Lord Vetinari snapped his paper shut and exclaimed, ‘The people of Ankh-Morpork are already at home to noxious gases. It’s their birthright. Not only are they at home with them, they quietly persist in making more. It seems that Captain Slope is one of those people who won’t like the railway at any price. Suggesting that sheep will miscarry and horses will run until they die of exhaustion … Indeed, it seems that Captain Slope thinks the railway will be the end of the world. Well, Drumknott, you know my motto: vox populi, vox deorum.’

Curious, the Patrician thought, as Drumknott hurried away to dispatch a clacks to the editor of the Times, that people in Ankh-Morpork professed not to like change while at the same time fixating on every new entertainment and diversion that came their way. There was nothing the mob liked better than novelty. Lord Vetinari sighed again. Did they actually think? These days everybody used the clacks, even little old ladies who used it to send him clacks messages complaining about all these new-fangled ideas, totally missing the irony. And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a fangler?

However, on the other hand, his lordship quite saw the point of the coach drivers and the others who even now, according to the Times, could see their business falling away if the railway were to be introduced, and he pondered, in such circumstances, what is the careful prince to do?

He thought, how many lives had been saved by the clacks, and not just lives: marriages and reputations and possibly thrones? The clacks towers now spanned the continent this side of the Hub and Adora Belle Dearheart had provided evidence that the clacksmen had several times spotted nascent fires, and on one occasion, outside Quirm, a shipwreck a little way out to sea – when they had clacksed that information to the nearest harbour master, saving all hands.

There was nothing for it but to follow the wave. New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world. All the time the fanglers and artificers were coming up with even more useful things that hadn’t been foreseen and suddenly became essential. And the pillars of the world remained unshaken.

As a responsible tyrant, Lord Vetinari regularly audited his actions fearsomely and without favour. Trolls in Ankh-Morpork were rarely talked about these days because, amazingly, people barely thought of them as trolls any more, just as, well, large people. Much the same, although different. And then there was the position of the dwarfs, the Ankh-Morpork dwarfs. Dwarfish? Yes, but now on their own terms. The Low King was certainly aware that in Ankh-Morpork there was a large population of dwarfs that had taken a look at the future and decided to grab a slice of it. Tradition? they had thought. Well, if it suits us then every so often we’ll have a parade of all things dwarfish. Sons and daughters of our parents but, as it were, augmented. We have seen the city. The city where almost anything is plausible, if not possible, including, for the ladies, a better class of lingerie.