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?