Not in our name

Dear Shirley Williams

You clearly wanted to speak about the Scottish independence referendum on Radio 4 this morning, and you made it clear that the principal reason you don't want us to choose independence is that it would rob the UK of it's place at the world's top table.

For many of us in Scotland, that is precisely the point. We don't want illegal weapons of mass destruction parked anywhere on our soil, let alone in the purlieus of our largest city. We also don't want the rusting contaminated hulks of nuclear submarines lying just across the firth from our capital city, but that might be negotiable. We don't want illegal foreign adventurism in our name. We don't want to be part of a nation justly hated all over the world for its centuries-old history of exporting warfare and weapons across the globe.

We know that it is the small countries of Europe that achieve positive change on the world stage. We saw the role of Iceland in easing the tensions of the cold war. We saw the role of Norway in bringing Israel and Palestine to the negotiating table - before the US sabotaged all the progress made. We've seen the role of Austria in providing a venue for the de-escalation of the tension over Iran's nuclear ambitions. We've seen again and again the role of Switzerland in providing a neutral venue for talks between warring nations. All these nations are trusted because they do not try to 'punch above their weight'. They are trusted because they don't seek to be the world's policeman. They are trusted because they don't have imperialist ambition.

Scotland will join this honourable company. We've always been an outward-looking, an internationalist nation; we will continue so to be. But instead of using our influence, as Britain has, to promote and foment war, Scotland will be in a position (which Britain, with its tainted record, can never be) to become a venue for building peace.

If you want Scotland to remain in the UK, the answers simple: disarm, unilaterally, dismantling all weapons of mass destruction and cutting defence spending as a proportion of GDP to at most no more than the European average. Adopt a written constitution which prevents Britain from going to war at all unless either invaded or requested to do so by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Voluntarily resign Britain's permanent seat on the Security Council. Send Tony Blair to the Hague to face indictment on war crimes charges.

If the government were to do all these things before September 18th, I think you might still achieve a 'no' vote. For sufficient Scots, this is the key issue: you may not hold illegal weapons, or illegally invade foreign countries, or trade arms across the world, in our name. Never again. But promises to do these things are not enough. Everyone knows what the promises of the British state are worth. I appreciate that it would be impossible to dismantle all the nuclear weapons in just three months, but a start could be made. All the other things could be done quickly.

We don't hate the English (or the Welsh). We don't want to see England dragged through more years of Tory government, whether propped up by the Liberal Democrats or by UKIP. We would like you still to have an NHS as good as ours, and a benefits system as good as we aspire to. But we want to hold our heads up in the world, to be able to say honestly and clearly that we are not warmongers, meddlers, arms traders, imperialists.

Will you do this for us? Or is, ultimately, that 'seat at the top table', that delusion of power, of greater value to you than the Union?

Yours sincerely

Simon Brooke

Say something positive

If you think I'm not always a great essayist, I'm even less good as a graphic artist. Consider this animated GIF an idea, a prototype, which those with better skills (and better tools) can take, copy, adapt, improve, and pass on.

Like everything else on this blog, it's published under creative commons attribution/share alike license - but if you do use it in any way at all, I'd appreciate it if you drop me a link.

Enjoy!

Eco WHAT!?

I started to write a while ago about the Grauniad's 'eco-homes' competition, and then shelved it because it felt too negative; and, in any case, the competition had passed (needless to say, the worst house - from an ecological point of view - won). However, people are still blogging about these houses, and it needs to be said: they are not good enough. If this is the standard British housing aspires to, we're in even deeper trouble than I thought.

Let's start out by saying this. I don't claim to be a pioneer or an ideologue or a sage. The Winter Palace is - by the Grauniad's standards at least - a fairly extreme eco-home, and I was thinking to some extent about its impact on the landscape when I built it. But I didn't use straw and clay and softwood primarily for ideological reasons. I built of straw and clay and softwood because I needed a comfortable home, and I was broke. That's why my insulation is (recycled) glass wool, not the sheepswool I would have preferred - it's less 'green', but it was cheaper. Similarly, an earth closet does have lower environmental impact than a septic tank, but it's also - much - cheaper. Mind you, I would have had an earth closet anyway, for ecological reasons, but... What I'm saying is that deep economy, not deep ecology, drove my build. Mine is more an economic house than an ecological one.

So what has this to do with the Grauniad's competition for 'the best eco-home'? Well, the Grauniad's competition, being a competition in the prestigious end of the public press, attracted mainly architects who wanted to show off their grand designs in order to attract new customers. And these are, primarily, 'grand designs', worthy of that appalling Channel 4 programme: a third of them are bloated plutocratic mansions of the hyper-rich, tinted with a very thin coat of greenwash. A third are somewhat more modest versions of the same thing. And a third, by my standards, sort-of qualify.

Three with brazen knobs thereon affixed

Let's start with 'Underhill' in Gloucestershire. Mr Baggins would not recognise this Underhill. It's no modest, finely crafted dwelling. It's huge. But, like Mr Baggins' home, it is - mildly - earth sheltered
(although not underground) - and to achieve that, the builders have dug or blasted out half a hillside. It's then fronted entirely with glass (full disclosure, so's mine - but it's a lot less glass). The structure of the house is 'entirely concrete'.

Sorry, you cannot call this an 'eco-home' in any sense at all. Digging that hole, making that concrete, wiped out any energy savings that the building may deliver over its lifetime. And building a house on that scale for one family - spending half a million pounds on a house for one family is not in any sense sustainable. The architect said of it, "We want to bring the Italian catwalk to eco houses." She's failed. She may have brought the Italian catwalk to the Cotswolds, but 'eco'? Nonsense.

The Blackheath Pavillion is again a plutocratic monstrosity - again, built by an architect for himself, this time at a cost of a million pounds (less change). The soi-disant eco greenwash is here even thinner. My contempt for this sort of cognitive dissonance is unutterable.

Plummerswood in the Borders is similar. Yes, it's built primarily of softwood - prefabricated in Austria from timber grown who knows where. The food miles involved are extraordinary. And, again, 1.25 million pounds to house one family: you could build one hundred and eighty homes like mine for that money (or, more practically, 90 homes each twice the size of mine and housing a family).

Three wannabes

On a more modest scale, the 'Zero Carbon House' (yes, seriously!) recyles some of the same nonsense. Again, it's an architect building for himself, at least partly as self-promotion. This one cost only a third of a million pounds, or twenty-five houses worth - but that is, I think, not counting the pre-existing house onto which it was built. As for zero carbon, it incorporates a lot of sheet glass, bathroom fittings of either enamelled steel or ceramic (the pictures aren't clear enough to distinguish), glass kitchen counters, and thirty five square metres of solar panels. Low carbon it may be, but zero carbon it is not.

But it does have genuinely good features, including newspaper insulation, and a lot of reclaimed materials. It's not a dead loss. Give it two out of ten, for trying.

Slip House, in London? Look at that glass.

Let's be clear about this, transparency is a good thing. Before I had the Winter Palace, I lived six months on a platform in a tree. So long as the daytime temperature stayed above ten degrees celsius, it was actually quite nice, but when the daytime temperature fell below that - as in Scotland it often does, even in summer - it was pretty miserable. And allowing the breeze to waft through your living space may be pleasant on a warm summer day, but being unable to exclude it when it's driving a thin cold condensing mist is much less pleasant. I think that we many of us go too far in excluding the weather from our lives, but... My house has glass. Currently it has about five and a half square metres of glass; when I finally get round to glazing the front gable it will have about nine square metres.

I do keep thinking about alternative ways to gain the transparency of glass without its embodied energy, and so far I haven't found one. Friends have built their homes around reclaimed window units, and that's obviously more ecological than having new glass specially cut; but I want my house to have a formal grace, and that's not easy to achieve with odds and ends of repurposed glass. Japanese paper is not transparent but does admit light; it's a possibility for my next serious build. I'm not an absolutist about glass.

But the use of glass at Slip House is on another scale altogether. Even walls which are of solid opaque material are clad on the outside with glass, and that glass rises a metre above the roof. Where it is transparent, that glass is triple thickness - which undoubtedly has a significant insulation benefit. At what point does that insulation benefit cancel out the energy cost of the extra glass? To my shame I don't know. My instinct is that this much glass just isn't sustainable. The cost isn't sustainable, either - this fairly modest house cost two thirds of a million pounds.

Marsh House in Nottingham falls into the same category. A little cheaper - a mere half million, here - and a little better. Not a lot better, it's built substantially of brick, and it doesn't look like reclaimed brick. Like me they do use a composting toilet - which in a city is brave - and do without a fridge. It's an interesting house with some good ideas, and it's certainly better than most modern houses. But an eco house? Really?

Three to respect

Lilac Cohousing is in Leeds. The houses were prefabricated in Bristol, out of timber and straw from god-knows-where; and then transported to their site by road, and craned into place. And you do have to ask, what the holy god damned fuck?

Straw has a lot of benefits for building - I should know, I live in a straw house. But part of the point of a straw house is that straw bales are more or less like LEGO bricks. Each bale can be lifted by hand, placed by hand, if need be trimmed to size by hand; and a team of half a dozen completely unskilled people can build the walls of a house in a day. Bales are incredibly cheap: if you can't make your own from your own land, they cost about two pounds fifty each on the open market; and a couple of hundred of them will build a family home.

But, an assembled straw wall isn't easy to move. To hold them together during transport, ModCell, the builders of the straw modules used at Lilac Cohousing, build extremely sturdy wooden casements. These wooden casements then form the load-bearing framework for the houses, and to be completely fair about it, I would not have confidence to build a load bearing straw structure more than two stories high, so the wooden casements are probably not more expensive of timber than any other multi-story straw structure. And, again, the ModCell modules are fair inside and out, like a proper concrete home and lacking the somewhat rustic unevenness of my own walls. So there are some benefits.

But you lose. You lose community effort. You lose comradeship. You lose empowering people, letting people have the experience of building for themselves. You spend a lot of money on factory manufacture, on transport, on cranage, on specialist labour. And for what?

The other thing which slightly bothers me is cost. It's elided in the Grauniad puff-piece. Each resident, we're told 'pays... 35% of their net income rather than taking on individual mortgages'. Woah, that's a LOT! 35% of income after tax? For how long?

Again, for comparison, my house cost what I currently earn, after tax, in two months. OK, I was mad at the time, and consequently not able to earn, and consequently broke, but... So if I paid it off at 35% of my income I would have it paid off in six months. Because, after all, building in straw is cheap. So how long will the Lilac residents be paying for, exactly?

So I don't know. This isn't dreadful. I'd like to visit some day and have a look, talk to the folk. Five out of ten, maybe?

Edited to add: it seems I was too harsh on the Lilac scheme. Apparently (so they say on Twitter in reply to my post) their modules were actually built on a farm eight miles from site, partly with residents labour, using bales from straw grown there. So not nearly as ridiculous as I had thought. And Lilac does look like 'normal' social housing - perhaps even too much like 'normal' social housing - which will appeal to the innate conservatism of lots of British people.

The Hemp Cottage has wool insulation. I'm interested immediately. That's something I wanted to do and somewhat regret I did not do. Its walls are not straw, but a hempcrete mix made with lime; a sort of technically advanced cob. The proponents of hempcrete claim that it is carbon negative, which is clearly baloney seeing the lime must be kilned. But the render on my walls would be more durable if I had used lime, and I may yet re-render with lime. One cannot be purist. This is, all in all, a pretty nice build. Six out of ten.

Lammas feels very like home; like the Standingstone conspiracy, they are eight households. Like us, they've bought their land together. They're obviously much more right on than us, with their deliberately and consciously unsquare dwellings built with higglety-pigglety roundwood frames. Their structures have their own aesthetic, and I can admire it very much, although it isn't mine. But these people are doing it for real. They're building themselves, together, out of (mostly) the natural materials of the land on which they live. And their houses cost very much in line with mine - 'None cost more than £14,000 to complete.'

In short, this is the real deal. I hope to go there, and to learn from them. They provide one vision of what an eco-house looks like - a slightly rackety, post-punk, post-apocalyptic vision, but an authentic vision nevertheless. You don't have to live in a house like this to be eco. Eco houses are also available in square, and can even have pitched roofs. The windows don't have to be funky-shaped. The timber doesn't have to be round wood (although there's some fuel saved in not sawmilling it). But Lammas is probably as close as you'll get to ecohousing in Britain today, whether your eco is economy or ecology (and, let's face it, the two are closely related). Nine out of ten, and respect.

And one odd ball

100 Princedale Road is sort of an odd one out in this set. It's a traditional terrace, retrofitted with a lot of insulation. That has, obviously, reduced internal volume. It's also greatly reduced ventilation. A lot of modern 'eco-house' thinking seems to be about excluding nasty uncontrolled nature; I'm far from persuaded this is a good thing. And this process of reducing the space in the house has cost £180,000 (on top of its original purchase cost), or the cost of nine good family homes.

As a technology demonstrator for efficient insulation I'm sure it's a wonderful building, but this doesn't scale. We can't afford to do this to every terrace house in the country, and it seems highly doubtful to me that this degree of insulation will pay for itself either in money terms or in energy terms in the lifetime of the build.

Three out of ten, to be generous.

Making oor ane Merk

This week two old friends have written to me in apparent distress, concerned about the consequences for Scotland of George Osborne's latest temper tantrum; and so I've had to compose a response to their anxieties.

The real facts are that if 'the United Kingdom' is the 'continuing state', then in international law it is clearly, simply and unequivocally responsible for all the debts - every last penny of them. That's the law as it's been through the independence of Ireland, of the breakup of the British Empire, of Czechoslovakia, right down to Sudan last year.

If there's a 'continuing state', and Westminster has made it very clear it wishes to be a continuing state, then that state takes the debt. That isn't, of course, Scotland's bargaining position. We are willing to take on a population share of debt - but only if we also get a population share of assets, and there's no doubt the Pound Sterling is an asset.

If the rump 'United Kingdom' wants to keep that asset to itself, I would expect that to be negotiable - but it's a big asset, so they must expect to pay heavily. But if they won't negotiate, then the law is it's their debt, not our debt, and we cannot default on it. That's very well understood, long established international law.

I actually agree that in the long term monetary union won't work; our economies are going to diverge pretty sharply. But it's very much in England's interest to allow Scotland to come to that decision in it's own time, rather than have to pay heavily now to bribe us to change.

I really don't see this as being a hard negotiation. It is so manifestly in everyone's best interest to maintain friendly relations. What we're seeing just now is frightened men having tantrums and throwing their toys out of the pram; after the vote, when they actually have to deal with the issues, they'll be much more pragmatic and reasonable.

It's right that the rUK can refuse to set up a currency union, or allow Scotland to share the Bank of England. It's right, too, that sharing the Pound, with or without rUK's agreement, would mean that Scotland would be effectively forced to keep its economy in lockstep with one rapidly heading down a neoliberal cul-de-sac which leads only to extreme social dislocation and the third world. In other words, while easing the transition to independence by keeping the pound in the short term may be a good thing, keeping it in the long term would probably not be.

On the other hand, the Pound Sterling and the Bank of England are both pretty substantial assets, of which Scotland by rights owns a roughly 10% share. If rUK want to keep that asset for themselves, what are they prepared to pay for it?

In the long term it seems to me highly likely that Scotland - like Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland - will have its own currency. It seems to me that in the long term we'll more or less have to.

But that in turn raises another question: what is the long term future of the pound sterling, floating off into the mid-Atlantic sans Europe, sans industry, sans education, sans oil, sans friends? The rUK really needs to think about what it's doing, here. It does not have a God-given right to the share of the planet's wealth it currently enjoys. This is a time to be building good relationships, not wrecking them.

On Clojure as a multi-user environment

Today, not having really enough to do at work, I was reading a Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel's (highly partisan) paper 'The Evolution of Lisp', and thinking about Post Scarcity Computing and about Clojure.

Lisp has failed to get traction too many times because people insisted on their own idea of what constituted a pure Lisp. Let's be clear about it, if I were designing my perfect Lisp it would be different from Clojure in a number of significant ways. Nevertheless, Clojure is more or less the best Lisp we have now, and furthermore it has traction. Furthermore, it has a number of most excellent features which, had I not been exposed to Clojure, I would not have thought of myself. So if you're going to build a post-scarcity computing environment now, Clojure is not a bad place to start.

But let's think about how Clojure impacts on the ideas I put forward in Post Scarcity Computing. Firstly and most importantly, in Clojure data is (with some special case exceptions which we'll come to) immutable. That has a number of interesting consequences, and one of them is that an older data cannot ever point to newer data.

How does that impact on a multi-user environment? Well, probably no-one's ever thought about that in the context of Clojure, because probably no-one's ever thought about having several people connected into the same Clojure session. But, suppose you connect to a base Clojure environment, and run some computation, and then I connect to the same base environment. I cannot see anything that's going on in your computation, because all the partial results of your computation are newer than the base environment.

You can try this yourself. There's probably simpler ways to do this, but here's mine: first, install emacs 24, and cider. Next, open three terminals, and run

lein repl :headless

in one of them. This starts a headless nrepl, and prints out the port number it's running on:

simon@fletcher:~$ lein repl :headless
nREPL server started on port 48705 on host 127.0.0.1

In the other two, start headless emacs sessions:

simon@fletcher:~$ emacs -nw

In each emacs session, type

escape-X cider

You'll be prompted for a host, with a default of 127.0.0.1 (localhost). Accept this. You're then prompted for a port; type in the port number that the nrepl server printed.

Now, you have two terminals both connected to the same Clojure session. In one, evaluate something:

user> (list 'a 'b)
(a b)

In the other, type *1 to look at the result of the last evaluation:

user> *1
nil

But in the first window, the one where you evaluated something, *1 returns the value you'd expect:

user> *1
(a b)

So, as I said above, two separate sessions whose computations and local environment are invisible to one another. How can they be made visible? It's as easy as defining a var:

user> (def shared (list 'a 'b))
#'user/shared

Now, in your other emacs terminal, the value of shared is what was set in the first:

user> shared
(a b)

So, by default, everything a user does is private. It can be made public by simply defining a variable, in the default (user) package. Again in one terminal:

user> (ns foo (:use clojure.core))
nil
foo> (def hidden (list 'p 'q))
#'foo/hidden

In the other:

user> (ns bar (:use clojure.core))
nil
bar> hidden
CompilerException java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to resolve symbol: hidden \
in this context, compiling:(/tmp/form-init3330134955068707486.clj:1:691)        

Unless the other user can guess the package name you're working in, they can't see the variables you bind. Of course, in Clojure as it exists now, if you do know the name of the package another user is using, you can see their variable bindings, because Clojure as it exists now isn't designed as a multi-user environment. And security by obscurity isn't really security at all.

But nevertheless you can see that Clojure could easily be made an effective multi-user environment. You can see that it would be easy to write an 'executive' function, which provided its own read-eval-print loop in an environment in which it had a (mutable) Java HashMap bound to a local variable, and could intercept a particular input pattern to store 'user-private' variables into that hashmap.

It's not hard, in fact, to see how a multi-user system could be built on a persistent Clojure session. I'll return to this soon, in further blog posts.

A circular history of money

Stage 0

I don't know what money is, but I'll give you this nice shiny piece of metal for that loaf of bread.

Stage 1

I know what money is: this nice shiny piece of metal is money, and it's worth exactly it's value as a piece of shiny metal.

Stage 2

I know what money is: this nice shiny piece of metal is money, and I have refined it to very high purity and stamped my mark on it. My mark is your guarantee of its very high purity, and consequently it's worth a premium over other shiny bits of metal of the same weight.

Stage 3

OK, yes, I might have adulterated the metal just a little tiny bit, but it's still got my mark on it so it's still worth a premium over other shiny bits of metal.

Stage 4

Hey, all those shiny bits of metal are heavy to carry. To save you the trouble I'll just put them all in this vault here and give you pieces of paper instead, but it's OK because those pieces of paper just represent nice shiny metal and I've even printed a promise on them saying I promise to pay the bearer on demand in nice shiny metal...

Stage 5

Well, OK, no, I don't actually have enough shiny metal to back all the pieces of paper. I seem to have printed too many. But it doesn't matter because, well, paper is money these days, isn't it? Everyone accepts it. And you know I won't ever print any more of it, so it's guaranteed to keep its value.

Stage 6

Yes, well, sorry. I lied. But it doesn't matter because... Look! Shiny!

Stage 7

All that paper's really inconvenient to print and it wears out too quickly. But hey, this number on this computer disk represents all the money we've printed, so we'll just do sums with that and everything will be fine.

Stage 8

See, there's been this economic meltdown thing - which was nobody's fault, it just happened - and somehow it's affected the computer and the number's got a bit bigger. Accidentally. But that's OK because we'll give the extra money to the very rich bankers and they'll lend it to you.

Stage 9

They kept it for themselves? Are you sure?

Stage 0

I don't know what money is, but I'll give you this nice shiny piece of metal for that loaf of bread.

Au tour de ma tête, more or less.

OK, so, my friend Janet got me on this blog tour thing. Thing is, I'd like to say I'm not writing these days. Much. I've got a new and demanding job, and I'm dog tired all the time. I've also got a lot of things I ought to be doing - not least, this year is Scotland's chance of independence, a chance I've been waiting for and claiming to be working for for forty years. But I'm not out on the streets campaigning, because I'm too tired.

Or so I say.

And yet, I came back to my lodgings on Monday night, sat down, and wrote three thousand words. I got up this morning at sparrow fart, and wrote another five hundred before wolfing down some breakfast and running out to work.

What am I working on?

So what (the fuck) is this all about? It's all about a novel. It's all about a novel which bit me in December, and hasn't let go. In two and a half months I've written 66,000 words - that's not far off a thousand words a day. That's (for me) fast. Unprecedentedly, startlingly fast. I mean, I've been working on one or another extended narrative piece - nominally novels - at any time in the past two decades. But typically it takes me several years to finish one, if I finish it at all - there are half a dozen unfinished train-wrecks littering my hard disk now.

This isn't a very sophisticated narrative. It has a third-party narrator - not strictly a Victorian omniscient narrator, I don't look inside the characters heads (much) - who isn't unreliable and time is more or less linear without any flashy-backies or other tricks. It plays no post-modern games. It's just a story such as people read when they're not trying to be intellectual.

I hope.

Sort of.

I'm not certain that it's any good.

So what's it about? It's about how a society moves from a tyrannical, feudal society to something a little bit more enlightened. Not very much more enlightened, it's not in the least utopian, it's not in any way presenting my view of a good society. It's a story about social process. But, people don't read stories about social process when they're not trying to be intellectual. So it's a romance - sort of, I don't know yet whether the protagonists end up as a couple and if they do they'd be a turbulent couple - set in a mildly fantasy universe. Without magic, because magic, in my opinion, tends to ruin plots, and without dwarves or elves or orcs or stuff, because what's interesting to me is how folk - ordinary human folk - work with other ordinary human folk. My folk are not all good. In fact, none of them are entirely good. That is what is interesting.

I hope.

The problem with writing a story about social process is I've got two whole chapters which are just process, and I worry that they're dull. One is a public meeting about how to organise the community, and that's essentially blocks of speech from different characters outlining different options. The other is a sort of a court of law, about the disposition of property. It's hard to make these dramatic. They aren't dramatic. They're process. Forging the new Scotland will involve a lot of process, too. Much of it will be dull. But we will have to go through it if we're to achieve a better state.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I don't know. Probably not much. Most people who write fantasy fiction - at least if they are writing anything more than commercial pot-boilers, are, like authors of science fiction, both commenting on the contemporary real world society in which they live, and also making some sort of a statement about what they view as a good society - whether that be reactionary and hierarchical (Tolkien, for example) or radically open (Ursula le Guin).

In my small way I'm sort of doing that, although my end state - a sort of proto-constitutional-monarchy - is a very long way from what I consider a good society. As I say, it's not about end states. It's about process.

Why do I write what I do?

$DEITY knows!

It's almost certainly pointless.

Probably no-one will read it.

The only novel I've had published (which I think is actually quite good, despite its cringe-making cover) has sold very poorly.

How does your writing process work?

Well, we're talking here (mostly) about stories. Narrative. I would say that on the whole I don't write stories. Mostly. Mostly I write polemic: writing intended to persuade. Journalism, in a loose sense. About politics, especially rural politics, about the environment, about the (mal-) distribution of wealth, of housing, of land. About how the land is used. About cycling. And about software, which is my profession but also my passion. And, because I'm mad, also about madness.

But really, writing a story and writing a polemic have a lot in common. You wake up with something you have to say, that won't let you rest until you've expressed it, expressed it in the best way you can with as much skill as you have.

That's what I do. I write because I'm driven to. Because I can't not.

Oh, how does the process work?

That's a different question. I write in a very basic text editor, chosen because it's basic. It edits text. There are no fonts or formatting or bold or italic or big or small. Formatting is all automatic, not something I think about. When you're writing, formatting is a distraction: something which just gets in the way.

When I've finished writing I run a bunch of scripts I've hacked up over the years which take my plain text and render it into something resembling a finished work. But I don't tweak: the stylesheet is the stylesheet is the stylesheet, and as it dictates so shall the text appear. Getting the stylesheet right has been, of course, a job in itself, but it's a job I've done and don't need to keep adjusting.

I store my work-in-progress in a revision control system - specifically git, because I'm used to it and like it. It means that if I change my mind about something and want to go back to an earlier version, that's easily done.

At fifty thousand words

A week ago tonight I tweeted:

"New novel now up to 42k words in only two months - 670 words/day average - despite new job. Very surprised. Don't know where it comes from!"

Just seven days later, although I've been working hard and very weary, there are another eight thousand words written. More than that, there's a lot of incident written: the capture of a castle, a failed assassination attempt, a breaking of relationships, the development of other friendships. The overall shape of the second half of the novel is emerging. It's a strange and exciting experience.

The novel has - inevitably - taken its own life and is twisting away from my original plan, which is both frustrating and intriguing. I had thought it was a novel about the birth of a republic. I thought my central character was a merchant's son called Dalwhiel - a thoughtful, entrepreneurial, largely non-military character. But the character originally intended as his love interest - a hereditary princess, Selchae, spoiled and arrogant - has emerged as more interesting and more characterful. She has much more of an arc, much more challenge to her character and therefore much more opportunity to grow.

And, of course, that's distorting the shape of the piece and causing problems. The narrative starts - in a third person voice, indeed - but following Dalwhiel

. In the first half of the narrative, he's present in virtually every scene. In the central part of the narrative, both of the protagonists are together most of the time, so the camera, as it were, is able to track both of them.

But I'm using a variant of the old classic 'Pride and Prejudice' plot: the protagonists initially fall out, are brought back together, fall out worse, and finally come together again. There's a lot of mutual lust in what pulls them together, but there's also mutual liking. But, as I say, in the second half of the narrative they fall out badly and part, and the camera can no longer track both.

So it tracks her.

That wasn't really a conscious decision. But she's more engaging to write, and she simply has to do more stuff. Where he has driven the narrative in its early part, she now has to take over - if she didn't, she would be just another stock princess constantly having the vapours and being rescued.

But it does mean that my republic isn't going to happen. We might end up with a constitutional monarchy with a quasi-divine priest-queen. Something of the sort seems to be emerging. I'm not yet certain.

And that's why writing a narrative - as much as reading one - is an adventure.

Buy the ASA a helmet. They need one!

The banned advert

Oh, I am so tired of the cycle helmets issue. I wish it would just go away. Cycle helmets are designed to stop you getting concussion if you fall off your bike at low speeds. They aren't designed to help if you get hit by a car, and they won't. They're not even nearly strong enough, nor could they be made so.

Of course, most people don't know that. Most people think that wearing an inch of polystyrene will stop a ton of metal. They wouldn't believe it if they thought about it, but they don't think about it.

And some of the people who don't think about it are, sadly, in positions of power. This time it's the advertising standards authority. And what makes it worse is that they've banned, on helmet grounds, a perfectly good safety message which was not about helmets. It was about space. Helmets don't save lives. Space does. So by removing that message from people's televisions, they are actively making things worse.

Thank all the gods they have an online complaints form, because they need it. I trust that it's going to get a lot of use over the next few days: I encourage you to use it. I have, and what I've said is this:

I'm writing to complain about your recent ruling regarding Cycling Scotland's television advertisement

Your ruling was irresponsible, ill-informed, wrong both with respect to your own code and to the law of the land, and actively dangerous: it will certainly increase the number of deaths on our roads.

Contrary to your prejudice, there is no body of research to show that cycle helmets make any difference whatever to safety outcomes in accidents involving motor vehicles, and no manufacturer of cycle helmets claim that they do. Helmets are intended to mitigate cuts and bruising in simple falls, and are neither designed for nor capable of mitigating more serious impacts. So whether or not the cyclist was wearing a helmet on the road has no bearing on safety. The law of the land does not mandate helmets, for precisely this reason.

What has a bearing on safety is position on the road, and the helmetless cyclist shown in the advert is acting precisely correctly, both with regard to the law and with regard to the best available safety advice; the motorist shown in the advert also behaves perfectly correctly.

In short, your adjudication causes harm and offence under 4.1 and 4.4 of your rules, in that it is likely to encourage drivers to believe that they may ignore the highway code and pass cyclists dangerously close; and under 1.2 of your rules, in that contributing to road accidents as you are clearly doing is highly irresponsible.

I'm not inviting you to copy my text. Write your own. Lots of copies of the same text will have far less impact than lots of different, well written responses (I'm sure you can do better than me, I'm too angry about this to be persuasive).

However, having submitted it through their online form, I'd also recommend that you send them a copy by Royal Mail, because the weasels will probably claim their online form is only for advertisements, and that as their adjudication is not an advertisement they are entitled to ignore your complaint. They're not. And we mustn't let them.

I am so tired of helmet wars!

Modelling the ships

Yes, really I have been working on the novel today, but the actual text is not much further forward. I'm now up to 20,500 words, which is progress but not fast. However, I've been doing a lot of background research on speeds of camel caravans, speeds of iron age sailing ships, and other details; and I've been working on my calendar, to make sure all the right characters can plausibly be where I need them to be at the right dates, given the transport they have available to them.

Interestingly, this exercise has brought back to mind (and validated) my previous essay, 'The spread of knowledge in a large game world'. Because of the speed of the ships (more below) my protagonist sails from the northern city where he's spent the early summer thirty five days after his home city has been conquered - but he does not know of it, because there's no plausible way for news to reach him. On his way he visits The City at Her Gates, and there he may plausibly pick up news of the conquest of his home - but it's equally possible that he won't, since although the news could have reached there if a convenient ship has happened to make the passage, it's possible that it hasn't.

The Ship

But most importantly, I've been modelling the ship.

The plot driver for Merchant is the arrival of a disruptive technology: new ships which are seaworthy enough to circumnavigate the continent, and thus bypass the bottlenecks of the caravan road which has been the main trade route for hundreds of years. So, I need a ship. But since this world is not based on real history, it has to be an ahistoric ship: a plausible, effective type of ship which would work and could have been developed in the real world, but wasn't.

Rig

So what I've gone for is a semi-elliptical squaresail. That is to say, a fully battened sail which hoists and reefs like a Chinese junk sail, but which tacks like a square sail: it has no specific luff or leach. This actually has some advantages. A junk mast cannot effectively be stayed, because when tacking the sail sweeps through the area where useful stays would have to be. Consequently, junks have unstayed masts. With a semi-elliptical  squaresail, you would be able to have stays on the mast, provided they allowed the yards to be braced round to 45 degrees. Also, with a semi-eliptical squaresail, you can set the aerodynamic curve of the sail to a considerable extent by using curved battens (semi-elliptical battens, hence the name). So this sail would be very much more effective upwind than a conventional square-sailed ship. Also, as the sail is reefed by lowering it, it's not necessary to send men aloft to reef it.

Such a rig could only develop in a place with tall, straight trees - forest-grown conifers, probably, because although unlike junk rigs the mast can be stayed, it can only be stayed at the very top - you can't hoist the sails past the attachment point.

Of course, Shearwater would not be as effective upwind as a modern racing yacht. She could not lie closer than 45 degrees to the wind and in practice wouldn't lie closer than 50 degrees; she'd also make a certain amount of leeway, so 60 degrees off the wind is a likely most effective course. But downwind she'd be pretty good, and on a reach she would be very effective. As I'm positing a prevailing westerly coriolis airflow modified by strong convection over the steppe giving rise to reliable onshore winds all along the southern coast, a 'trade route' going east along the north coast, south along the east coast, west along the south coast and north along the west coast would involve very little if any beating to windward - for a ship which could lie a close reach, as this one could.

She has no staysails - she could have, but I'm assuming that either they haven't been invented or haven't been found advantageous - so she has no bowsprit and her bow is short and cobby. Her forecastle extends right to the stem, and is pretty broad at the front, with no front bulwark or rail. This is to make anchor handling easier (but, of course, more dangerous). She's a cargo ship, a beast of burden, and she's not slim or elegant; but on a 40 metre overall length she has a payload of at least 40 tons of cargo - possibly significantly more, her displacement will be more than twice that.

Cargo

Not only does she carry at least as much as 160 camels, she can make two round trips from north to south in the time a camel caravan can make one. This surprised me. But camel caravan speed is about 32Km/day, whereas the speed of a classical period merchant ship was about 220Km/day. much greater. So even if (as I'm assuming) the sea route round the continent is three times as long as the caravan road, the ship, with seven times the speed, makes the journey in less than half the time. That in turn means - something I hadn't seen until I worked this out - that not only could she outperform the camel caravans on the cargoes they can carry, she could carry perishable cargoes - perhaps fruit, for example - that they couldn't carry. No wonder the cities which depend on the caravan trade feel threatened!

As a cargo ship she has a cargo derrick to aid loading and unloading positioned over the main hatchway.

She has some features which are there simply because I needed them in the story; for example the shore boat I mentioned in chapter one is visible stowed on the main hatch; the stair on which Dalwhiel stands to talk to Karakhan is visible, the companionway out from the after castle is there, and even has an arched roof to add headroom.

Building the model of the ship helps me to visualise it and consequently to be able to write more confidently about it; it's the same reason I have town plans of my cities. I can even visualise her in the context of them.

In praise of LuminusWeb

Well, I've just finished my first in-anger, for-a-paying-customer, website in Clojure. Essentially it's just a very simple CRUD system; it landed on my desk last week in a rush because the agency which had been supposed to be building it had drawn some pretty pictures and then thrown their hands up in the air and said 'this is too hard'.

It wasn't a requirement it be written in Clojure; in fact, until I tacked a credits line on the bottom of the pages saying 'Powered by Clojure' I don't think the customer knew that it was. I estimated four days on a fixed price basis; I think this was fair. In fact it took six, but I worked over the weekend so the project hasn't been delayed by my overrun.

Some of the overrun was unforeseen - the agency who abandoned the job had built the forms in JotForm, and they proved to be so horrible that I had to rewrite them from scratch - the HTML was bizarrely bad, and none of the field names were meaningful. Also, the pretty pictures drawn by the agency were all fixed size - they didn't flow or scale. I admit I'm a snob, but if a website is going to be identified as my work I want it to be right. So now, it is right (well, mostly; the navigation does something ugly and not very usable if you shrink a desktop browser window too small, but I haven't yet found a workaround for that which fits with the design). Now, it uses media queries to distinguish smartphones, tablets and desktops, and serves the appropriate CSS for each. Yes, that cost me time, too, but in my opinion it's worth it.

And, of course, there was a bit of feature creep - there always is. The customer asked for several features which hadn't been in the original specification, and I've delivered them - but they all add time.

But the overrun I did foresee - learning time - was much less than I would have expected, and that was down to LuminusWeb. LuminusWeb is not really so much an integrated toolkit in its own right as a collection of tools from a range of developers. It doesn't use all the tools which, if I was selecting for myself, I would choose; for example it uses Selmer for generating dynamic content rather than the, in my opinion, much more elegant Enlive. But what LuminusWeb does provide - which makes all the difference if you're building something against a deadline - include

• a great project template which sets up most of your scaffolding
• a very clear tutorial, and
• excellent documentation.

LuminusWeb's scaffolding and examples, with a little help from a couple of books

• Web Development with Clojure
• Clojure Programming

allowed me to build what I needed very quickly, and with remarkably little pain.

LuminusWeb is also very up-to-date; it uses current or near versions of all the tools it depends on.

There is one thing I'm disappointed with. I had hoped to integrate Chris Emerick's Friend authentication package to do OpenID authentication, but I struggled with the documentation (despite good example programs from both Chris himself and from Assen Kolov), and simply couldn't get this going in time. I did work out how I would have done proper database-layer authentication, but in the end I simply did application layer authentication because it was quick and easy.

Altogether, it's been a very pleasant experience and I'm kicking myself for not having done it sooner.

On Rascarrel Shore

My cross bike on Rascarrel Shore, 2010

When I was a wee boy, we used to go down to Rascarrel shore fairly regularly, and I used to play pooh-sticks in the burn from the wee footbridge. It wasn't, as a boy, my favourite beach, being stony and windswept, but it was under a mile and a half from our house up at Nether Hazelfield, and the old medieval road from Rascarrel shore up to Rerrick, although by then abandoned, ran by the end of our lane and was still recognised by the farmers as a public right of way. By the time I was ten, I was permitted to walk down to Rascarrel on my own.

Rascarrel was not a pristine shore. It was part of a populated landscape. It had been occupied by the barytes miners, by miners for coal and copper, by fisherfolk and by smugglers over the historical period.  John Thomson's map of 1832 shows a coal mine and a smithy on the shore. There are dwelling sites all along the bay. The beach itself is rocky, and strewn with large, rounded pebbles; there's nowhere that's sandy, nowhere to launch a boat, and few places where it was easy for a child to get into the water to swim. Consequently, as a child, I preferred Balcary for sailing and Red Haven for swimming. But Rascarrel was our nearest beach, and the only one I could get to by myself, so I went there often. There is a natural rock arch which I've loved all my life and have many photographs of, and several minor caves.

There had been a little barytes mine at the end of Rascarrel shore; it must have been a small works, no more than a couple of men and a boy in all likelihood, because the ruin of the miner's cottage is a wee place. The mine was last worked in my lifetime, but I don't recall ever seeing that cottage with a roof on. What I do recall, however, was three separate groups of cheerful, well maintained summer huts, owned by people mainly from Dumfries. There was one group of two or three huts by the miner's cottage; a group of six or seven just to the east of the burn, where the old medieval road comes to the shore; and another group of three or four about a hundred metres west of the burn, accessed over that footbridge. They had been there since the 1930s, and were a well established part of the landscape.

In the early seventies, the footbridge washed away in a spate and was replaced by a new, higher bridge, I'm pretty sure at the council's expense. As is appropriate; it was a public good on a public right of way. In summer, Eddy Parker used to keep his boat moored in the burn mouth; an exposed place, but it was a tough old boat and Eddy knew what he was up to. I would sometimes anchor my boat off there in the summer. We would go down in autumn and winter to collect mussels off the rocks, or pick up driftwood along the strand.

As Margaret Thatcher's recession closed in in the 1980s, the poorer folk of the village went down onto the shore at Rascarrel to collect mussels which they sold to the shellfish factory in Kirkcudbright - hard work for little money - and the larger mussels soon vanished in consequence. About this time, too, the council constructed an improved car-park at the shore end of the lane, at public expense. During the 1990s I used regularly to ride a mountain bike on the loop round Rascarrel shore, and back by Balcary Heughs. The place has always been part of my life.

My niece Zoe in Bill's hut on Rascarrel shore, 1983

All this time the hutters came and went, and maintained their little cabins well. I didn't know any of them, but I would greet them in passing, as you do. There was no hostility between village folk and the hutters. In the early eighties one of the huts was lived in by a friend of my sister's, Bill, and we used to walk my niece Zoe who was then about one down to the beach in her wheelchair, and have a mug of tea in Bill's hut while he yarned or played guitar.

Rascarrel farm was then owned by a family called Hendry, who had a daughter a bit younger than me. She married one of the MacTaggart lads, and together they inherited the farm. The hutters continued to quietly enjoy their huts, but there were complaints about increases in rent demanded by MacTaggart, and some of the huts fell into disrepair.

In 2004, the MacTaggarts decided to evict the hutters and build their own holiday chalet development on the site. There was a long legal fight, but in 2007 it was lost and the hutters were evicted. The MacTaggarts then applied for planning permission, which was fiercely resisted by Auchencairn Community Council. However, after two applications were turned down by Dumfries and Galloway council, a third application was appealed to the Scottish Government, who overruled local objections and approved the scheme.

In the past year, the MacTaggarts have pressed ahead with the plan, destroying ancient woodland and bulldozing new house sites out of the cliff. They've erected lights, security cameras, and alarms, and angrily harass members of the public using the beach and the track to it. See, for example, this tweet:

Just encountered farmer objecting to me parking 2 walk 2 ruined huts at Rascarrel 4 PhD. Says my car cd be scrapped by passing lorry!
— Lesley Riddoch (@LesleyRiddoch) October 4, 2013

During the course of the year, 'old' Mr MacTaggart has died; but his son continues the same aggressive policy.

On the Roy Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-1755, the lands of Rascarrel are not enclosed. It was then common land. It's not marked as enclosed land on subsequent surveys either, but then they typically don't mark enclosures whereas Roy's map did, so they aren't evidence. Still I should be interested to know when, and under what legal theory, the right of common was extinguished?

On the shore road out of Auchencairn towards Balcary, reed-beds are naturally reclaiming the bay. There's an area that was open mud when I was a boy, and then reed-bed, and then, as land was established, rough grass; and now the householder across the road has put fences round it and claimed it as his own - again, on what legal theory I don't know. There is an assumption these days that land must belong to someone, that anything as dangerous and subversive as unowned land must be extinguished as quickly as possible. When Rascarrel was 'just a farm', rented from Auchencairn estate, did the rented area extend to the tideline? When the estate was parcelled up and sold off, were the lands to the tideline sold with it? I'm guessing so, or someone would have protested before now. But, more significantly, what claim apart from arrogance and fiat did Auchencairn estate have to the shore?

Whatever the legal theory, what has happened on Rascarrel shore in the past decade amounts to enclosure of common, since this was land freely enjoyed by the people of Auchencairn and the surrounding area for leisure, for recreation, for fishing for generations. It amounts also to the extinguishing of our rights under the Land Reform Act. It also undermines the rights of all hutters, everywhere in Scotland. If we aren't prepared prepared to defend those rights, we will lose them.

A first look at Tchahua

For anyone interested in the story I'm working on, this is a first look at my model of the city of Tchahua. The deep water quay is front right; the bridge (front left) is roughly modelled on the medieval London Bridge, but without the buildings that were built on it.

Obviously the castle (centre right) is the Residence; I've shown the outer ward walls lower than the inner ward, partly because for defence you would want to be able to shoot down on them if the outer ward was captured, but partly because it's a different phase of building - the outer ward would have been added when the deep water quay was developed. Facing the Residence (middle of the picture) is the guildhall and and a couple of large buildings which I'm currently vaguely thinking of as probably inns. I suspect there should be a religious building somewhere but I haven't got that worked out yet - there may be several temples because I don't think the Dragon cult is a state religion so there are probably other cults.

Upstream of the bridge - left of picture - is the old harbour, which older, smaller ships could access through the lifting span of the bridge; the two large buildings on the quayside there are the silk warehouse and the spirit warehouse. I think the spirit warehouse is the one nearer the Residence, but again that isn't certain.

The area between the guildhall and the Residence is the market place and will not be built on, but the area between the guildhall and the city wall should be densely packed with dwellings and workplaces. Upstream of the warehouses should be the richer merchants houses, probably quite grand.

I'm viewing pitched roofs as probably because it's coastal with regular onshore winds drawn in by convection over the steppe inland; it's likely to have moderate rainfall. I haven't yet made up my mind about building technology, but I think there is a mix of mainly-timber and mainly-stone buildings. There probably isn't any brick because the local stone is limestone, so there are unlikely to be clay deposits.

To the left of the city - under the bridge - is the eponymous river, which is the same river which runs underground under the city of Hans'hua. I'm not yet fully committed to what the arm of water to the right of the city is. It may be a shallow, marshy bay, or it may be another river. The city wall spans the peninsula from one shore to the other, but does not actually enclose the city. In the story there are sections of it which are in poor repair.

Looking at this model it's obvious that there should be something significant at the end of the peninsula, bottom right of this view. I'm not yet sure what that would be. As I originally imagined it, the Residence pretty much was the end of the peninsula, but when I modelled it like that it didn't look like real geography.

There must be a kink in the river downstream of the harbour, as at Kirkcudbright, for example, to shelter ships in harbour from storms. I haven't got the wider geography pinned down yet. Obviously this is the same continent as in my 'Modelling river systems' note, and the precise location of Tchahua is the estuary towards the western end of the south coast. But that's rough geography, and the benefit of it being my world is I can chop it around as suits me.

There's a lot that isn't in this picture, yet. Obviously there need to be dereks on the quays, boats here and there, lots more houses, public wells - the stuff that makes a city viable. Also, this is a city which has grown considerably richer in the past decade and a half, so there should be a lot of building going on (which may be why the wall is in poor repair - people may have been robbing building stone out of the city wall.

More grief creating formatted documents

I write my fiction using a 'word processor' which is in fact no more than a hacked together set of shell scripts. To produce final proof output, I need a tool to render my text into nicely formatted PDF or Postscript. I do this by way of HTML, but I still need a tool for the HTML to PDF step. For years I've used Prince, which is very good indeed. It has three problems from my point of view

• It's proprietary software, and although you can legitimately use it for free, if you do it prints its own logo on the cover page of your document;
• It's too expensive (US$ 495) for me to be able to really justify a license;
• And finally - for me this one's the killer - it doesn't run on Debian, and because it isn't free, you can't just compile it yourself.

It does run on Ubuntu, and consequently I do run Ubuntu on one of my machines just so that I can run Prince, but I now want to run my fiction through my continuous integration toolchain, which runs under Jenkins on my server; and my server runs Debian.

Consequently over the years I have periodically evaluated other options - genuinely free software options - for doing my final formatting step. So far, I've found nothing good enough. Today, I've tried again.

There are two new options, pandoc and wkhtmltopdf.

pandoc

Pandoc is an ambitious project to create a Swiss army knife for converting between text document formats - to do for text documents what ImageMagick does for raster graphics. To generate PDF it depends on LaTeX, and can use a variety of different LaTeX libraries to achieve this effect. Unfortunately, the LaTeX stage crashes and I'm not sufficiently up on debugging LaTeX to work out why, although the error message suggests it's to do with not finding the right fonts:

simon@engraver:~/Documents/fiction/slave$ pandoc -o merchant.pdf merchant.html 

pandoc: Error producing PDF from TeX source.

! Font T1/cmr/m/n/10=ecrm1000 at 10.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found.

                   relax 

l.100 \fontencoding\encodingdefault\selectfont

So from my point of view, that's a fail.

wkhtmltopdf

Wkhtmltopdf uses the Webkit rendering engine - the same one used in the Konqueror, Chrome, Safari and now Opera browsers - to render the page. You'd think that would be bound to be a good one. Unfortunately, it isn't. It doesn't honour - presumably because browsers don't need to - all the print-oriented vocabulary of CSS. 

My stylesheets specify different page margins for left and right hand pages, to put the wider margin in the gutter; they specify that left hand pages should show the book title in small caps on the left of the header line, and the page number on the left of the footer line; while right hand pages should show the current chapter title in small caps on the right of the header line and the page number on the right of the footer line. They specify that an image on the cover should bleed to the edge of the page. They specify that references in the table of contents should be resolved to the page number on which the content appears. They specify even that pages in the frontmatter should be numbered in roman numerals, while pages in the body should be numbered in arabic numerals.

Wkhtmltopdf honours none of this. It doesn't show page headers at all, or page numbers. It can't resolve table of contents references. It won't bleed the cover page differently from the rest of the content. To be fair, it has to be said that the Amazon Kindle, which really ought to, does not honour this vocabulary either; but seventeen years after the publication of the CSS1 specification and ten years after Prince XML was launched, it's a bit disappointing.

Worse, wkhtmltopdf occasionally splits a single line of text over two pages, so that the top half of the letters appear on the bottom of one page while the bottom half are at the top of the following page.

So that too is a fail; not quite such an epic fail as pandoc, but not good.

So it looks as though I'm stuck with Prince; one of these days I may even have to buy it.

Postscript

It transpires that although Prince is not supplied packaged for Debian, there is a 'generic linux' version (a gzipped tar containing, inter alia, an install script which installs neatly and correctly into /usr/local/) which works perfectly on Debian. So I'm happy again.

Restating the case against Land Value Tax

Andy Wightman, author of the Scottish Green Party's report on A Land Value Tax for Scotland has challenged me to 'crunch some numbers' to demonstrate that land value tax does (as I contend) effectively subsidise the over-exploitation of marginal land, and also effectively subsidise large estates. The argument is not essentially numeric, it's essentially logical, but nevertheless I'll attempt to do so.

Note that I'm not arguing that Land Value Tax is inapplicable in urban areas - on the contrary, in urban areas it may well be a very good tax. I'm arguing that it has consequences in rural areas which act directly and diametrically against the cause of land reform.

First I'd like to introduce the two characters of a three act drama.

Meet the Neighbours

Meet Alice. Alice lives in wee house on a small holding outside Obaig, where she owns ten hectares. Her neighbour, Boris, owns a thousand hectares, entirely surrounding Alice's holding. Boris's holding includes a hundred hectares of well drained valley land alongside a public road; the remainder of his land is, like Alice's, high, wild and remote from public infrastructure.

Alice, as I've said, lives on her holding, and owns nothing else. She needs to make her living either from it or from the local economy, where wages average £26,000 per annum, or about £21,000 after tax and national insurance. Boris lives mainly in his Monaco home, for tax reasons, but he works in an international private bank, and he also has homes in London, New York and Geneva. His salary, before bonuses, is £1,000,000, and as his residence is Monaco he pays little tax on this.

Following Scotland's independence in 2016, Land Value Tax is introduced. A temporary assessment of £50 per hectare is levied on the lands around Obaig, because assessing the notional unimproved rental value of land is complicated and expensive. So Boris is assessed at £50,000, while Alice is assessed at £500.

Alice keeps eight cows on her holding - it's poor land, and that's as much stock as it can carry. She produces, in an average year, four heifers, three of which she can sell on at about £500 each (she needs to keep one for herd replacement); and four steers, which she sells on at about £350. The gross profit on her holding is thus less than £3000, and the tax is a sixth of that. However, Alice can't afford to go to law to challenge the assessment, so she pays it.

Boris's factor runs 100 breeding cows on his valley land, and so its profit - £37,500 - is somewhat more per hectare than Alice's. On his 900 hectares of hill land, he runs 600 hinds, producing about 400 surplus deer per year; he shoots some of these himself for his own pleasure, but lets most of the shooting for a gross income of £120,000 (£100 each for 200 hinds plus £500 each for 200 stags). That adds up to £157,500. So he could more easily afford his assessment of £50,000 than Alice can hers of £500, but he considers it worth his while to pay £5,000 to a firm of Edinburgh lawyers who challenge the temporary assessment, and so the government reassesses his land at £30 per hectare.

This continues for five years, before the government manages to get the lands properly assessed. The new assessment is £30 per hectare for the hill land, and £60 per hectare for the valley land. So Boris sells his valley land, moves his cattle up onto the hill, and again challenges the assessment. The tax authorities, eager to avoid an expensive legal fight, lower the assessment on his land (but not on Alice's) to £20 per hectare. His land is now overgrazed, and consequently deer keep breaking through the fence into Alice's property. She carries out urgent repairs to her fences; as they're march fences she asks Boris to contribute half the cost. But Boris's favourite lawyers argue that the old fence was perfectly adequate and that Alice's repairs are excessive. They offer to pay only 10%, and as the poor have no lawyers, Alice has to accept this.

Also, the Range Rovers and Porsche Cayennes used by Boris and his sporting customers have torn great holes in the 5Km track leading to Alice's holding, and it's become too rutted and potholed for Alice's fifteen year old Golf to cope. Her deeds say that the cost of repairs to the track should be divided evenly between all the landowners the track serves, which is her and Boris. But she can't afford to pay 50% of the costs. So either she continues to live in her house but can no longer get out to do her £26,000 job in Obaig; or else she rents a flat in Obaig in which case she can no longer get in to feed and tend her cattle in winter. So she sells her land to Boris for much less than she thought it was worth, and six months later is homeless on the streets of Glasgow.

What are the morals of this story?

The cost of assessment

Firstly, Land Value Tax is complex and expensive to assess, since it's a notional, variable proportion of an uncertain rental value. It's bound to be open to challenge, but only those with large holdings can afford the legal fees to hire the lawyers to challenge the assessment. What that means is, people with larger holdings will pay less tax than those with smaller holdings of similar land, because the assessment authorities will (reasonably) price in the risk of legal challenge.

The economies of scale

Inequity of holding size

Second, people with larger holdings have more economic options for their use. For example, Alice cannot effectively run deer for shooting, because deer need a larger range, and 'sporting' shooters want the experience of the 'romantic' bleak open moorland, not relatively small fenced areas. And if Alice doesn't fence and allows her deer to roam across the land boundary, she's likely to lose more to shooting by Boris' customers than gain from Boris' deer straying onto her land. And if it comes to a legal fight, once again the poor have no lawyers, so Alice loses.

Geometry and encirclement

Again, suppose an electricity company came along seeking to erect a wind turbine. Suppose the turbine was on Alice's land, she would get the rental from the turbine itself, but Boris would get the rental from the wayleave for transmission across his land - if he even granted that wayleave. If the turbine is on Boris's land, Alice gets nothing. If Boris suggests to the electricity company that he might get difficult about wayleaves if they put the turbine on Alice's land, they'll almost certainly choose his - it's easier and cheaper for them.

Generally, if a large holding is surrounded by many smaller holdings, then the owner of the large holding, if seeking a wayleave for, for example, a new access track, has many potential partners to negotiate with and can play one off against another, pushing down the cost. But a small landowner surrounded by one or two larger holdings does not have that option.

Geometry and linear features

Again, consider that access track. 4.9 Km of it is across Boris's land, allowing Boris to get close to, to feed or shoot, deer anywhere along it. Boris's vehicles, as well as Alice's, use that section, and it gets a lot of wear and tear. Boris can get to his land without crossing Alice's land; he can if he wants build other tracks which don't go near Alice. One hundred metres of the track are across Alice's land; that section gets much less wear, since Boris's relatively high powered vehicles don't use it. But it's normal in Scotland for costs of repairs to a private access track to be evenly divided between the landowners the track serves; it's the arrangement we have here. This suits large landowners far better than small.

Ninety-eight hectares of Boris' land are within one hundred metres of the track, and so easily serviced by it. But supposing the track goes to the middle of Alice's land, only six hectares of her land are. But she pays the same cost of access to those six hectares as Boris pays to service his ninety eight.

Suppose, also, that both Alice and Boris require to fence their land from their neighbours. The length of fence required scales with the square root of the area, so Alice must pay for 1265 metres of fence at about £1 per metre, or £120 per hectare. Boris needs only ten times as much fence, and so pays £12 per hectare (of course, these are march fences and so the cost would normally be shared 50/50 with the adjoining land-owner; so the costs would be half as much, but the scaling factor is the same).

Marginal and submarginal land

Many of Scotland's landed estates are 'sporting' estates on very marginal land. The land is marginal, in many cases, precisely because of a long history of mismanagement by estate owners: they're overgrazed so there's no natural regeneration of trees, the topsoil is washing away. Land which was farmed productively by small holders three hundred years ago is now unfit for any agricultural use. And of course it's remote. It's remote because the landowners have cleared the people off the land, so there are no villages for public roads to serve, so there are no public roads to serve the villages which aren't there. It's rmote because estate owners have resisted the construction of public roads across their land. Because it is overgrazed into wet desert and unserved by public infrastructure, the value of this land is very low. So the land value tax will be very low.

What this means

Because large estates can afford good lawyers and can challenge what are essentially uncertain assessments, they will tend to pay lower rates of tax per hectare than smaller holdings. So Land Value Tax benefits large estates. Because large estates have inherent economies of scale, and land value tax takes no cognisance of this, land value tax benefits large estates. Because large estates have created large areas of Scotland that are depopulated and ecologically impoverished, they have created conditions in which they will pay very little tax on vast areas of land.

Of course, just because land value tax is a bad land tax doesn't mean that land shouldn't be taxed. Of course it should. But, as I've argued elsewhere, there are better ways.

In summary, Land Value Tax hurts small holders particularly on fertile land and close to public infrastruture where there is a clear public policy interest in encouraging agriculture, and helps owners of large sporting estates. It should be opposed, not promoted, by land reformers.

Nae Gods, an' precious few heroes: no place for racism in Scotland

Nationalism in Scotland is in ferment, on the boil, full of interesting ideas and cross-currents. We're enthused and stimulated by preparation and campaigning for the referendum. Ideas from the left and right are encountering one another, and sometimes we're a bit shocked at what we see.

Dennis Canavan is right. We do have to keep our eye on the ball. We do have to work together to achieve the win, because we still do have a hill to climb. So maybe I'm talking out of turn. I've already taken a pop at the old left, and now I'm going to talk about what I see as the misty-eyed romantic right: the idea that there is an authentic culture of Scotland, a true ethnicity: and that that culture, that ethnicity, is Gaelic.

What started me running is this multi-part article on the (generally excellent) Newsnet Scotland website. The article, too, is generally accurate. However, I believe it stretches a point about the extent of Gaelic in early medieval Scotland until it creaks. And in that creaking I hear an echo of special pleading which sounds to me distinctly racist.

I don't claim to know much about the paleolinguistics of Scotland north of the Antonine wall. That there was a general progression from mainly Brythonic/Pictish to mainly Goidaelic I believe, although I would be surprised if the hegemony of Goidaelic culture over Pictish was as complete as shown. South of the Antonine wall I know more, and in Galloway I know quite a lot. And I'll say this: the map reproduced here, taken from the third part, is just wrong: factually and intellectually dishonest, and spinning a myth about Scottish identity which just isn't true. In 1000 AD and for half a century afterwards, the Brythonic Kingdom of Strathclyde still had its caput at Dumbarton Rock, north of the Clyde, and still extended south into south Ayrshire and Dumfrieshire. To colour that area blue, for Gaelic, is not compatible with the historical record.

As far as Galloway goes, there was limited Goidaelic penetration into Wigtownshire - mainly the Rhinns - during the dark age and into the early medieval period (but note that eighth and ninth century place names in the Machars - Wigtown, Whithorn, Glasserton, Sorbie - are Anglian). There are also several kirk-compound names (Kirkcowan, Kirkinner, Kirkmaiden, Kirkmedan) which include the Anglian 'kirk' element but in Brythonic or Goidealic word order. There are, of course, also a large class of names where the Brythonic and Goidaelic forms are sufficiently similar not to be diagnostic. So prior to the wars of independence all we can say is that Galloway as a whole and Wigtownshire in particular had an ethnic mix through this period with Anglian and Brythonic names for most elite settlements but some Goidaelic settlement names appearing in the West. It appears from the Latin forms used by the scribes of the Lords of Galloway from Fergus through to Alan that their native language was Welsh.

After the Wars of Independence - from about 1340 - everything changes. Many place names disappear altogether; many new, primarily Goidaelic, place names emerge. Some names (e.g. Hazelfield -> Auchencairn) are translated directly from an earlier language into Gaelic. This seems to represent a very widespread depopulation, with new Gaelic-speaking immigrants spreading in from the west.

And then by 1600 it's all changed again. Gaelic has vanished; all new names are in what we would now call Scots.

So there was a period of Gaelic ascendency in Galloway and I'll not deny it, but it was short - 250 years at most. This is, historically, one of the most mongrel parts of our mongrel nation, ethnically mixed as far back as you can go. Dammit, we know that the Romans settled veterans from both Syrian and Nubian (black African) legions on farms both north and south of the wall, and it's a very fair bet that the descendants of those people are still here.

Ireland has, historically, been one of the sources of Galloway's population, but it's one of many. The oldest inhabitants we know of were Brythonic, and their descendants are still here. The Anglians came in after the Kingdoms of the North were defeated at Cattraeth. The Norse came in sporadically along the coast in the ninth and tenth centuries (Eggerness, Borgue, Southerness, Almorness, Heston, Tinwald, Torthorwald). And the Irish came in. Given the importance of the trade route, we must assume some population movement back and forth between the Rhinns and the Belfast area going back into the stone age, but Gaelic is neither the original nor the most important nor the most enduring language of Galloway.

We don't need ethnic cleansing here. We don't need racism. There is no one true Scottish race. There is no one true Scottish language. Very few of us are of  a single, pure, ethnic stock. We're mongrels. Mixed. The product of a complex, turbulent history. That's who we are. And it's who we've always been. King David the First didn't address his charters to 'omnibus hominibus tocius terra sue, Francis et Anglicis, Scottis et Galwensibus' for nothing. When William the Welshman won the Battle of Stirling Bridge, his colleague Andrew Moray was of Flemish extraction; and they were followed as leaders of the Scottish cause by Robert de Brus, a Frenchman with Norwegian ancestry.

Galloway (and Scotland) is not and never was a Gaelic province. It is not and never was Welsh or English or French or Norwegian or Syrian or Nubian. It was and is a glorious mixture of all these things and more, and we should celebrate that. This is no time for misty eyed, ill informed romantic myth making, and it's no time for racism. As Dick Gaughan sang, it's time now to sweep the future clear of the lies of a past that we know was never real.