No, really, I laughed out loud.
One of the pleasures of a live bookshop, as opposed to an online one, is the small treasures that fall serendipitously into your hand while you're trying to find a worthy tome on, say, Red Tape Concerning Buying a House Abroad.
Thus it was that I chanced upon Mike Parker's "Map Addict", and, being one myself, had to have it. Very readable, informative, and highly amusing; I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in maps.
I was slightly surprised to find that a man so hooked on maps seems never to have become obsessed by orienteering (then he'd know why people turn the map round to point in the same direction as they're going) - is it too late for him to discover the delights of not only the competition but also the hours spent afterwards tracing the exact route taken on the map, and comparing it with the route that
should have been taken?
In fact, now my mind is focused on maps, I have only to pick up the map of the 1993 British Orienteering Championships at Brown Clee to remember the echo features, the awful moorland, the boggy bits where the next control was, naturally, over that nasty hill up there; and read my notes on the back, and see that I came 65th out of a class of 70 (rather unfit after a year on the sick).
And the album of photographs from the walking holiday in the Auvergne, with all the maps of the area tucked inside the cover, unfold the sheets, and remember the heat that had us moving from one patch of shade to the next, the spots where we stopped to eat our lunch on different days, the little chapel in the woods, the wonderful place we stayed in Orcival, the politeness of strangers on the train, exactly where I tripped and fell, lacerating both knees and blacking my eye...
Even the family history research is peppered with maps, both old ones of the places where forebears lived, and current ones, to see how it's all changed. Like the family tree charts themselves, it's all so much easier to follow on a map. One of my own earliest memories is of poring over a map of the Festival of Britain site.
Beside the computer here is a small pile of new maps, preparation for the next holiday. The position of the cottage has been pinpointed, the terrain examined, routes for walks and bike rides discussed. What memories, joys and disasters will attach themselves to these sheets?
Oddly, the river banks were above the water, separating the flooded fields from the rushing and swirling river.
Great week! And we've already tackled the laundry mountain and the knee-high lawn. Now back to normal loafing.
And the light holiday reading is chosen - as well as the books of sudoku and of crosswords, DH has Gogol's Dead Souls and Beowulf (in translation), and I'm taking a 500-page tome called The Scourging Angel - the Black Death in the British Isles.
and the Buff Beauty rose -
These 2 trees almost looked dead at first glance, but there are little leaflets appearing in tufts at the ends of the branches. The sycamores on each side, on the other hand, are in full leaf.
It's called the Sand Ripple hat, because that's what the pattern is supposed to represent. It's all the usual fine handspun yarn, black Wensleydale and oatmeal BFL, of which there is a good supply in my stash.
This little character, about 4 inches long including the tail, startled us by skittering across the track in front of us this afternoon, while we were walking in Hamsterley Forest. For some reptilian reason, it took cover in a big puddle on the track, with only its head above the surface. But at least it stayed still long enough to have its photo taken.
This was a batt of 90% wool and 10% other natural fibres, which has spun up into 410 gms of lovely chunky tweedy yarn.
