Maps

Along with evaporated milk and Bruckner music I love maps. My first conscious memory of maps was at primary school where hung a black-and-white wall chart of Europe covering much the same area as the one below. The legend "Caspian Sea" in particular intrigued me.

Map: a representation, usually on a flat surface, as of the features of an area of the earth or a portion of the heavens, showing them in their respective forms, sizes, and relationships according to some convention of representation.

I would add that a map should also be pleasing to the eye and, above all, be optimised for its intended use. To achieve this features may be omitted, distorted or exaggerated to aid clarity. A good example being the London Underground map.

Central portion of the Tube map

Back in my youth, whilst my father drove, I liked to navigate using his brightly coloured Bartholomew half inch to the mile maps. I prided myself on not having to turn the map to face the direction of travel as my mother had to do.

example Bartholomew half inch map

One of the first things I do when or before I go to a new locality is to acquire and study a decent map and then to stake out the territory. But I know folk who, having lived in our house many years, still do not know how to find local places. Some have not even explored our own few acres of land.

GPS became operational in 1995. Several years before that I had contacted the OSI (Irish Ordnance Survey) with a proposal to engineer an in-car navigation system that supplemented dead reckoning from odometer data and a compass with digital mapping. When I visited the OSI they were then only in the process of digitising previous printed mapping so my proposal allowed for an interim solution that entailed me driving every road in Ireland whilst my dead reckoning sensors would be storing data that, after a bit of processing, would become a digital road map. My proposal never got off the ground, of course, and then GPS took over and made it all look a bit silly.

Uncle Sam

Not surprisingly I have welcomed the digital mapping revolution and the advent of GPS for which we have to thank Uncle Sam. I continue to be awed by the ability to utilise data from multiple satellites on my hand-held smart device to pin-point my location on a high definition map. Google Earth and Street View are likewise amazing achievements, and all these services are free for personal use! I am similarly awed by cell-phone technology, and so on. When I consider, for example, a daffodil, I think "you are going to die in a number of days and how can I enjoy your beauty as much as it deserves in that time?". Because there is beauty in good design. Youngsters today take all this technology for granted with no respect for the man-years of blood, sweat and tears implied. As a design engineer I figure I at least have some comprehension.

Bestal's Nutwood

When flying or in other public transport I like a window seat so that I can gorge myself on the passing landscape, maybe picking out would-be dream places to live, like Nutwood of Rupert Bear fame. And often I will be following my course on a map.

Journeys often start and end in the same place. I have adopted a sort of loose principle of life that such a route can be graded according to how much area it encloses. On this basis the worst thing is to come back the same way as you went. Similarly, when going from A to B, I like to explore different routes. If I have time on my hands I will choose a scenic route over a more direct motorway route. I differ radically from Ali in this respect: she likes to get from A to B as quickly and as smoothly as is possible.

In their spare time some sew, many spend vast amounts of time playing computer games, and others natter. For me, I can spend hours poring over maps. Even my doodles are usually some sort of map, often involving railways the surveying of which is made interesting by gradient and rate-of-turn constraint limitations.