Everyone leaves town. It happens in a good story, it happens to the star player on the team. They think there's pastures greener elsewhere. The thing is, the whole lot are just as rotten as one another, and it is a phenomena known as "cutural cringe". People think that the local, the familiar, has no value - and that they must get away to find the profound and the valuable.

They just don't get to the self actualisation phase - they keep searching outward. Writing lets us reach inward. Hive is the only place where we write for ourselves, and not to try and gather the attention of the louts and the buffoons who, like inflatable car-salesmen distract you from what is at the end of the road you're travelling on.

It is the same thing for all of us, eventually - and we'll all get there, but I will take the journey serenely and placidly, as I watch them wave their arms about in panic at every leaf that falls from the tree, and every candle that burns down.

The price doesn't matter if the network operates in the same way.