The New Old Continent

Inspired by varyar's excellent "In and Out of the Reich" series. Trying to get myself to write again.

Air Royal: French commercial air company; founded in 1930 by Guillaume Martin, nationalized by the Caron government in 1999. Developed the largest commercial jet in Europe to date, the Royaume 3600. Founding member of the European Air Compact alongside Deutsche Luftkompakt, Pruski/Preußisch Fluggesellschaften, Società Aerea Italiana and Habsburgische Luftverkehrsgesellschaft.

A Brief Guide to European Travel

(Published in 2018 under the auspices of Midlands Publishing, known best for its periodical London Monthly)
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Darlington to London; 01/03/18


Morning in Darlington. I wake up, brush my teeth, boil a cuppa Darjeeling and sit in my favourite chair to enjoy the sunrise. Here, as I write these words, I am suddenly overcome with the enormity of what now lies ahead.

Great Britain is my life. I have ever moved in the shallows of British power- in the very epicentre of British might, in fact. I have never- and this is the truth- even seen the coast of France in person. Within Great Britain, my range of movement may be generalized as within England, or, to be even more exact, within the North. My London accent is imprecise; my French, inexcusable; my German, even worse. I can only pronounce a few words of Slavic with any clarity at all.

What am I doing, travelling overseas- and, even worse, travelling overseas into a land bereft of even a smidge of British influence? My parents, and their parents before them, satisfied their wanderlust by journeying to Canada, to South Africa, to India and the Straits and Australia. Within the British Empire one may find such a dazzling array of sensory delights that one would be ill-advised to even leave. And yet that is just what I am going to do.

Fully one hundred million subjects of the King regularly transit to and from the borders of the great European states. Apart from internal travel, the British Empire is the source of the greatest proportion of tourists in the Continent. Perhaps my earlier assertion about British influence is irrelevant; in Paris, for example, I might turn a corner and run into a fellow from Glasgow or Cardiff.

But enough dilly-dallying.

I have cleaned up my table, shut off the telly, and made sure that the stove is off. The taxi ferries me to the train station, where I now sit on a bench, recording my thoughts. I will not be returning to Darlington for at least a month.

In Great Britain, what can at least be said is that the trains run on time. We take great pride in the efficiency of our transport system, seeing as the first locomotives were manufactured here. Industrialization only really took off across the world after the Austrians took notice of it; it is an annoying quality of theirs. Those Americans who tell you that our ill-feeling towards the Austrians is merely envy, or worse, a perverted form of affection, are lying.

The 10:38 to London crisscrosses nearly the entirety of England, taking regular stops at the major urban conurbations en route. As it coasts into the station, an American tourist beside me starts asking his mother why there’s no smoke. I am tempted to reply that the smoke is in fact called steam, and that coal-guzzlers were phased out a few decades prior; prior to his birth, in fact, judging from his hairless chin.

Perhaps this is another reason for my extended holiday; too many tourists. It’s about time, one would imagine, to give those haughty Europeans a taste of their own medicine. And surely the Americans have been punished enough.

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EXTRATERRITORIALITY

Jaldipedia, the Virtual Encyclopaedia


{Part of a series on DIPLOMACY}

Extraterritoriality is a concept primarily practiced in Europe. It concerns the intersection of a number of spheres related to the management of a territory. Such spheres may be religious, administrative, linguistic, economic, industrial, financial or diplomatic (list not exhaustive). It is most commonly practiced in Europe under the auspices of the Austrian Empire as a method of ensuring pan-European peace. Notable examples include Silesia and Lusatia, Lombardy-Venetia and Savoy and Nice. The concept may said to have been invented by Joseph Ferdinand I.

{Contents [hide]}

1 Mechanics

1.1 Austrian

1.2 American

2 History

2.1 Use under Joseph Ferdinand I in Europe

2.2 Spread of extraterritoriality to other developed countries

2.3 Extraterritoriality as common practice in subcolonization

3 Similar concepts

4 See also

5 Notes and references

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Darlington to London; 01/03/18 (cont’d)

A lumigraph would not be appropriate for this book - I want this volume to be cheap, damn it - and so I shall merely resort to attempting to describe the scene before me in the most dulcet of tones. Hopefully, when the reader imagines my voice, or pictures my physique, they envision a man on par with Humphrey Lyons or Rudolf Ailes, all long limbs and Teutonic splendour- never mind that their facsimiles barely match up to them in person, if all those ulogs are to be believed.

The Darlington station is quite apt for the city responsible for the world’s first steam-powered passenger rail, measuring up to, as it were, the Mayor’s vast ego. Mayor Nordlich has been in power since the late ’00s; one fears that if he keeps ordering expansions to the various public facilities around the city we shall scarce have enough money left to process and educate the multitudes streaming from Agra and Oudh (or “AO” in modern parlance, if you would prefer to be forward-sounding).

There is, oddly enough, in a sort of crypto-Catholic reverence, a vast stained-glass panel over the two vast doors which enclose the station. The ceiling is nothing more than a vast skylight of glass reinforced with chrome, thin strands of concrete interweaving in and on themselves; still, the roof hasn’t collapsed yet - and it has been around for half a century - so one supposes that the design is still going strong. The stained-glass panels, however, were installed during Nordlich’s time (which is ongoing, regrettably), and portray, in typical Boer fashion, a riot of colours featuring angular, bloated figures having a grand old time pounding spikes into the ground. The artist placard is nowhere to be found, until I notice, barely discernible from the orange-red-green background, a constellation of indents on the glass spelling out “VISSER”. Very modest, are the Boers.

The rest of the station is little enough to talk about; there are balconies on every other floor (five in total), each hosting a different cuisine from diverse portions of England. One feels that the architect wanted to cultivate something of a microcosm of the Empire, with so many African scents and Indian fabric about that it makes the head spin. Still, on the ground floor as I am (food does not excite me terribly), there are the typical ’00s British staples of interior design - a clock, arrays of glass-mounted artwork (including a garish - but, I must admit, oddly pleasing - map of the world) and assorted furniture.

On the train now, with nothing to write about until London, I feel that it is as good a time as any to talk about the Boors. That is not a misspelling- the Boers are commonly referred to as Boors in polite company, at least in the bourgeoisie salons that rumpled old men like me tend to frequent. One would barely call them rebellious; not exactly, per se (how rude! to presume that this Empire experiences such a trifling thing as rebellion), but they have had the most retrograde attitudes towards race across the Empire. Oppression, needless to say, is not the answer, not when South Africa has acres and acres of perfectly exploitable land and resources- all easily obtainable, if the Boors would stop imposing artificial limitations on their Negroes.

Anyone whom you pull aside on the streets of London will tell you that Graham had the right idea with his “pre-emptive action” policy, but it did not appear so in those days. Many, many politicians - my great-grandfather among them - and even a vast quantity of folks on Graham’s own side of the aisle - lambasted the PM for following an abhorrent trend - indeed, an insensible, incoherent trend. And yet practicality triumphed, ultimately, over ideology - just in time for the latest round of European bloodletting. Graham’s sterling conduct during the war would influence public opinions - while tax receipts and an explosion in Indian goods did the rest.

Now, this book has the potential to dissolve into a self-congratulatory screed on how the world appears to have avoided the worst excesses of colonialism, so I shall stop myself here. Rather, it is time for me to look around and describe the varied passengers on this cortège. Not for the reader a contrived procession of the “divers nationalities of the Eternal Empire” (to borrow a popular travelogue… from the ‘60s) but rather a jumble of youths and old folks, most of them absorbed in a book or a screen. Generally, no upstanding working man or woman would be found on a train at this hour- particularly not a cross-country voyage such as this.

An odd tradition, purely original and native to English soil (instead of being imported from other parts of the Empire or, indeed, other parts of the world) is for the youth to purchase a ticket and simply ride the train back and forth, back and forth- across the arteries of the island. There is a certain aimlessness and timelessness about the act that is charming, I must admit, but who in their right mind would buy a ticket heading to nowhere? Perhaps the newly affluent - definitely I myself am able to recall being sixteen again, and absolutely thrilled at my new acquisition of a thousand pounds for only a few months of work. That I proceeded to waste that thousand pounds on a new wardrobe is little different from how the youth of today waste theirs on train trips.
 
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