Having being away from the UK for the best part of 6 months I have discovered that I am not particularly prone to homesickness. Of course I miss people and places but not in that particular gut wrenching, joy engulfing, constant state of mind way. I’m predisposed to make the very best of my self-imposed exile and feeling miserable about such a fantastic opportunity just doesn’t make sense.
Hard-hearted as I might seem day-to-day, once in a while something triggers a longing for home that is literally breathtaking and always unexpected. Such an occurrence happened yesterday when I was engaged in a group Skype session hashing out the finer points of a database / GIS resource management system I am currently establishing on behalf of the Wired! group (more on which later). Towards the end of the chat, my partner in crime, the system’s developer in Wales, shared with us his screen and an example from a similar CRM system in the UK and bam! there it was, an Ordnance Survey map.
The encoded colours, the familiar lines and symbols that have accompanied my work and leisure time for years. Self-explanatory – no gazetteer is required after all this time – and as familiar as the face of an old friend. Despite depicting a tiny place in Wales I had never visited or heard of, for some reason this made me feel urgently homesick.
I’ve always felt there there is so much more in a map than just the representation of locations as image. The choices of symbol, representation and colour combine to make a language of their own. Perhaps this is why some people have such difficulty reading maps and goes some way to explaining why a type of map could elicit such an emotional response.
Almost as if to prove that I am not the only one fascinated by cartography, when I returned home at Christmas I found James had mounted an old OS map of our still-quite-new local area that was part of a number I had picked up a while ago as my old department got rid of its paper map library. As OS maps themselves cannot be reproduced here without a licence, a picture of our dining room wall is the best I can do for those of you unfamiliar with the cartographic language of my home land.
