FT261

Once upon a time, though poss­ibly not so long ago as you might like to kid yourself, the world was full of wonders: monsters, freaks, fairies, unknown animals and weird ‘technologies’ such as the carbuncle, a precious stone that glowed with its own light and so could be used to illuminate the marvellous palaces of strange races that no one had yet met. However, if they existed at all, these things were actually quite a long way away. They were literally ‘beyond the pale’, when ‘pale’ meant a perimeter fence and so, by extension, known territory.

Frankly, I don’t have the slightest interest in what the carbuncle might have been, whether the griffin was a misidentified triceratops fossil or even whether fairies were remnants of an extinct race.