I would like to pretend that I am some sort of iconoclastic smash the system type of dude, but - truly - I am nothing of the sort. No matter how hard I try, how scruffy I get, or how long I grow my hair, I am still a respectable English gentleman of the old school, which is exactly why I spoke to the woman from the Salvation Army in the way I did. I like to think that my breeding and savoir faire showed through at that moment, because just as she had spoken to me, I was looking around vacantly and I saw the message "Xtul Lives, Xtul Rules, doesn't in Jon?" scrawled surprisingly neatly in violet magic marker above the telephone.Admittedly all sorts of people knew that we were travelling to Norfolk that day; I had put it on the CFZ blog, for example. But nobody outside the three of us in the hire car knew that we were going to be stopping off at that particular Motorway Services. And nobody apart from me, and possibly my ex-wife knew that the blurb on the back of the 1980s paperback edition of Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov had always irritated me. It was an over the top screed which had no real emotional empathy with the story. It started "Foundation Lives, Foundation Rules!" After all these years even typing it out for the purposes of this narrative is mildly irritating.
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