Strumble Head; St Govan; Old Head of Kinsale; Spurn; Swin Spitway and Hook.

In the acknowledgements thanks is given to B.D. Thynne, Head of Hydrography in the Charts Department of the Greenwich National Maritime Museum ‘for his courtesy and enthusiasm. The risk to mariners from this little book would have been much greater without his help.’ Nonetheless approach these headlands with care, charts and a good Pilot and don’t drink any alcohol…including Weakbow Cider…before disembarkation.

Goethe once said ‘In boldness is genius’. He might have added but didn’t that it also contains the seeds of failure. On Page 68 the bold acclamation can be read that Seymour’s Seamarks was the first of a series of books of illustrated verse by John Seymour.

These Forthcoming Books were recklessly listed with illustrator and publication dates: Summer 1995 Jolly Boys in the Coats of White with Kate Seymour; Winter 1995 Animals Talk Back with Connie Lindqvist; Summer 1996 My Old Man with Mike Avery and Winter 1996 Dancing Leaves with Sally Seymour.

Ten years on all this has yet to take place though both Jane and Sally Seymour have completed their assignments, Connie was part of the way through the more ambitious publishing plan for Animals Talk Back at the time of her death and Mike Avery is available to complete his assignment after having shown how good he is.

A budget of £10 000 would suffice to take the project out of mothballs and put it back on track. There is a Complete Book of John Seymour’s Illustrated Verse (without the illustrations)…funded by Teddy Goldsmith…available as an Adobe pdf file or as a bound A4 book. This will be sent to potential sponsors on receipt by Academic Inn Books, P.O. Box 36, Rye, Sussex TN31 7WP of £25 or $50 and a letter indicating the nature of their interest.

In Seymour’s Seamarks John Seymour writes that he had never seen the Old Head of Kinsale from the sea but he had by land. ‘It’s a headland sticking out into the Atlantic foam from Ireland’s south-west coast. It was often the first landfall mariners had on the voyage home from the Americas.’