Maps, and why you should love them more

I'm going to recommend watching the BBC4 series 'Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession" even before I've seen it, because I love maps and everything about them - the artistry, the politics, the sense of a place frozen in time and space, the unreality of them, and the sheer human arrogance of marking out possession on the unstable crust of a spinning metal ball in the middle of nowhere.

I use maps all the time in my work, in my life, probably a lot more than most people do because I use them as a canvas for my tours and treasure hunts. Wandering the city streets holding a 1:2500 printout marked with arcane signs and arrows is a common theme in my professional life, but I also use maps for the things other people use them for - going to work, going to the pub, finding the hotel, etc etc.

Aside from anything else, I have a terrible sense of direction so I rely on maps an awful lot. And the most interesting contention that the series makes is that the modern map, the one we think of as normal and the most obvious way to represent the world, is anything but. So I'm going to watch it and see how that happened, and I recommend that you do the same.

Clearly it's on at some stupid time of night, so catch up with it on iPlayer. Silly television.

http://bbc.co.uk/i/s2wvh/

Those who are about to drink salute you.

Jon Hyman, a dear dear man. A legend, indeed. And a man whose 30th birthday I can't attend. Unlike everyone else, however, I do at least know how to get there. Because it's my job to know where everything is in the City of London. Especially the pubs.

You see, Corney & Barrow on Masons Avenue is one of the hardest places to find in the entire City of London. Even if you’re looking.
 
According to multimap, streetmap AND googlemaps, Masons Avenue DOESN’T EXIST. 
 
Look them up. There’s nothing there. Mostly because it's a pedestrian alley, but also partly, I like to think, as a way of deterring the uninitiated from exploring its many hidden treasures.
 
As a gift to those attending, but especially to Mr Hyman, and by way of an apology for my inability to attend his birthday feastings, here is a short guide to getting to Masons Avenue:
 
From Moorgate station – take a left, or right, depending on which exit you choose. In fact, there’s a distinct possibility you’ll come out in totally the wrong place - the dreaded third exit. If you’re on a main road, you’re in luck. If not, come out of the station, cross the road, follow the road ahead until you’re on Moorgate itself, and proceed as above.
 
When you’re on Moorgate, head south. This will either be right or left. If you pass London Metropolitan University, you’re doing well. If you pass Hotel Chocolat, you should turn round.
Cross at the traffic lights, continue down Moorgate, and take a right between two almost completely characterless office buildings, one of which has a bar at the ground floor called “the Gable”. At the end of this alley, cross Coleman Street, and to the right of no.30, there is another alleyway, almost inconceivably obscure. This is Masons Avenue.
 
Now, from Bank Station. Come out anywhere you like. All the exits are in pretty much the same place, and walking around underground is very unhealthy. Wherever you emerge, look for the statue of a man on a horse in the middle of the junction. To his right (not yours, his) is a building with no windows on the ground floor. This is a good thing, as it’s the Bank of England and they don’t want the likes of you snooping around.
 
At the end of the Bank, turn right into Princes Street. At the end of that, go left-ish into Gresham Street, take the first right into Coleman Street  and then turn left just after Coffee Republic, into Masons Avenue.
 
And finally, from St Pauls station. Depending on which exit you use, there will be an obscenely hideous octagonal office building either across the road or to your right. If it’s to your right, cross the road to the other exit. It’s too horrid to look at up close. From here, you should walk along past a shiny glass office building, past the COSTA, past EAT, Starbucks and Pret, and take a left at the traffic lights onto King Street. At the end are some traffic lights. Go right, take the first left into Basinghall Street, and Masons Avenue is on your right, just after the VITA café.
 
Good luck to you all, birthday wishes to Mr Jon, and adieu.

The perils of precipitate pronouncements

Rather like trying to steal a biscuit while mum is asleep on the sofa, the surprise and shock when, despite to all intents and purposes being unconscious, she mutters "hands off" from another room entirely, my PC is now awake to my treachery and is planning a magnificent and utterly self-destructive send-off, beginning, this morning, with the news that it has decided to unilaterally declare war on my word processing package.
Upon cranking up the machine this morning, I was faced with the news that "your version of Microsoft Office is a big poo head" or words to that effect, and then given the option to "immediately destroy all your work for the last three years" or "give me leave to nag you incessantly forever".
This, bear in mind, while it was still asking me what I wanted to do about the .NET 3.4-95i340953409583945 framework jack-knife dishwasher fluid mustard seed short wave feltrum XP update that had been sitting around for a while in the euphemistically-titled "tray" (litter? anyone?)

So, just to be clear, if my PC actually leaps up and bites off some extremity or just swallows my head before I get a chance to write again, I am buying a Mac. No I really am.

That's it. I'm buying a Mac

The day has come. I've only been waiting for the internet to come online for two and a half months, such is the towering incompetence of TalkTalk. I can finally access the internet from my house (imagine...) but something's been niggling at me for a few weeks. It's not that the computer has got slower and slower as time has gone on. That doesn't surprise me. Nor did it unnerve me that a RAM upgrade, C Cleaner, scouring out the annoying little programmes, uninstalling the AVG scanner that took up all my processor power, and a hundred other things failed to do anything to halt the slow deterioration of the system. The lack of battery power and dodgy build quality were just, I assumed, something I had to accept. The fact that it just sometimes randomly crashed was, in some philosophical way, an acceptable compromise. I hadn't realised that the compromise was all one way.

So when it comes to the point that I'm poring over forums reading posts from one techie to another discussing how to find a version of a file to note down then uninstall and keep a series of numbers to reinstall a programme that is bound to completely destroy everything on my desktop, and I can't even find the file so I'm looking for what to do when you can't find the file, and all of this is because Windows wants to install something and can't and gives me an error code that doesn't come up on the normal list of things that I start to recall a conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks ago that goes something like this "so what happens when it breaks?" "it doesn't." "how often does it crash?" "*snigger* it doesn't"...

The conversation took place while discussing whether it was worth my buying a Mac. I had never thought of it until Cassie came to stay, and I started playing with the thing. Much as I tried to resist its charms, I started to realise that it wasn't so much the prettiness that was seducing me. It was the fact that it worked so much better than every single PC I've ever owned, seen or heard about. The fact that there doesn't seem to be any need to have to think about it, that I could just get on with what I was doing.

And I'm just so sick of having to fix the bloody thing so much of the time. Once I saw something that doesn't cock up, I feel like an arse for having put up with it for so long. So I'm not going to any more. I might be wrong, but then I can always go back and buy a PC in a couple of years. As of next week, I'm on the mac.

just gets more interesting every time i think about it

I'm not usually much of an enthusiast for the latest technology, Web 2.0, virtual remote desktop networking and what have you, but this evening, i think i might have been converted. I've been doing a lot of research to find a useful (and ideally cost-effective) platform on which to run my secret new City of London corporate treasure hunt activity, and I've found a utility where i can operate my phone from my laptop, which makes things an awful lot easier. Obviously i had to confuse myself horribly by trying to take on my phone of myself taking a picture of my handset on the screen on a backdrop of a picture of the phone (or something to that effect), but every time I think about it, the potential just grows and grows. I'd better get on with it. Watch this space.


Not literally this space. Just an idea of space. If you can watch an idea without form. And all credit to you if you can.

treasure hunt.

I'm doing a treasure hunt as well, and this baby is going to be huge

17th August
12pm (that's noon)
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, City of London
Forget your Dr Kawashima... you want brain training? You'll get an assault course the like of which you've never witnessed.
£12 (or £10 if you bring three other people and form your own team)
see facebook page
or email andrew@showmethesquaremile.com for details

walking tours

I'm doing a couple of walking tours

10th and 24th August
2pm sharp
City of London Information Centre, south side of St Pauls Cathedral
Whoever turns up gets a really bloody good two hours of London history.
For a mere £6
here's a link to a map and things