William Shepherd

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 It is just one of perhaps half a dozen unpublished manuscript.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'.

We are a Seafaring Nation. The British Empire was an Ocean Empire constructed in a Sea Ocean World. The entire pattern of the world’s cities and their positionings grew out of the commerce and communication flows of the Water Ocean World.

Whoever commanded the unsinkable ships (islands) commanding the mouths of the local bays, harbours, estuaries, channels and passages, and commanded the islands and capes which governed the entrance to the Seven Seas governed the world.

The entrance to the Seven Seas was understood only by the Creators of the British Empire and they built their empire on this knowledge. The great one Water Ocean World pattern was unseen by world people. It was and is in fact one ocean with one central island - Antarctica - clockwise around which ever races west-to-eastbound the winds and waters.

This gigantic merry-go-round - called the roaring forties…entered into at Forty Degrees South Latitude…is known as the Southern Hemisphere’s Jet Stream area. Ships out of the Atlantic, Indian or Pacific Oceans were swiftly borne west-east by the merry-go-round to choose their re-entries into those oceans and their local lands.

The Real World that we have inherited is not the One World of Tomorrow which new emperors will doubtless construct upon the new Air Ocean World centred upon the North Pole, around which counter-clockwise west-to-eastward races the Northern Hemisphere’s Jet Stream at 200 to 400 miles per hour, but upon the interactions of this emerging Air Ocean World with the traditional established patterns of the Old Water Ocean World. The Water Ocean World has established the fundamental pattern of Today’s World Cities.

Water Trails represented the shortest distances between otherwise remote lands and peoples. Water routes represented the most economical lines of communication. Long distance communication consisted of written or face to face transmission…most swiftly completed by water. The tonnage commerce of inorganic and organic world resources could only be accomplished in Water-Borne Vessels. Only token commerce and slow messages could take place on the backs of men or animals travelling the long way…via the plains and mountains around the headwaters.

Centuries ago the masters of the unsinkable British Isles established fortified bases at the southern extremities off South America, South Africa and Austral-Asia and with the unpeopled Antarctica at their back they came from the south upon the soft-bellies of the essentially northern hemisphere dwelling people. It was the Masters of the British Isles who held secret and commanded until World War One this WaterOcean World.

But many other peoples were quick to follow along behind the Merchant Venturers from these islands. And wherever they went trade followed and great sea-faring cities grew up on the shores of the oceans. To these cities flocked all the most enterprising elements from all the peoples in the sparsely populated Land World of the time.

The Greatest Cities were those where Freedom and Tolerance won the day…often only after a bitter struggle from the entrenched land owners descended from the earlier arrivals. The Great Liberal Cities became Confederations of Tribes and each World Tribe eventually remembered its cultural roots and as these pioneers in the New Lands and the New Cities opened up by the Water Ocean Routes of the Imperial Traders grew ever more prosperous so their children and their children’s children reconnected with the families and the communities they left behind.

Twenty years ago I wrote that the Nation of Tomorrow is the Circle of your Friends but these are no longer the people in your own town or the girl on your block. Your friends are likely to be your family and likely to be friends of your family. They will be friends you met first locally in your school and then friends that you made at some other place around your local ocean where you travelled or went to college.

Webs of personal, family, ethnic and religious bonds were weaved across the Earth’s oceans…between the Old Communities in the Old Land World and the New Pioneer Townships and Cities Dwellers in the New World growing up apace at the end of the Water Ocean Trade Routes.

This is the pattern of the Real World we inhabit today. It is a series of Water Ocean Worlds around each of which are clustered great cities with their own Diversity of Tribal Community and their own particular pattern of political power which enables that diversity to be welded into a Unity.