After my failure to become the Member of Parliament for Oldham West & Royton in the spring of 1997 I went off sailing for the summer with my Agent…as in Secret Agent Connie would insist. ‘So secret that nobody ever saw me do anything.’ Nonetheless she signed off on my Election Accounts. Our Summer Cruise included two weeks in Morlaix…an old Pirate Lair on the North Brittany Coast an hour’s drive from Toni Pinschof in Mael-Pestivien.

On our return to Rye in September we started work on the Magpie Sagas leaving Rye a week before Christmas to spend the Holiday Season at Dannemoragatan in Stockholm’s Odenstan…5-minutes walk north of Odenplan.

Connie returned to Rye in the New Year to get Vemara shipshape for her Linnaeus Voyage. We reckoned to be away from May to October with eight weeks to Gotland, eight weeks for the return and eight weeks in and around the island.

After Connie left Stockholm I started work on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to The Euro…between Economic History courses and exams at Stockholm University. When it was time for my return to England at the end of March I had eight chapters drafted…with plans set out for another four. A couple more weeks and all twelve chapters would have been in draft. But things get to where they get to. There are only eighty hours in my working week.

There were gaps in the eight chapters but indications of what was destined for the empty spaces. But what I didn’t know until I had completed the first round of writing was how much of my scribbling would find its way into The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to The Euro...and how many other books had jumped onto the passing band wagon.

However this faded into insignificance in the summer of 1998 following a shift on the English Political Scene triggered by Gordon Brown’s veto of Tony Blair’s plans to abolish the pound. This meant that my Little Euro Book went onto the back burner…and has remained there ever since. Indeed when I came to write the Politics of the English Pound five years later for the Swedish Euro Referendum in September 2003 little of the Little Euro Book was incorporated into the text. It is just one of perhaps half a dozen unpublished manuscript.

The fifth chapter of the manuscript falls into four parts and begin with The Tale of the Great Tank. The rest of Part One discusses Vortices, Testing and Scaling. The second part of Chapter Five links Scale to Phase Shifts, Chaos Theory and Complexity before discussing the implications of Fritjof Capra’s 1996 publication…The Web of Life: a new understanding of living systems and its relationship to Chris Langton’s work with Cellular Automata.

Langton summarises the relationship between his own work and the phase transition characteristics of different systems by comparing Langton Categories I & II, IV and III respectively with those in Dynamic Systems…order, complexity, chaos; Matter…solid, phase transition, fluid; Computation…halting, undecodable, non-halting; and Life…too static, life/intelligence, too noisy. The Edge of Chaos is a domain between too much Order and too much Chaos. Its existence gives credence to the idea of avoiding excess and the notion of Moderation in All Things.

Yet it goes further than this in suggesting a physical measure for where the boundary might be. These ideas suggest that a model could be derived in which an Economic Domain is a mix of Agents exhibiting Diminishing Returns and Increasing Returns. By changing the proportions of each, very different economic behaviour could be elicited.

One way to shift the ratio would be by an injection of more R&D. Another way might be to alter the internal ratio in each agent between Resource Workers and Mind Workers...muscle and mind. Applying Leopold Kohr’s Theory of Skyscraper Economics may provide a way to integrate the idea of Optimum Size and the notion of a Certain Reach into an economic model.

Such a model might have very practical applications. For instance it might be possible to demonstrate that there is an optimum structure of Company Size and ratio of Muscle to Mind...e.g. operations budget to R&D budget…and Market Niche Size or Relative Size in which the proportion of man hours spent at 'the edge of chaos' is maximised...thereby providing an objective criteria for what is meant by 'optimum'.