Part of my work as a Blogger involves reading the daily papers. What a relief to be free of this three months hence. On the crime I read about I would make two observations. Firstly the Police Clear-up Rate for crimes of violence that reach the newspapers is extremely high. The police are surprisingly good at finding needles in haystacks.

My other observation is on the increase in the number of stomach-wrenching crimes and the rise in frenzied knife attacks. In the case of the Oxford drop-out who knifed to death the daughter of a Harrow schoolmaster last week…and in several other frenzied knife attacks…drugs is reported to have been a contributing factor…Cannabis in particular.

This adds a third element to my Conspiracy Hypothesis for Anna Lindh’s killing: In addition to having an NLP Trigger Implant the assassin was high on Cannabis which explains the frenzied nature of the attack reported by witnesses. The switching of blood samples in Accident & Emergency is the third element. All this is wildly implausible and gets an Implausibility Index of 89 out of 100. The trouble is my Index for the Official Theory is 99.

I mean who’s kidding whom? Be real! Our assassin just happened to be hanging around outside the right department store at the time that Sweden’s Foreign Secretary happens to be visiting and just happened to have a sudden urge to subject her to a frenzied knife attack in the only random killing of this nature ever carried out anywhere in Sweden. The Official Theory is ten times more improbable than the Conspiracy Theory. I wonder how her two sons are doing?

Before leaving Sweden 8-weeks ago I typed up some notes about my suspects in The Case of Anna Lindh. Guns and Gold Conspiracies were in second and third place on my A-List behind the One World Order Conspirators.

Featuring as a group in seventh place were the Corporate Profiteers…Drug Companies, Chemical Companies and Energy Companies. The Legal Drug Industry spent vast sums rubbishing John Le Carré’s Constant Gardener which would suggest some rather nasty skeletons in the corporate cupboards. Why are corporations permitted to remain outside modern Public Sector Freedom of Information legislation? Trade Unions should have the Right to Know.

In 1984 Anna Lindh became the first woman president of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League. Her six years as president from 1984 to 1990 were marked by a strong commitment to International Affairs…on behalf of Nicaragua, Vietnam, South Africa and the Palestinians and against the Arms Trade.

Subsequently Anna Lindh had access to insider knowledge on top-secret weapon development programmes…Climate Weapons, Passover Weapons etc…from her old colleagues, from contacts in Foreign Affairs and Environment in Brussels, from insiders in the Swedish Government…eg. SÄPO…and from elsewhere….eg. Stockholm’s Institute for Peace Research (SIPRI).

On 11th June 2003…three months before Anna Lindh’s murder…the Guardian published an interview with the Swedish UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq Hans Blix. Referring to criticisms from the US Blix remarked: ‘They would say I was too compliant with the Iraqis when in reality they meant I was not compliant enough with what the US wanted.’

Blix went on to refer to ‘bastards’ in the US administration who regarded the UN as an ‘alien power’ who ‘would not care if it sinks into the East river’ and who ‘planted nasty things in the media’…although he claimed that he had not cared very much: ‘…an irritant like a mosquito bite in the evening that is still there in the morning.’

Remembering the final collapse of the inspections process, Blix stated: ‘The lowest point was the end when we realised a peaceful resolution to the crisis was not going to happen. That was very disappointing. The war cost a lot in destruction and lives.’

Accentuating the positive Blix pointed out that: ‘we proved beyond a doubt…and under immense pressure…that independent, impartial, objective monitoring can be achieved. We were in nobody's pocket. Every day I get letters from inspectors who want to work again. We're immensely proud of what we achieved.’

On 3rd July 2003…three weeks after Hans Blix’s interview in the Guardian…Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh announced his appointment as Chairman of a new independent International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Anna Lindh told reporters in Stockholm: ‘We must do everything we can to avert the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. It is very gratifying that Hans Blix is willing to accept the chairmanship. The experience and knowledge he possesses is unique.’ And she went on.

‘The purpose of the Commission is to provide new impetus to the international efforts involved in disarmament and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missiles. The Commission will be formed during the autumn of 2003 under the leadership of Hans Blix and will plan to report their recommendations in 2005.’

Thanks to a Bollywood romantic comedy Mahatma Gandhi’s popularity is hitting fresh heights. While much of the world was watching endless repeats of 9/11 Indians were rushing to cinemas in record numbers to see Carry On Munnabhai.

The film took a billion rupees…£12 million…at the Indian Box Office in the first fortnight and is rated as the most popular Bollywood release of the year in Britain and the US. The plot revolves around a radio quiz about the Life of Gandhi. Leaders of the ruling Congress Party have told senior party members to see the film.

On 1st May 2005 I still believed my newly-beloved to be interested in my work as a writer so I made a compilation of articles published by Rye’s Own between June 2004 and April 2005, added a preface, put a pink ribbon around them and sent it away into cyberspace. Here is Rye in Chaucer’s Times…and below the words prepared for my new love.

The early years of my flawed career were spent flat on my back. When the Red Army marched into Prague I was lying under a Hillman Imp in the British Embassy in Red Square. While Idi Amin and his Mossad cronies were seizing control of Uganda, I was hiding under a bed in my Kampala hotel room

I was flat on my back again a few years later when the Greeks started lobbing shells into my Turkish campsite early one morning before I got up. On that occasion I bundled my Swedish wife, my 18-month old daughter and her Marimekko comfort blanket into my Cambridge-blue VW camper van and bolted for the Bulgarian border. So I have had my brush-offs with Mortality.

On my return to these Offshore Islands, I stayed long enough to help the Pentagon and its Evil Empire build roads in the Empty Quarter of Oman…and Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy to make loads of money for the good New England Quakers of Worcester… before flying into the belly of the beast to eat McDonalds french fries at Boston’s Museum of Science in the company of the grandson of the MIT President and former Kennedy Science Adviser, Jerome Wiesner…and joining Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame acquiring CIA skills in neurolinguistical zapping of honest citizens.

Betwixt and between all this public-spirited endeavour for God and Country I sang in a choir with Stuart Holland…a Junior Treasury Shadow Minister during the Benn Ascendency; opened the batting…that means cricket…with the boss of the GMB union, John Edmonds; and…the final humiliation…stood as a badly defeated Westminster parliamentary candidate on the stage of Oldham Town Hall alongside New Labour’s next Environment Minister, Michael Meacher. He won with more votes than all the rest of us put together. Upon the same stage had Sir Winston Churchill once stood. So much for my brief brush-offs with Celebrity.

In the mid-80s I decided Diversifying was a plausible Life Strategy. So I began writing for a London-based political journal…Feature Articles under the name William Shepherd and Book Reviews in my own name…or was it the other way about? My scribblings went out to the world alongside those of famous men like HRH Prince Charles, Leopold Kohr, Fritz Schumacher, John Seymour, Ivan Illich, Kirkpatrick Sale and Edward Goldsmith…with knights of the realm like Sir Julian Rose and Sir Richard Body riding shotgun. So I claim 15-minute of Alternative Fame as well.

My political career reached its climax in September 2001 when the Radical Consultation I was organising ventured onto a collision course with some of Osama Bin Laden’s special effects at the World Trade Center.

I still await the call from MI6 to serve my gods and their country…though unbeknown to the powers-that-be my nation is now the circle of my friends. The closest I came to The Call was a 1984 invitation to lunch at the British Officers’ Club in Boston at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. There will be a file.

But while awaiting My Prince’s call on my mobile phone I carried on scribbling…as the Magazine Editor for the Rye Harbour Boatowners Association (2000 to 2003) and then as Music Critic and Occasional Columnist for Rye’s Own, the public voice of the Rye Freedom Fighters.

My Rye’s Own compilation included these eight articles: Rye Weather Forecasts (120); Ryesingers on Tour (122); Music in Rye & Winchelsea (125); Dredging Strand Quay (126); Rye Partnership (127); The Winchelsea Pantomime (128); Rye New Library (129) and Smeaton’s Harbour (130). Those are the Rye’s Own issue numbers in brackets.

Since compiling this list Rye’s Own has published five more of my articles: The Flourishing Port of Rye (131); The Politics of Wind Farms (133); Rye Harbour Road (135); Cycling the Rye Harbour Tramway (136) and Local Powers (138). Perhaps adding Connie’s Rye Artwork to Shepherd in Rye’s Own is a recipe for a local best-seller?

In England the 17th century started badly when James I was drafted in from Scotland in 1603. This set the scene for declared and undeclared Civil Wars in England for the next 50-years during the administrations of Charles 1 (1625-1640); Oliver Cromwell & Co. (1640-1660); Charles II (1660-1685) and James II (1685-1689) before William of Orange (1689-1702) was brought in to sort out the mess and pass on some semblance of orderly governance to Queen Anne. History might be repeating itself following the present 20 years of Scottish Government in England.

I have Kent Libraries’ copy of Tawney’s Business & Politics under James I on the bunk beside me for a second reading and his The Acquisitive Society and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism…with Hilaire Belloc’s Biography of James II and Charles Wilson’s Profit & Power about Dutch Wars of the 17th century on my list.

The 17th century is the key to 21st century England so Christopher Hill’s The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 is important. But to understand the 17th century means getting up to speed on the Tudors which means going back to the death of Henry VIIIth in 1553 and the 44-year reign of Elizabeth Ist that followed. This ended in 1603 with the Scottish Settlement and the Catholic James Stuart ascending the English Throne. I found The Queen’s Bastard…a historical novel by Robin Maxwell…provided valuable insights into the history of this period of English History.

But the further I get into the history of the English Speaking Peoples the more I am veering away from Academic History to Historical Novels and the good sense of teaching history by telling stories. 1066 And All That mocked this approach. But just as a Christian Scholar can bring Jesus to life with Monty Python’s film The Life of Brian so a brilliant history teacher can make history real for young (and old) people with 1066 and All That…and the help of the internet. My main complaint about the book is that it is bad history.

The problem with 1066 And All That is not the satirising of History Teaching and the Trivialising of the Idea of History but its fundamental misunderstanding of English History. Producing the Domesday Book for instance was only possible because of the efficiency of England’s fund raising prior to William of Normandy’s invasion…from years of paying Danegeld and bribing Viking raiders with gold to keep them at bay. The real significance of the overthrow of Harold Godwinesson was the subsequent replacement of English Law by Continental Roman Law.

Nowadays historical novels from good publishers are extremely well-researched. They are therefore able to provide an overall picture of the life and times in which they are set. Another interesting feature of the historical novels to be found in libraries and second-hand bookshops is that women authors are overrepresented. This is a Good Thing. Women have insights that are absent from the Great Men and Glorious Wars approach limping on into the English Public Schools teaching of my day as a last hurrah of Imperial History from its decline in the Victorian Age.

Oxfam claims to be the biggest second-hand bookseller in the country…which doesn’t surprise me. It was at their Ashford branch that I found a copy of Harold The King by Helen Hollick with its well-researched chronicling of the Norman Invasion of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066.

For two more pounds I acquired Sphere Book’s Six Wives of Henry VIII. This and Philippa Gregory’s 2001 book The Other Boleyn Girl and last year’s publication The Constant Princess about Katherine of Aragon covers the Reign of Henry VIIIth.

In 1972 Sphere commissioned Julia Hamilton to write Katharine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves and arranged for Margaret Heys, Frances Clark and Jessica Smith to write abridged versions of The May Queen (1967), Mistress Jane Seymour (1967) and Henry Betrayed (1969) respectively to complete the boxed set with the stories of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Katherine Howard.

Traditionally England’s kings and queens were appointed by the Witan or Council of England…which lives on today as the Privy Council. Hereditary Claims mattered but, in the history of the English Monarchy, kinship by marriage could override Bloodline Seniority when Competence or Loyalty were in question…and loyalty can cut both ways. This English Tradition predominated in the appointments of Aethelred, Cnut, Harthacnut, Harold Harefoot, Edmund Ironside, Edward Ist and Harold Godwinesson. Rules of succession need not be fixed in stone.

From time to time the Council of England finds itself playing a crucial role in the selection of kings and queens. It was certainly active in the 17th century when the rise of the gentry led to a shift in the balance of economic and financial power in England. R.H. Tawney seems to suggest this was behind the 50-years of turmoil from 1625 to 1675.

The Stuart Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and their replacement in 1689 by the House of Orange…William strengthened his link to the Royal House through his marriage to Mary…were really the work of the English Council.

Perhaps I should write a Lord of the Rings style saga about England and the English from the 10th Century to the 21st Century…although a good case can be made for starting with Stonehenge & the Druids or King Arthur and the Round Table. Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphogenetic Fields could provide the Ancestral Push and Pull from Posterity and play a similar role to the Gods of Mount Olympus in the Greek Myths or the Asgard in the Nordic Sagas.