The Black Riders of the Internet III: Not Going Underground

This posting spins off from me doing one of my intermittent searches of the internet for interesting maps. As you will know I do not do this as assiduously as bloggers such as Strange Maps but it does give me pleasure to collect together interesting samples in this kind of scrapbook of a blog that I run. Having seen a postcard from Bath which portrayed that city as if it was the London Underground system I went in search of other locations which might have done this. Back in August 2007 if you look on my 'Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 5' posting you will see a couple of examples, including the underground map being used as a piece of art work, 'The Great Bear' produced in 1992. Since then lots of people have used the structure of the map for highlighting various things and I will show some examples in the posting which follows this one. However, this posting is about what else that I found out. As with many issues I came to this a couple of years late. It is about internet censorship, something else I posted on twice last August with two postings titled 'The Black Riders of the Internet' which detailed how lawyers are rampaging around the internet especially looking for maps of the world of 'The Lord of the Rings' and shutting down websites which feature them. These sites are run by fans not by profit-making organisations; no-one was trying to sell these maps. Yet, for the lawyers they would rather squash the enthusiasm of fans in an incredibly heavy-handed way and no doubt for a fat fee, so actually damaging rather than aiding the Tolkien estate.


I encountered the same thing when I was looking at maps which borrow from the London Underground map. Loads of people do this there are ones, in particular, featuring different music genres. Yet lawyers, Healeys Solicitors, on behalf of Transport For London the body which now runs the London Underground targeted one of these. The man they targeted was Geoff Marshall who just like 'The Great Bear' by Simon Patterson, took the map and simply altered the labels for each of the stations. What was clever, as you can see below, is that he made anagrams of the original station names. This in itself must have taken ages especially to come up with so many coherent names. Geoff was a real fan on the underground system and an advocate of its usage. However, the pressure from the solicitors back in March 2006 led him to turn completely around and now he drives everywhere in London. Many organisations face spoofs of their advertisements, I recently featured a whole slew of them around Absolut vodka's advertising, many of which were pretty offensive. In contrast Geoff was just producing art work based on something he loved. Of course in contemporary UK to go against the desires of the rich even to produce art is now illegal. Corporations seek to control every minute element and by doing so are stamping on our contemporary culture. What would have happened if Andy Warhol had been censored by soup manufacturers or by Chairman Mao or Marilyn Monroe?


Anyway, below is the excellent picture, please copy it and spread it so far around the internet that we can contest the censorship which is going on. There are so many evil things on the internet, including images, that no-one lifts a finger to stop, that it seems criminal that instead they spend so much effort to crush enthusiasts and fans and artists. If you are interested in others visit:

http://ni.chol.as/media/sillytube.html or http://www.steveprentice.net/tube/TfLSillyMaps/

In fact many featured there are not silly and show things such as stations with wheelchair user access and where the toilets are, which as someone who used to travel 2 hours per day on the underground, I know can be vital.

Anagram Map by Geoff Marshall (2006)

The Morality of Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy, as I have noted before, has become a fact of life for many people in Britain over the past few years. Once it was just the realm of businesses, but now thousands of people each year are going personally bankrupt. This is not surprising in a country where food, fuel and accommodation are already among the most expensive in Europe and where salaries rise very slowly and 80% of the population earns below the average salary. The UK is a country where the companies which control the basics of living such as water, sewage, gas and electricity are making millions of pounds of profit whilst people are shoved into fuel and water poverty. Repossessions of houses have risen 48% in the past year and are set to increase meaning that more people are thrown on to the very diminished public housing sector and into private rented accommodation where landlords/ladies can abuse them and increasingly where rented properties are also being repossessed by banks leaving tenants homeless without even notification of the process going on until they are evicted, even if they have been paying their rent religiously throughout.

For our young people, we have got to a situation where you cannot get a job or at least a decent job at all without a degree. However, studying at a university is will put you into at least £20,000 (€32,000; US$40,000) in debt. It is clear why this is wanted, it effectually makes graduates indentured and dissuades them from doing anything risky or radical and certainly not protesting against the state. However, it does saddle them with debt from the start of their working lives (assuming they can get a job with unemployment rising sharply) and is effectively meaning that 5-15 years from now even fewer people will be able to afford to buy a house than at present and yet no-one is making provision to increase either the social housing or the private rental market. It can be seen as a big boost to those rentiers currently snapping up houses and flats put on the market by people who had a 'buy-to-let' property which they cannot keep up. It will put many more people into the hands of the unscrupulous (and you show me a decent landlord/lady, I have yet to meet one, they are greedy and mean and have no consideration at all for the tenants who provide their income treating them all as if they are criminals and seeking to screw every last penny from them) landlords/ladies. They will have increased demand in the next decade that they can exploit to keep rents (that have no control on them in the UK) high and the quality of what they provide very low.

You have to earn over £15,000 in order to start paying back a student loan and most graduates (and I spoke to a man who researches this) earn only £17,000 per year (about £7000 less than the national average salary). Of course the debt does not go away until either they reach 65 or are so disabled that they can no longer work. Even if they go abroad it hangs over them. I can see the rise of UK student loan exiles in France, Spain and the USA rising. Of course taking a degree should be seen as an investment in your future, but of course it is not, because now everyone has them. It is like having to pay £20,000 to buy a school-leaving certificate. Rather for UK people it is a beginning of the process of British society draining as much money from them as possible with giving minimum back. We are the donors to keep the wealthy very rich. There is no sense that you can ever be without debt in the UK. You are hooked up to the blood-draining device at the age of 16 and are never let free because if you were then some rich people might actually have to work for their income rather than suck it from you. I can see where the writers of 'The Matrix' got their idea for humanity being a resource drained by parasitic controllers!

Currently there is one escape from all these pressures on people: bankruptcy. Though student loans are exempt from bankruptcy. Now, I have noted a trend to try and plug this gap. Of course bankruptcy is not the easy solution. It means that for six years you will find it very difficult to get credit for a mortgage, a car or anything and in the UK that effectively bars you from purchasing so many things. Bankruptcy also bars you from entering professions such as the law or accountancy, as if most of us had a chance of getting into either of those, though they are popular with graduates, so for them this is an issue. Also many of your possessions will be taken, that new computer and that ipod and the DVD player will no longer be yours. You can have old furniture and an old car (well I am in a fine position, my car is now 11 years old and rusting and my furniture was second hand when I got it 6 years ago and is coming apart, I can afford nothing newer). Make sure no-one dies and leaves you an inheritance while you are bankrupt because that too will be taken. Avoid winning the lottery too, unless it is such a big win that it can wipe out your debts. So bankruptcy is a way out but it is not an easy way or a decision that is taken lightly.

Now, to stop people using bankruptcy to escape the indenturement that society wants to shackle them with, I have noticed that people have started talking about how 'immoral' bankruptcy is. I heard this first from the Inland Revenue's sickly-named Time-To-Pay Helpline. If you ever want to be told how foolish you are and how you are trying to cheat the state and are a despicable you are and do not happen to have an irascible elderly relative handy then call these people up. They portray you as a tax cheat if you dare even mention bankruptcy. I noticed even the Money section of 'The Guardian' talks of the questionable 'morality' of bankruptcy. Putting this moral censure on people is utterly perverse. Who questions the morality of utility company and petrol company bosses awarding themselves million pound bonuses as they squeeze ordinary people into poverty? Who questions the morality of landlords/ladies who charge high rents and then provide no service to their tenants and then come after them for fictitious charges?

In the UK it is clear that the perspective on morality has become totally twisted. What is clearly moral now in the view of the civil service and the media is to exploit ordinary people to the fullest extent that you can. It is no longer a question of 'I'm Alright Jack', what we are being told to adopt is 'I'm Alright Jack, but I must get more money from you and you are going to suffer as a consequence'. Any attempt to escape from such rapacious behaviour is being condemned. In the UK society insists that you make yourself amenable to being exploited and to not having a stable let alone comfortable life. If you dare challenge your exploitation then you are the ones portrayed as immoral. This is sick. This is a sick society, stay away from it if you have any sense.

Boris Johnson: Buffoon of London - Is this what we want from politicians?

Last month in the posting about the desire in London to revive the Routemaster bus, an old-fashioned beloved but impractical vehicle, I mentioned the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The position of an elected Mayor of London was created in 2000. Despite having a population of around 10 million people, more than many European countries, and being at the centre of an economic region with 25 million people (i.e. larger than the population of Spain or Poland) London has often lacked its own government. In 1986 on party political grounds rather than issues of practicality, the Greater London Council (GLC) was abolished. Control of London then fell to the 32 London boroughs and the City of London (the government of the medieval core of London, a small area with few inhabitants but the main financial centres). It was not until 2000 that the replacement Greater London Authority and the London Assembly were created. It is incredible that the largest city in the UK had no cross-city government for 24 years. Anyone living in London at the time knows the chaos it caused as road works in particular could not be co-ordinated across boroughs (which being so densely populated are often only a few miles wide) and major transport projects were delayed because companies had to deal with a whole range of councils.

Anyway, finally in 2000 this mad system was ended and we got an elected mayor. Ironically the man who held the position 2000-08 was Ken Livingstone who had been leader of the GLC 1981-84 and then after a short break 1984-86. Having broken with the Labour Party he was an Independent 2000-2004 and then as a Labour candidate 2004-08 having been welcomed back into the party. He lost the election to serve his third term of office by 1.028 million votes to the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson's 1.168 million. Livingstone came over in the election as looking weary (he is 63; Johnson is 44). Perhaps he did not expect people to take Johnson seriously. Livingstone has headed London for a total of 13 years. One thing that must be said about him is that he always had good ideas and a populist touch. He radically reformed public transport in London with the Fare's Fair scheme of the 1980s and again the Oyster system of the 2000s. He has always been a strong advocate for London and played an important role in getting it the 2012 Olympics and the preparations for that. People have perceived him as left-wing, but that is mainly because of how he was painted as a 'loony left' member by the Thatcherite press of the 1980s. In fact though his policies seem to stem from a mix of common sense and trying to do what he sees as the best for the people of London.

Now, we turn to Boris Johnson who has been in power for a little over 3 months. Johnson, as I have mentioned before, is an ex-public school boy having gone to Eton (as did Conservative party leader David Cameron) and then on to Balliol College, Oxford University. So immediately he is unlike almost everyone who lives in London. He has an international background he was born in New York, his great-grandfather served in the government of the Ottoman Empire, his father worked for the European Commission and Boris went to school in Brussels; his second wife is half-Indian. So in these ways he has an international background in common with many London citizens. Before surgery as a boy he was deaf and this may explain the rather distracted manner in which he comes across. He was Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames 2001-08 and Shadow Education spokesman 2005-08.

The main problem with him is his incompetence. For someone who has been in the public eye as a politician and before that as a journalist, he seems to have a real inability not to offend people. He failed almost immediately as a management consultant because he found the graphs and charts of the profession tedious. This is a characteristic that has already caused him difficulties in his job as mayor because he complains the meetings which are at the heart of the job are tedious. He has handed responsibility for all planning to a deputy, an approach that is in sharp contrast to Livingstone's hands-on approach.

Johnson was kicked off 'The Times' for falsifying a quote, but seems to have risen through 'The Daily Telegraph' from 1987 onwards becoming European Community correspondent (no doubt aided by the inside family contacts; his father-in-law is also president of the European Commission on Human Rights, so often he would be interviewing family friends) then assistant editor 1994-9 and then editor of 'The Spectator' 1999-2005. Both of these are very conservative publications. Working for them seems to have simply kept him distant from ordinary people and he has continued to make ill-judged comments about citizens of Liverpool, Portsmouth and New Guinea that he has had to apologise for. In this way he is very like the Duke of Edinburgh. They are so wrapped up in attitudes that died in the 1950s that they go around speaking in an ill-informed way that causes offence in these more enlightened times. The Duke of Edinburgh you can forgive, he is an elderly, non-elected monarch with actually no power, Johnson is different he runs a city with the most multi-cultural population in the UK and a budget of billions. Under his mayorship it will be the Olympic city welcoming people from around the globe. More faux pas from him could cause international embarrassment for the city and the UK as a whole. He tends to speak bluntly and in appealing to his 'constituency', prosperous people of the kind I encountered at that Hampshire show recently, he forgets that the bulk of the population do not share his outdated views and actually want someone who is responsive to the world of 2008-13. Though perhaps I am wrong, maybe it is not 'the bulk' and I am looking at this from my small constituency as much as he is. However, if he was mayor of Royal Leamington Spa, then he would be facing fewer challenges than as mayor of the capital.

It is not just that Johnson comes over as being very 'silly' and has pandered to this by appearing on comedic television programmes, it is because you have no sense that this is an act. It does lead people to excuse him for his faux pas, but hardly instills confidence that he can handle crises when they come.

Given his loathing of procedure and his dependence on his deputies; he had 5 deputy mayors. The deputy mayor he handed planning to, Sir Simon Milton was embarrassed when it turned out that he was breaking regulations by remaining a member of Westminster Council and the Local Government Association and taking up this new role. Ray Lewis, deputy mayor for young people was forced to resign last month when it was revealed he had been investigated for financial irregularities when a church minister. Even during the election Johnson lost his deputy chief of staff James McGrath after he made statements about people of Afro-Caribbean origin returning to the Caribbean region if unhappy with policies in London. Tim Parker another deputy mayor and the one designated by Johnson as 'first deputy' have said that there are insufficient women of quality to appoint them to senior positions in the GLA. So, again we have out-dated attitudes seeming to be accepted by the Johnson administration. Like Johnson himself, men such as Lewis and Milton have controversy around them, that might not be criminal, but certainly makes people feel uneasy. The fact that there are 5 deputy mayors, will lead, according to Tony Travers of the London School of Economics quoted in 'The Guardian' to a fragmented policy-making approach which the formation of the GLA was supposed to combat.

What policies does he have? Well unsurprisingly he cleared out those Livingstone had initiated such as an increased congestion charge for heavy fuel using cars and to pedestrianise Parliament Square. Instead he annouced the abolition of the 'bendy' buses and revival of the Routemaster buses. So he is clearly moving transport back to the early 1960s and favouring elitist transport over public transport. He also scrapped plans to introduce 60 hydrogen-powered vehicles and ended the oil deal that Livingstone brokered with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela who Johnson (in line with the US attitude) calls a dictator. Aside from that, very like David Cameron himself (they were both Eton boys and members of the same banqueting club at Oxford University) he has no policies.

Is this really a problem? George W. Bush has set the model of a leader who makes no policy for himself and is a silly figurehead who seems to act simply as a distraction for whatever is going on below him. He seems to have no idea of what politics is actually about let alone running a country or in Johnson's case something big enough to be a country. No wonder it has been ruled out that Johnson could not replace the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, because we know that if he did you would have a shabby, mildly corrupt figure in that position again more about publicity than policy. I think that the British public has a low tolerance of politics. They see all the functions of the state as going on moderately inefficiently and feel they can do nothing about it. They will protest when a service is stopped in their local area or they oppose the building of some necessary structure and even then they blame the local council rather than any other broader political structure. So, for them, why not have a mayor who is a comic figure who spouts mildly bigoted views that they mouth themselves when among friends down the pub? There is no need to have a politician let alone an effective one as head of London. I think for all his policies, Livingstone won because people liked him standing against the Labour Party and he seemed like an ordinary man. In the past eight years though he has had to be a politician and that is not something people like in their heads of government.

I remember when at university fellow students complaining that the university newspaper was 'too political'. Its politics coverage was about student union politics nothing broader, but this was too much and they wanted it to restrict itself to sports results and details about social events. When I was at university people would often elect a pet cat or a pinball machine or an elderly celebrity to particular student union posts, rather than a person, despite the fact that universities were under heavy pressure in the dying days of Thatcher's rule. If university graduates wanted this, then surely it is unsurprising to find that attitude spread across many in the population. So, possibly in Boris Johnson, many Londoners have got the politician they want, someone to entertain them like a clown for the next five years while London grinds on not getting any better and with many challenges not even noted let alone tackled. I predict that as a result the 2012 Olympics will run into severe problems, notably with transport, but also attitudes to visitors. In his bigoted attitudes even to people from other parts of the UK, Johnson gives the green light to those people with stronger prejudices, that it is alright to speak and behave that way. This is going to be making an unwelcoming environment for visitors (though after Beijing it might appear mild in comparison). London will decay under Johnson because simply he is incapable of doing the job for which he has been elected. Given how much of the UK is tied into London it will damage the country as a whole. Of course by then he might be well in step with the national government because Cameron as prime minister will be no different and we will see a head of government with really no idea what to do but muddle along. Meanwhile London and the UK as a whole will become poorer and far more divided than it is even at the moment.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 10: Pellucidar and Others

Before I continue looking at Pellucidar and some other assorted maps I have turned up recently I have to put in a recommendation for the Fantasy Maps blog: http://fantasymaps.wordpress.com/ On here you will find a thorough coverage of many fantasy worlds. It is a real delight to wander through and see what they have. In addition, as the blogger notes, it is an excellent resource if you happen to be reading a series and want to check up on where everything is.

This posting has been rather postponed. It was triggered by the release a couple of weeks ago of another movie version of 'Journey to the Center [sic] of the Earth', I thought it might be an idea to dig out some maps I ran across while looking for stuff on Pangaea and Antarctica. 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' was written by Jules Verne in 1864. There has been a previous movie made in 1959. Edgar Rice Burroughs most famous for the 'Tarzan' series, he also produced the Barsoom Mars stories. In addition he wrote a series of books based in Pellucidar another world in a 'hollow' Earth. The movie 'At the Earth's Core' (1976), is based on the first book in the series, with the same title, which Burroughs published in 1914. It features the US actor Doug MacClure (1935-95) who seems to have made quite a career out of these fantastical movies which were a fad in the mid-1970s. He was in 'The Land That Time Forgot' (1975), 'The People That Time Forgot' (1977) - both based on Burroughs novels (both published in 1918 and both available online through a Project Gutenberg; there is a third in the so-called Caspak series called 'Out of Time's Abyss' published the same year) and featuring a lost island where dinosaurs still exist. He was also in 'Warlords of Atlantis' (1978) though that was initially a screenplay rather than a book, it was very much in the same ilk with a Victorian scientist travelling into an underworld environment with fantastical creatures. Anyway, I came across a whole slew of maps of Pellucidar (the word 'pellucid' means that something allows light through it or derived from that it is clear in meaning, I suppose it is related to text or speech being 'lucid') on the following website: http://www.bouncepage.com/Pellucidar/maps.html

The site is interesting as it shows how maps for fictional worlds evolve and are re-interpreted as it features maps from 1915 (when what would become the novels were first serialised in magazines) to 2000. Pellucidar fits with views of the Hollow Earth that I have looked at on this blog before, having both an inner sun and a polar opening. I include here some for discussion, and the usual hunt for inland seas! For some reason this first map appears as a negative on the blog, but if you click on it then you can see it as black on white as it should be.

Empire of Pellucidar (1915)

This one was the first and shows just a little of what would later be revealed as the world of Pelludicar. It is shows the North-West coast of some sea filled with quite a few islands and numerous, unnamed cities, Mahar, being the people who inhabit them. I like the Unfriendly Islands which seems charmingly naive as is Land of the Awful Shadow and one would almost expect this world to be for a children's book rather than an adult one. The style is also remininscent of the one of Mongo that I have featured in a previous posting.

Map of Pellucidar (1929)

This one was also drawn by the author but he seems to not be very confident in expanding the world. We may be looking at an inland sea to the North-West of the map or one to the South-East. It is a bit disappointing that so much is unknown or unexplored. Perhaps he did not want to tie himself down. I also find 'Scale Unknown' to be irritating, but foregiveable. There is always a challenge in fantasy stories that you want huge sweeping continents, but then it takes months for your characters to cross them. I think he should have stuck to the peninsula he first features, but I suppose reader and publisher pressure led him to expand.

The World of Pellucidar (1966)

This tells us as much about reader expectations as developing ideas of the stories, especially in the 1960s when 'fantasy' as opposed to being a sub-set of science fiction, was coming into its own. The unexplored areas are now named and we still might have two inland seas, but they may just be long gulfs. The styling, in contrast to the simple maps of the pre-war era seems to try to indicate the fantastical nature with the creatures pictured on it.

Map of Pellucidar (1965)

In contrast, from the previous year is this very scientific map which, like the flag of the United Nations gives a picture of its world from hte North Pole. It also shows how comparatively small the original region that Burroughs featured was. In addition, the bodies of water one might thing were inland seas turn out just to be the ends of vast oceans, with more closed in seas elsewhere on the globe.

Pellucidar - From the 'Dictionary of Imaginary Places' (2000)

I used to own a copy of the 1980 German version of 'The Dictionary of Imaginary Places' by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, apparently it was reprinted in 2000 in English. I saw a similar book back in 1985, in English, but foolishly had no money to buy it and have never seen it again. This blog might be very different if I had taken some money with me that day. This map like the following ones focuses on the key continent of the novels. It is never clear if the term Pellucidar represents the whole world or just this continent. Again you can tell the date of this one by the style. Gone are the monsters but we have a pattern somewhere between scientific and artistic. I think there must be a challenge for fictional mapmakers not to make their islands look like creatures, we seem to have a hare at the southern end of the map and a pointy-nosed crocodile (sea predators 62 million years ago on our world) at the northern end.

The Empire of Pellucidar by Bruce Wood (2000)

This again reflects the kind of maps you can find in real cartography online with a sandy colour for the land and a bright blue for the sea. This again shows the main continent but portraying it much slimmer than the version above. It almost looks like some lost Greek island. It emphasises the dominance of the oceans over the land in Pellucidar, so in some way moves us away from Burroughs's focus.

Pellucidar Mapped on to Earth (1970)

This is perhaps the most 'scientific' of the Pellucidar maps by Frank J. Brueckel who has drawn lots of maps of the world. It tries to overlay it with our world. There is a difficulty with this because, if Pellucidar is within our Earth then its diameter must be less than ours. I do not know whether Brueckel took this into consideration. If you went straight up from two points on Pellucidar and came out our Earth, those two points would be farther apart than down on Pellucidar as the arc between them would be wider.

The Discworld

The Discworld is the setting of Terry Pratchett's (born 1948) incredibly long-running comedy fantasy story series, of currently 36 novels. The first was 'The Colour of Magic' (1983), though Pratchett had featured a similar flat planet in 'Strata' (1981), though it was a science fiction story the inhabitants of the planet did not know it had been artificially created. Pratchett features ideas from across numerous mythologies and popular culture. This planet rides on the backs of four elephants themselves on a huge turtle 'swimming' through space. Physics is very different on the planet with light flowing across the Discworld like a liquid rather than a beam or wave.

The Four Corners of Civilization

In contrast to most of the maps you find on the internet, this one is from a pretty new novel, in fact the next two stories in the series are not out until 2009-10. They are the Kingkiller trilogy by US author Patrick Rothfuss (born 1973). The books are: 'The Name of the Wind' (2007), 'The Wise Man's Fear' (scheduled for April 2009) and 'The Doors of Stone' (working title, scheduled for 2010). They are a fantasy auto-biography of musician-wizard called Kvothe. Rothfuss wrote it in 1991 as 'The Song of Flame and Thunder' but publishers felt it was far too long (even for a fantasy epic) and so he was advised to break it down. This map looks as if it could have come from a book published in the 1950s and I adore the pencil drawn styling. Peninsulas seem to be these days, but notice numerous large lakes (possibly inland seas?) and certainly a candidate for an inland sea in the South-West, there is also another archiepelago up in the North. Rothfuss could probably be seen as an uber-fantasist, given that he wrote such an epic by the time he was 18. I guess there is hope for all of those teenage geeks to put aside their Gor books and start writing something for themselves. As such Rothfuss draws on a culture which is well established and all good to him. I look forward to his future worlds.

The World of Malaz

This one comes from Steven Erikson (born 1959; pseudonym of Steve Rune Lundin which actually sounds a more fantastical name; maybe he thought having 'rune' in his name would make people think it was fake). This world is home to the stories in the cycle the Malazan Book of the Fallen. The core books of the series are: 'Gardens of the Moon' (1999), 'Deadhouse Gates' (2000), Memories of Ice (2001), 'House of Chains' (2002), 'Midnight Tides' (2004), 'The Bonehunters' (2006), 'Reaper's Gale' (2007), 'Toll the Hounds' (2008), 'Dust of Dreams' (forthcoming) and 'The Crippled God' (forthcoming) as well as some novellas. There is so much detail about this world, that I might as well point you directly to the wikipedia entry for the world (rather than the novels): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Empire have an empire born out of city-states which then becomes a colonial power and over-stretches itself, so a nice mix of Greek and Roman history, of course with magic and pirates.

This world looks like a bunch of islands, but you have to note the scale and the fact that it is actually a collection of spread out continents. Malaz is in the centre and pretty small. There looks like one inland sea on the western continent and there is an archiepelago beyond that to the North-West. I am bit concerned to see an area called Jhag Odhan, because in the fantasy novel I wrote in 1988 I had an Ijahg City (soon to be featured on this blog).

Eladraigne and Namarre on Erith

I encountered more along this line on a rather cobwebsite, Daelstrom's Melted Maps: http://daelstorm.thegraveyard.org/maps.php which does not seem to have been updated since 2006. This has a very Celtic feel to it (and an inland sea or is it just a lake? Mirrinor), though the North-Eastern Nenian Sea presumably counts. There are two small archipelagos too. Anyway, this one comes from a female author, not that common, though as I began to think about it with Le Guin, Macaffrey and so on, there are a few. This is from The Bitterbynde triology by Cecilia Dart-Thornton an Australian author. The books are: 'The Ill-Made Mute' (2001), 'The Lady of the Sorrows' (2003), and 'The Battle of Evernight' (2003). There is not a lot online about this world, though there is already an online role-playing game set on the world. From the game you can see a range of races, with a mix of barbarians and more calmer peoples and elvish like races too, the 'Faeran'. The world as a whole is called Erith and Eladaraigne is the main kingdom which houses the Feorkind with its capital Caermelor (clearly reminiscent of Camelot). Namarre is inhabited by barbarians. So, it seems steeped in Celtic/early Anglo-Saxon culture.

Continent of 'The Way of the Tiger'

Rather than coming from a novel, this comes from a series of game books written by Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith called 'The Way of the Tiger' series. They were: 'Avenger!' (1985), 'Assassin!' (1985), 'Usurper!' (1985), 'Overlord!' (1986), 'Warbringer' (1986) and 'Inferno' (1987). Their world is called The Orb. They were like the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks (and in fact one in that series, 'Talisman of Death' (1984; republished 2006) also by Thomson and Smith also features The Orb), in that you select options and go to the relevant entry. There is a simple combat system that allows you to battle opponents using dice. Effectively they were a role-playing game for people travelling or had no friends. The interesting thing about this series is that it has an unashamedly Japanese setting, with the player being a ninja and he can draw on 'chi' (as in Tai-Chi; it is the Chinese for the Japanese word 'ki' as in Aikido) which is a mental/spiritual force used in Chinese martial arts. Despite these references to our world, the setting is fantastical with barbarians, an Assassins' Guild, rangers, paladins and a whole series of gods, many related to war or evil. I like this map which is very North-South orientated (perhaps to match Japan itself) but the large fjords of the Great Valley Reaches seem reminiscent of Norway. It is not clear if this is the extent of the contient or if The Sea of the Star is an inland sea. There are no archiepelagos visible.

The World of Xylae

This one I can find out little about, it came off another blog hosted on blogspot, by someone it seems is called Tang. Despite the name, this seems to have Nordic and Italian, rather than Chinese influences. It has a hand-drawn 1930s feel, though the waves and mountains look put in by computer. There are stories on the blog, but I did not stop to read through them and there was little reference to this place except its name and I have no idea how you would pronounce Xylae (maybe it is like 'Skylar' which I know is now sometimes a girl's name, I believe, particularly in Australia). One reason I picked on it is because it has a mega-inland sea and a whole chaos of archipelagos. This Latchader Sea seems closed at both ends and at the bottom, the Romund Sea could be another inland sea, though if that is a cape, I guess not, it is just another gulf in a larger ocean. Clearly the West is most inhabited, though if this is set on a globe then the cities to the East of the map might be quite close to those in the West. You would have expected a bit more about Romundland. The title describes it as the 'known world', so if it is a typical fantasy setting, then maybe there are more 'undiscovered' continents.

Stepping Into A Parallel British Society

I am in the fortunate position of having leave to 'use up'. Many businesses force you to take a certain amount of leave in a year and partly due to my failure to have a holiday I have been compelled to take time off despite the fact that this is generally a costly experience. Anyway, it gives me some more time for blogging. Like today I was on leave yesterday and that enabled me to step into a very alternate British society. No, I did not slip through a portal into a world where Hitler had won the Second World War or even just where Callaghan won the 1978 election, I simply went to the New Forest & Hampshire Country Fair. There are many of these kinds of events, I used to run into much smaller ones in Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire when I lived in Milton Keynes, and I guess that I probably encountered the kind of people I am about to talk about there. I think the thing about this fair was the scale of it and probably Hampshire is more prosperous than those Midlands counties. Also the New Forest which I sometimes skirt while driving around the South of England, attracts the very wealthy. It is picturesque and comparatively close to London so probably no surprise. So scale, prosperity and the fact that unlike Buckinghamshire-Northamptonshire-Bedfordshire which for some reason are the realm of bikers, there were not the usual leather-clad bike brigade to leaven the mix of people.


Why did I find it so unsettling? Well, many of the things there you would probably find at any fete in a country area. There were stalls selling cakes, there were marquees of flowers and handicrafts, there were car dealerships and various charities with stalls too. So, far so normal. There were more livestock. Having recently re-seen the episode of 'Father Ted' featuring the 'King of the Sheep' contest it was fun to see one for real. There were a lot of horses and people show jumping or driving coaches very fast or pulling those commercial carts with shire horses. So, it was rural. However, it was the people that made the whole thing a little scary. The event runs Tuesday to Thursday rather than over a weekend, so this presumably filters out office workers and shop assistants for starters. I would normally have been at work. So walking around, for all the conservationis and the modern farm technology on show (and a great deal of older stuff like 'vintage' tractors and a huge steam-powered combined harvester) you felt as if you had stepped back to 1928.


There were middle class people there but they seemed mainly to be traders. However, predominantly the people seemed either to be squires and big landowners and their numerous offspring or they seemed to be farm labourers granted the day off and their families, greatful for a day's break, tugging their forelock in their gratitude. There was a clear pecking order with 'members' areas where men were wearing suits and ties (despite the heat) and there was a commissionaire in full uniform to police entry into these areas. Colonel and Mrs. Blimp seemed to be everywhere, he in a navy blue jacket, carrying a shooting stick and she in a floral dress and large straw hat. There is a younger version too, who presumably in time will grow into these people. Their dress code was different but equally as alien: young women in leather hats with jodhpurs and these peculair knee-length boots in a kind of hard suede. The young men dressed the way Princes William and Harry do off duty, I suppose unsurprisingly, because they belong in this same alternate reality. There were dogs, dogs by the score. Some were for showing in events, but the bulk were just brought by visitors. Many people had two or more, everything from beagles to labradors and the odd poodle or dalmatian. You could believe if someone started shooting pheasants from the air there would be a thousand dogs rushing to catch the kill. There was a stall with a whole range of shotguns sitting on it, so maybe they do that when 'outsiders' like me have gone home. Despite the hunting ban it was interesting to see the book stalls there had hunting books in great prominence.


I clung to the conservationists because at least they seemed to have come from a world I knew. They were put at the far end of the event from the groups like the gundog handlers and the Countryside Alliance that seemed to be more in tune with attitudes of the bulk of the visitors. I do remember in the 1970s people spoke of the Green-Brown alliance in West Germany. By this they saw some commonality of interests between the Greens and the Browns (brown was the initial colour of the Nazi Party) who represented landed interests and the people who are subservient to them. Both groups want to leave rural areas untouched, though for very different motives. The Greens (in this situation represented by conservation groups, and by this I do not only mean pressure groups, but also official bodies such as the Forestry Commission who weree there in force) are democratic and want to encourage all kinds of people to enjoy the rural areas of Britain and the more Brown tendency founded on exclusive access for the 'right' people and no interference from outside. Now sometimes there is overlap but it is an uneasy relationship on both sides. You could almost see that represented physically at the event I was attending.


My concern, I suppose, was that I had stepped into a society (in large numbers, there must have been thousands of people there) which bore no resemblance to what I know UK society is like. What was frightening, was that the people there whether they were from the top or the bottom of society seemed to believe in a society founded on strict hierarachy and privilege. Most alarming they believe whole-heartedly that their view of Britain and especially the rural areas is the correct one. They believe that the elites should control everything, should be free to exploit the rural spaces and block out anyone else. Of course they need poor people to work for them, but these people must be grovelling and grateful for the meagre wages and the minimal privileges that the elite grant them. I was reminded by what I read in the 'Metro' (a free newspaper in London and some other cities) which had a comment from Claire Armstrong of Safespeed (an organisation opposed to speed cameras who talk under madness in trying to get people to have the 'right' to speed) commenting on the need that near Preston in Lancashire, the local authorities have had to put a CCTV camera to guard a speed camera to prevent it being constantly vandalised. Armstrong said '[t]he culprits were probably law-abiding citizens taking direct action against speed cameras'. How can these people be 'law-abiding' if they are vandalising a piece of safety equipment? I am sure these same people would want young taggers birched for vandalising through graffitti. In addition, these people are disabling speed cameras so that they can commit more crime, i.e. speeding, without being penalised. Of course, in the screwed-up parallel society which lives beside our own, there is a very different sense of what being 'law-abiding' is. Their definition is about protecting privilege while keeping down those who lack power and wealth or will not kow-tow to them.


The bulk of the attendees of the New Forest & Hampshire Country Show, feel that their view is the correct one. However, they are fortunately only a minority. The bulk of the population lives in cities and suburbs and has at least a semi-democratic view of how UK society should function. What is alarming is that the ordinary people of the UK in fact have so little power and with David Cameron on the horizon as the next prime minister or the one after next, they are actually going to climb into the ascendancy once more. In that kind of society wages are kept low while bonuses are in their millions; people are free to speed and run down people with impunity. The bulk of us come into a kind of serfdom and forced to be grateful for that. An afternoon at a country fair has shown me a potential UK of 2015 and unless you are of the navy-blue blazer brigade, for us it is going to be a country with an unfair, oppressive and divided society.

The Deserving and the Undeserving

The UK is now a country where there seems to be few bounds of morality on the basis that used to exist. People publicly take drugs, commit adultery, have illegitimate children, speed, lie in public, take bribes in monetary or other forms and this is just the politicians let alone 'celebrities'. Sixty-one Conservative MPs were improperly employing members of their families on salaries of around £40,000 paid for by the state; most of these family members did nothing to benefit the MP or the constituency, it was just a sinecure for them. People in the public spotlight seem to face only minimal censure. Possibly this is because so many newspapers and magazines rely on scandal to fill their pages and to press people too much to behave in a respectable way would be to cut off their supply of stories. The only journalist who seems to be raising these issues is Polly Toynbee and I am pleased at that, but she seems like a very lonely voice.

It is interesting that such moral constraints from which the bulk of the population are excused are still applied very heavily to the poor. The sense of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor dates back to the perceptions of the late Victorian era. These seemed to match social welfare with moral behaviour. More than that though, it was a sense that people could prove they were worthy of being lifted from poverty by adopting the correct frame of mind. They needed to compliant and grateful rather than seeking to challenge the situation they were in or the society that kept them there. Benefactors loved to see the needy bowing in supplication and gratitude for the benefits given to them. Anyone who did not behave that way was improper and so should be penalised by having benefits withheld.

Partly this association was due to the fact that it was felt that anyone could lift themselves from poverty if they just tried, so in fact, it was felt, the bulk of people still in that state were lazy, feckless or corrupt. This stemmed from the fact that having numerous children and drinking alcohol were seen as primary causes of poverty, when in fact they were more often the consequences of the things that people used to blot out the discomfort of living in poverty. In the 1930s when mass unemployment came to the UK, it was noted that consumption of alcohol and tobacco as well as gambling increased. In addition funerals became very elaborate. These are aspects that you can still witness in East London where I lived 1994-2001. Of course drugs have also long been part of the mix, laudanum was bought by the pint in the 18th century. These days that factor is more visible, but stems from the same cause. When you are living in a room in a bed and breakfast with no hope of work and little to do to pass the day, you just want to blot out the world in whatever way you can. I agree that addictions lead to poverty, but you must also recognise that poverty leads to addiction, and if you like, immorality. If you have nothing worthwhile keeping in the world, why bother to stay in the world? This is seen in the funerals. I have never seen so long corteges or as elaborate funeral tributes or horse-drawn hearses as when I lived in East London where people have the least money to afford these things. In more prosperous areas, people make less of a fuss. However, in poor districts it is a sense that at least at their death the person gets something decent in their life. It is a celebration too, that the deceased, unlike the mourners, has finally managed to shake off the burdens of debt and worry that continue to plague the living.

In the 20th century, from the 1910s onwards and especially from 1945, the state took over the role of aiding the poor. It tended to move away from moral judgement to a mechanistic approach. If you fit certain criteria then you receive the benefits, if you do not then the benefits are not paid. There is no question of how you use the money, whether you save it or what foods you buy. There have been some moves in this direction more in terms of health, which in the UK having a state-run health system which is often free at point of use, it can be counted as a 'benefit' though one that most people whether rich or poor, unemployed or in work, will use at some time in their life. There has been discussion whether the obese or the elderly or those who smoke should be refused certain treatments, notably IV fertilisation treatments or transplants. As yet this is still generally undecided, but it fits in with the growing attitude that there are people, who because of the lifestyle they lead, are more 'deserving' of treatment than others. How long is it before that extends to determining who gets treatment on the basis of the person's income or their ethnicity. This is a very slippery path, but one that many people in the UK are keen to progress down.

People in the UK often feel that they are both hard done by and that other people are getting more than they are, and usually without 'deserving' it. This is a natural gripe. It is difficult to comprehend how impersonal global economic forces impact on all of us as individuals. It is much easier to identify distinct individuals and blame them. Of course every single person you or I is going to meet today, tomorrow, next week, probably for the rest of our lives, has absolutely no control over the global economy. The people who do, do not mix with people like us. Even Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling should you meet them somewhere, have only limited power to influence what impacts on our bank accounts or whether we will be in a job this time next year. So, we blame other people and we assume, because we come from a superficially prosperous country, that if we do not have enough, then it must be that someone else is taking it from us. We do not blame the faceless ultra-rich who in fact are the ones squeezing it from us in the petrol we pay for (BP the largest British owned oil company post six-month profits of £6.75 billion [€8.5 billion; US$ 13.5 billion] today, equivalent to £37 million per day. They make enough money in profit in a year to pay the annual salaries of 225,000 school teachers, just under a third of the total) or the food we buy, rather we blame the immigrant family on the corner or that layabout family across the road.

If you ever work in a government department as I have done (the Department of Employment and the Inland Revenue as they were named in the 1990s) you know that every day letters arrive at every single revenue or benefits office from people telling on their neighbours who they are convinced must be defrauding the government. In the bulk of the cases they are wrong as the civil service is pretty efficient at catching people defrauding them, they do not need the public to keep pointing out people, in fact it wastes their time as they have to process these 'reports' from the public when they could actually be chasing down fraudsters. The popular media always talks about 'scroungers' and people (often foreigners) supposedly defrauding the state. It never talks about the billions of pounds of unclaimed benefits. In 2007, 2.1 million retired people were deemed to be below the poverty line, a rise of 200,000 from 2006. However, each year, that is each and every year, £5 billion in benefits targeted specifically at people over 60 years old, are unclaimed. People are either ill-informed about what they can claim, or, and if you know British people of that age group, reluctant to claim because of the stigma attached, that they would rather live in poverty than go for this money. Surely any person who has worked in the UK through this past decades 'deserves' all the help they can get, even if you stick to that criteria which I feel is an unsound one.

All of this is going to get work. David Cameron, from his elite public school background, is reviving the rhetoric of the 'undeserving poor' from the Victorian era and rehashed through the Thatcher years. There is no indication on how you can prove you are 'deserving', but as in the past it seems that you must be willing to enlist your family members as free childcare and then go and take lowly paid jobs with long hours in order to prove that you are deserving, that you have sufficient self-sacrifice for the state to deem to come and help you. As I have noted before, the bulk of the UK population, about 25 million of which are working age, want to work. Around 35,000 of them do not. This still leaves 1.55 million unemployed people in the UK who want to work. Many will work in jobs with poor wages, but of course they have to earn enough to live on and pay the ever increasing fuel and food bills. People forget that in the Victorian era a lot of the worst paid jobs came with food and housing as part of the pay, that is not the case any longer. You cannot move to a Victorian economy unless you go to it wholesale, which is to say, men dying at an average age of 45 so having no need for unemployment, children going into employment from the age of 6 onwards without having education, an infant mortality rate somewhere around 15-20 per 1000, accommodation that could be afforded even on pauper wages from factories, a 12-hour working day; cheap adulterated food, and so on. You cannot expect people in the modern UK to somehow behave as if they were living 120 years ago when the rest of society is enjoying all the benefits and advances of the 21st century and also dangling these things in front of people constantly, telling them they are nothing unless they own them.

Is 'deserving' or 'undeserving' a stamp to be placed on people's foreheads? The father of the UK welfare system, William Beveridge, was aware that all people go through ups and downs in our lives. All of us will be ill, all of us will get old, many of us will have children, many of us will find ourselves without work at sometime or another (even managing directors get laid off at times). So this is why he came up with 'national insurance', to insure us against the mishaps of life. There was no question of morality, we just paid in when we could and then drew out when we needed, that was the approach of the welfare state, not taxes feeding into benefits. Obviously it worked better when there was full employment, but it should be working now as employment is still reasonable. However, as with all insurance claims, there are people who feel that they should check the claims. Their judgements are to be not based on how much you have paid in insurance (nor how much you will pay in the future) but whether you have somehow lived the 'right' way to get the money. This is arbitrary. If this is the basis of judging benefits paid to poor people or those just temporarily without a job or with children, I think we should begin applying it to the rich as well.

How would the wealthy respond if we began taking away their salaries and bonuses if they fail to invest in their companies; if they take drugs, drink and drive dangerously; if they produce children who have not bothered to study for qualifications and are a burden rather than a benefit to the country; if they do not pay their workers a wage that reflects their contribution to company profits (no company makes any profit without workers)? I think it is time to come down hard on the undeserving rich. Make them feel embarrassed and guilty for what they suck out of the UK and waste on things that generally damage the environment - big cars, numerous flights, developments in tropical countries, the drugs they take. They do far more harm both to the UK and the world as a whole than any number of families or individuals below the poverty line. Of course we are going to move even further away from anything of this kind. Wealth in the UK buys you exemption from moral criticism. Poverty, however, thrusts you right into the spotlight and even if you do receive the measly benefits you are obliged to feel guilty and oh-so-grateful for them. That is a perverse state of affairs and riling me so much I am going to have to cease this post.

A Very Good Tour

Well, regular readers will know my opinion of Cadel Evans in the Tour de France and so will understand how glad I was that he was not able to pull back the time on Carlos Sastre on the time trial on Saturday and so went on to ultimate victory. Sastre is very self-effacing a trait which appeals highly to British viewers but probably seems perverse to US or Australian ones.

Commentators say fans of the Tour de France divide into two camps, those who like to see a champion like Miguel Indurain or Lance Armstrong tactically and strategically take apart the opposition and those, including myself, who prefer an open race in which it is uncertain who will win and there are chops and changes throughout. The 2008 race was in the latter category, often with less than a minute dividing the top 5-6 riders and there were others such as Denis Menchov and Bernhard Kohl with maybe some more luck could have won. There were days when successful breakaways won for heroes like Marcus Burghart of Stage 18 or Sylvain Chavanel of Stage 19 and there were stages for sprinters, notably the four victories by Mark Cavendish, the best a British rider has done in a single tour. There was excellent tension, such as on the first day in the Alps when Sastre staked out his claim for victory by breaking away in Alpe D'Huez and then again in the final time trial as he rode excellently to hold on to it. Seven people held the yellow jersey throughout the race this year and even when it seemed a foregone conclusion that Cadel Evans would win, there were still surprises, it was really edge of the seat stuff.

The interesting thing is that the man who won the Tour de France last year, Alberto Contador was not invited to compete this year. This is because the Central Asian team, Astana that he rides for were barred in 2006 and kicked out in 2007 when Alexandre Vinokourov, Andrey Kashechkin and Matthias Kessler were detected as having taken drugs. The Astana team is now run by Johan Bruyneel and he has a strict drugs checking policy, but clearly the team has to serve its time in exile before the authorities will let it back in. I do hope so as a Sastre-Contador-Evans (plus Menchov and Kohl) battle will make for exciting cycling.

The thing that stopped 2008 being an excellent tour for me was the continued presence of drugs. Of course it was nothing on the scandals of recent years. In 2006 Floyd Landis was stripped of his victory of the whole race for drugs taking. Last year two leaders of the race, Alexandre Vinukurov was kicked out for drug taking and then Michael Rasmussen for irregularities around his drug tests. Last year whole teams went, this year Moises Duenas Nevado and Manuel Beltran were removed but their teams remained, following the removal of Ricardo Ricco who had one the 9th stage and the departure of the Saunier Duval team with the winner of Stage 10, Leonardo Piepoli and Juan Jose Cobo who came second on that stage. Effectively the Barloworld team funded from South Africa will dissolve after Nevado on that team was caught, as they are withdrawing sponsorship. This is the shame as Barloworld were one of the few non-European teams. Interestingly the new approach of the authorities targeting suspicious riders seems to have paid off, maybe in future they should be barred from even entering. Three teams in this year's race have their own drugs monitoring on top of the official one and I think in future any team being entered into the race must be compelled to adopt this approach.

The thing that effectively lost Cadel Evans the 2008 Tour de France was his team, Silence Lotto. They were almost invisible in the race and you can contrast this with the strength of the CSC team which put first Frank Schleck and then Carlos Sastre into the yellow jersey. A team even half as good as CSC would have allowed Evans to claw back Sastre's gain on Alpe D'Huez which was a model of team working with the two Schleck brothers policing the people pursuing Sastre and breaking up any pursuit. Evans had no-one to help him counter that and he also lacked the gall of someone like Armstrong, who knew that even when he was in the yellow jersey sometimes he had to attack rather than simply defend. Evans has come second in 2007 and 2008. He can win the Tour (though given his acid personality I hope he never does) if he can get even 2-3 decent team members around him. He has the all-round ability which he has demonstrated throughout this race, but he lacks that added spark of a team that can haul him up a mountain or break up his pursuers that both Sastre and Frank Schleck could call upon. The Tour de France was won by the CSC not only in actuality, but in terms of performance and they are an example in terms of how they work on the road (and their drugs screening policy) that other teams should really seek to copy.

Though the race is just over, I am very excited about 2009. I trust that it will be a clean race and one in which there will a whole host of exciting riders battling out for victory. That will be the sport of cycling at its peak. It has been a long, hard slog to reach, but I feel we are finally getting there and that is all for the good. Walking around my home town, I can see the impact that Cavendish's wins have already had on British cycling, there are so many more people (all men interestingly, maybe we need to bring back coverage of the women's Tour de France) and also children rather than wearing football strips, are in cycling caps and outfits. In the long-run this is not only good for the sake of cycling as a sport, but, I feel, for the health of the UK population.