I forgot to say earlier, but thanks to whoever it was in College on Wednesday evening who repeatedly searched for me on google and clicked through to my website. You could have been more subtle about it (i.e. taken more than thirty seconds to do your five searches), but I’m quietly touched that someone made the effort to make me feel less Unloved and Unwanted. Whoever you are, you made me smile, and I appreciate the thought.

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another – particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.