Terry Hopkins hovers by the lamp post outside the Arabic grocer’s where a clown throws grapes into the air and catches them in his mouth. Hopkins reaching into the hessian satchel around his neck; his felt cap and corduroy jacket giving him the appearance of a college lecturer. In the bag are sheets of stickers which Hopkins is attaching carefully to lamp posts and traffic lights along the High Road. He affixes one on top of a torn away sticker promoting a metal band; a small white square bearing the name of his website, a repository of conspiracies and counter arguments which back up Hopkins’ avowed belief that the earth is in fact flat. The clown has no access to the internet nor any wish to be sucked into Hopkins’ orbit, but were he to type the link into a browser, he would find no shortage of evidence telling him that the spheroid earth is a mediaeval myth backed up by no science of repute. Hopkins is tired; he was up until 3am going down a wormhole with some Americans. How would a flat earth have gravity? they asked. He explained that up is always up wherever you are, that if the flat earth were propelled upwards in a direction perpendicular to its face, the force on it would feel like gravity. Up is relative, they told him; it is not necessarily above your head. Lie on your back and up is above your chest. Floating in space with no objects from which to take bearings, where is up? A wag asked if he’d graduated from middle school, the kind of ad hominem argument he has come expect from trolls. Some still think that he and his cohorts are Creationists who believe the earth is covered by a dome in which the sun and moon are both contained. How does his infinite acceleration theory sit with this? The chatter was generally benign, and several fellow flat earthers chimed in with suggestions. Hopkins knows his stickers won’t convince anyone, but at the very least, the world will know that not everyone agrees with the scientific orthodoxy; that it is healthy to ask questions, to challenge the “official” version of any event, to not be such cattle. The clown admires the man; he remembers when the earth really was flat, before the navigator El Cano returned from the dead, limping home to Seville after an odyssey that took in the Spice Islands, Patagonia and Cape Verde, proving by his own heroic circumnavigation that the earth was in fact a giant ball. Here in twenty-first century Kilburn, with space travel, the internet and the wonders of modern science, it is Hopkins who is the pioneer.