We in the north and west of Europe have benefited, for millennia, from the constant arrival of the new. At the end of the last Ice Age our hunting ancestors penetrated the land that would become Britain. They were alone there for a long time but were eventually joined by those who could teach them the skills of agriculture and stock-rearing. Later came the magicians who could source and conjure metal, and after them a steady flow of incomers, bringing more and more of the modern world. Ideas of all kinds blew in like seeds, and kept on coming.
