Je vous ai aimé plus l'honneur le monde (Lexi, Keiran, etc) Yesterday morning Britannia had been just a name on a map.
For most of last night, after Keiran had stepped off the plane and retrieved his suitcase (one of those ridiculous wheeled things: granted, the typewriter was a heavy sod, but it felt like he should have been hefting it around regardless), it had been a dot on a route plan he had to ask someone to decipher for him – coloured lines and blobs, what? No sense of geography there – though the few notes he'd succeeded in making as the bus bumped and juddered along the winding roads, past telephone poles and farms, vineyards and waterfalls, decreed that it was also a distant dot on a horizon bright with the promise of mighty deeds, beneath a sky streaked with sunset like spilt blood, dappled with clouds like fluttering pennants (it was at times like this, confronted with that sort of nonsense, that he questioned the wisdom of his vocation, though it seemed a promising start as far as the 'radical return to style' his agent kept babbling about was concerned... maybe just a little too radical: if his readers hadn't been able to take a change in tone he wasn't sure a change in era and the reintroduction of chivalric tradition would really go down a storm.).
By the time he'd made his way from the bus station to the town proper, he'd been congratulating himself on an excellent choice. This was the sort of place a writer could fall in love with...
… assuming he could survive long enough to immortalise it on paper, that was, because by now he was dying of hunger, having rejected airport food and underestimated how long it would take to get to Britannia (resulting in no provisions, eejit that he was) and then trundled a ridiculous little roll-along suitcase through the streets.
Fortune, it seemed, was still smiling on him, though, as far as auspicious tangents went, because he'd found himself outside what had to be a bakery. By this point he could, as the folks back home were fond of saying, have eaten a scabby dog, but cake sounded – and more pointedly smelled – like something he'd enjoy a lot more.