"I don't tend to get mythological references and so on, I have a spotty and culturally impoverished education. I've been going to Milliways since I was six and staying until I ran out of seashells to trade for food, so in some ways I'm very cosmopolitan albeit without much information about what things are and are not common across worlds, but I spent the rest of my childhood in a beach town pretending to be slightly crazy, attending an underfunded school designed to turn out docile fisherfolk, working on a clam boat, and generally existing in a context that has lost all its previous ties to Earth history that isn't a fictionalized version of the Roman Empire."