" The truth is, my life never went according to plan, or a plan, or anything resembling a plan. It just sort of sprawled. Some lucky people have lives like a new colony, where the public buildings and houses and streets and markets and town walls are all laid out and completed before the first settler moves in. The rest of us are like old villages which grew up haphazard, strung out along a road or squashed in between two mountains. "

― Tom Holt , Alexander at the World's End