My love affair with maps has been going on for quite some time now. I can’t put an exact date to our anniversary, but I know that it’s a love I will never let go. There is something very evocative and mysterious about them; from the simplest town plan to the most intricate and detailed atlas. I know I’m not alone – many of us need only to glance at a map and before long they have lost minutes, hours or sometimes even days in a reverie.
Yesterday I stumbled upon a little gem of a bookstall in Spitalfields market, near to my office in London. It was selling prints of every map you can imagine, ripped from old atlases (atli??? If it’s not it should be) and I spent half an hour rooting around looking for maps that mean something to some of the special people in my life (and share the love of mappage). I controlled myself and bought only a few maps. But it got me thinking – what’s my favourite map? Off the top of my head, here is a list of my top 5 maps:
• JRR Tolkein’s maps of Middle earth
• The beautiful blue and green world map on the wall of the flat in Chelmsford
• The London underground map – ingeniously designed to resemble a circuit board
• The close-up satellite image I had of Canterbury when I lived there
• Stephen Walter’s London map ‘The Island’
http://flowingdata.com/2010/06/02/uber-detailed-london-map-satire/
so what's your favourite map?
Welcome
Well, here we are. I don't know where 'here' is exactly, but I hope you will join me on the journey to find out... Let me start at the beginning. I'm 26 (actually now 28... so the world turns...), female, and British. That's the first few things you will notice about me if we were to ever meet. But there's a lot going on in this here noggin' of mine (that means head in olde english speak by the way). I am writing this blog for myself really, but you are very welcome to pop in to visit every now and then. I can't promise anything mind-blowing or life changing for you, but it may well make you think, laugh or even explore your own mind. I love to write. I also love to travel, meet people, have adventures and generally get the most out of what life has to offer.
I've been thinking hard about this and I love looking at all maps, I recently bought a friend of mine a Times atlas and loved passing on the passion to another person, it makes me happy if I see people lovingly searching the pages for familiar places, or dreaming of far-off ones. I even love the maps that aren't very clear and sometimes even wrong! When walking around places, I often imagine myself looking down on where I am, as if looking at a map, or “doing a joey”
ReplyDeleteA globe that a dear friend of mine bought for me a few years back is perhaps my most treasured possession, when I moved house recently, this was the one item that I wouldn’t let out of my sight and took in the van cab with me to protect! It’s also one of the few items I have that I deemed important enough to go in my will!
I think my “favourite” maps are the ones that have been with me through different stages of my life.
1. The old road map of Great Britain that my Dad had in the back of his car when I was young, it doesn’t sound very interesting and every other car has one, but sitting in the front, following the roads on the map and being allowed to direct was perhaps where it all started!
2. The satellite image of Canterbury I had on my wall throughout university, if I’d put as much time into doing my work as I did to looking at that map, maybe I’d have got a better result!
3. The enormous political world map that I had stuck to my wall the year before I went travelling. I spent many a happy hour, plotting my journey, sticking pins in the places I’d been, was going and hoped to go.
4. The dog-eared, weather beaten, road map of New Zealand that I had whilst driving around New Zealand, I lovingly highlighted the roads we took, as we took them, to show everywhere we’d been. The cover has fallen off and a few of the pages have fallen out, but I still love it.
5. My Bristol A-Z, my new home town and a book of maps that has helped endlessly with directing lost visitors or planning my next walk or route to explore new places in my own back yard.
wow good work laubs! So we have two the same... and NZ would probably be in my top 10. Very pleased you take such good care of the globe. Ele p.s. for how long have you had a will? and am I in it?! x
ReplyDeletewho do you think gets the globe?!
ReplyDeleteLatin derivations:
ReplyDeleteMasculine words ending in "us", plural form is "i" eg. magus becomes magi
Feminine words ending in "a", plural form is "ae" amoeba > amoebae
Neuter words ending in "um",plural form is "a" testimonium > testimonia