Showing posts with label The Map That Came to Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Map That Came to Life. Show all posts

Saturday, July 13, 2019

JONATHAN PROBABLY DOESN'T KNOW OR CARE WHAT GEOFF LIKES



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.