What is Britain for?

Any thoughts?

It's a question my agent posed me in connection with my book about Arthur ('King' Arthur, that is - the original, the historical, the one!) "What is Britain for?" What's the point of the book - current subtitle: "The True Story of Arthur and the Fall of Britain" - if we haven't decided what Britain is, and why we should give a damn?!

And at first I thought - "What is Britain for? Well, it's kind of for keeping the wind off Belgium. And for making sure Ireland doesn't get too close to the Continent."

But that was just me being facetious.

Anyway, I've spent about two months now on my rejigged opening chapters to Commanding Youth and I think I'm getting there. The question. What's it all for.

The Romans invaded, but they only took about a half to two-thirds of Britain - essentially, the same part as the invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes would later turn into a place called 'England'.

The rest of Britain got renamed. The tattooed people to the north got called 'Picts' (from pictii- 'painted'). Their Irish equivalent was the 'Cruithne' - effectively, the Picts in Ireland (or, as Diodorus Siculus called them, 'those of the Pritani who inhabit Iris'). The Britons, according to a description given by Claudian Claudianus just five years before the Romans left Britain for good, remained rather 'Pictish' themselves.

So - all of the British Isles, plus a substantial part of Ireland, were once 'British'. Then Rome came along and turned just a part of the territory into 'Britain', the rest becoming somehow alien. And the bit Rome called Britain then got taken over by Germanic immigrants (the English) who were anything but British.

And therein lies the problem of Britain.

Over the centuries, England has tried to govern every part of the British Isles (and Ireland) from London. But England is the odd-one-out, the non-British part of the whole. Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall ... these are aspects of the real Britain, and they have all been imposed upon, trampled, exploited and frequently despised by the controlling English in their southern capital.

So I'm beginning to formulate an answer to the question "What is Britain for?"

It's for uniting against the stranglehold of London and the southeast, and for remembering that Britain existed long before England was invented.

Now I've just got to get that idea past my agent, who's based in ... yes, you've guessed it.

London.

FICTION OR FACT?

I had a meeting with my new agent last Thursday.

We'll not dwell here on how I came to be stopped by the police in London, and we'll pause only briefly to note that I missed bumping into Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon by something less than twenty-four hours.

The meeting went well. A great chat. Most encouraging.

But some of the time, at least, was spent weighing up the relative values of historical fiction and non-fiction.

See, historical fiction is going great guns at the moment, apparently. While a certain chain of bookstores seems to have decided that homo sapiens is incapable of reading - or, at least, buying - 'serious' books (to that bookstore I can only say: 'Don't make the same mistake as television! We're not all sheep!')

Now, with both of my major projects I have, at times, considered whether fiction might not be the way forward. But then I've stopped considering and carried on trying to tell the story of what (I believe) actually happened.

Had I been writing them as fiction, I would have wanted to present descriptions of people when no genuine descriptions or portraits of them exist. I would have wanted to describe the meals they ate, what they wore, what the weather was like ...

In short, I'd have made stuff up. And once you start doing that, you might as well make up the whole thing.

But then, I'm biased. I rarely read fiction. Too often, I've picked up a novel, read the first page, and then given up - which is why Authonomy was such a shock to my system (more of that anon). I find non-fiction infinitely more comforting. Reality, to me, has always been more interesting than, well, somebody else's imaginary world.

I put it down to my Welsh blood. We're a race of preachers and teachers (and poets and perverts), and we believe passionately in learning. I began researching my main subjects - the historical Arthur and the life and times of Will Shakespeare - because I wanted to know who these people were. And I've found out some fascinating things about them.

Would I really want to bury all that in a work that somebody could easily dismiss as 'just fiction'? I don't want the Dan Brown get-out clause: I'd rather have written 'The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail' (although I think the authors of the latter got it wrong).

So, for me, the real issue is: can non-fiction be as gripping, as engrossing, and as entertaining as fiction? Not just for an autodidact like me, but for your average reader?

Can we not prove that 'truth is always strange - stranger than any fiction'?

Still, the good news is that my long chat with my agent dispelled any nagging worries about e-books, self-publishing and all the current malarkey that so concerns the writer of today.

Got some more work to do on the projects. That should keep my mind off things for a while.