About the author

David Roderick

I grew up in Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K., and attended state schools.&nbsp; I learnt the clarinet in primary school quite quickly through&nbsp;<br>state-paid-for music lessons through the school and local education department.&nbsp; At this age (10 years old) I wished also to<br>learn French, algebra, and short-hand.&nbsp; Alas, to this day my French is appalling (though my Spanish is quite good) and I never&nbsp;<br>learnt any short-hand either -- as of yet.<br><br>My childhood was quite turbulent as my mother was turbulent and irrational at the best of times.&nbsp; I have known prosperity and<br>poverty as a child.&nbsp; My mother remarried to a paranoid man when I was 12 and although I did pretty well in my GCSEs in the&nbsp;<br>1990s, I flopped in my A-levels.&nbsp; I attribute this to a worsening family environment and the development of a thought disorder&nbsp;<br>(prodromal schizophrenia) at the age of 16.<br><br>I managed to get a state-funded flat down the road at the age of 18, and this space allowed me time to resit my A-levels, and<br>York University miraculously accepted me on an engineering BEng course.&nbsp; I somehow managed to not fail this degree despite&nbsp;<br>not having a sufficient background in maths or physics to understand the course material.<br><br>In the 3rd year I attended some lectures on economics and history within the department by Ken Todd, and these lectures,&nbsp;<br>​​​​​​​or the way I interpreted them, transformed my life.<br><br>In 1999, upon graduation, I immediately began pursuing research into the governmental causes of the industrial revolution,&nbsp;<br>gravitating strongly to the works of Adam Smith.&nbsp; But the language he wrote in was 18th century English, and this was very&nbsp;<br>different than that which was spoken in the generation I had grown up.&nbsp; So I pottered about for a bit, discovering that the&nbsp;<br>generation who could remember the Second World War, in my home area, spoke a now-extinct dialect, the rules of grammar<br>of which had been passed down to their generation.&nbsp; Alas they are no more.&nbsp; They all have died.&nbsp;<br><br>As a monument to them I have written my book in their grammar because I believe that non-broken prepositional words&nbsp;<br>which are fixed and non-chaotic will allow a greater ability to transliterate my works into foreign languages.&nbsp; I am a citizen&nbsp;<br>of planet Earth primarily, and I should consider that to be my primary nationality to avoid falling into the "us and them" trap.&nbsp;<br><br>David Roderick​​​​​​​