In moments of anxiety and depression, and sometimes when I’m at stool, I reach for Jonathan Meades’s Peter Knows What Dick Likes, published by Paladin, a collection mostly of his magazine work.
I open it at random and I always find something decent. Yesterday I opened it at a piece titled ‘I Like Maps.’ Me too, Johnny.
And in that article Meades writes, ‘Just as William Morris abhorred illusionism in wallpaper so do I fear the increasing three-dimensionalism of OS (Ordnance Survey) products whose reductio ad absurdum would be no more than doctored aerial photographs … Nothing about the rigours of abstraction, about studied concentration, about the exercise of imagination.’
It could have been written yesterday. And then I saw the date of publication of the piece. 1987!!! The man’s a prophet. Still with a certain amount of honour.
I wonder if he, and you, are familiar with the children’s book The Map That Came to Life, ‘described by HJ Deverson and drawn by Ronald Lampit’? A couple of children and their dog go for a walk, from Two Tree Farm to Dumbleford Fair, and on the way they learn how to use a map. It’s brilliant in its nostalgia, and in its charting an England that never really existed.
That’s another thing maps can do.
