Training | 2010.02.22
A manifesto of the lost | Ian McMillan
Go left when you should go right, east rather than west: the world will seem a brighter place
I got off the train in Accrington the other morning; I was visiting a school to spout my deathless verse to the excited pupils and, although the teacher had offered to meet me and transport me, I\'d decided to walk. Earlier I had printed a Google map that indicated the school was 0.7 miles from the station, a pleasant stroll in the bracing Lancashire air. The map showed the route in a nice bold line, simple as a vapour trail in the blue.
The problem is that Google maps don\'t use terms like left and right at the start of the journey. They refer to west and east, so I had to go west from the station. I looked to the sky, and, of course, it was a deep February grey so I couldn\'t get my bearings from the sun. There were no simple, bold, vapour trails. I turned, boldly, and began to walk in the direction I hoped was west. It was a west of the mind. It was, in many ways, a Yorkshire west in a Lancashire setting. In other words, I got lost. Profoundly lost. My west was east.
I walked into town and wandered down the main street into what Americans call the central business district . The reality of Accrington was somehow different to my reading of Google Accrington. I should have been almost at the school gates by now. Instead, I found myself outside the town hall. I wandered in and presented myself at the tourist information desk. I asked the woman there about the best route to the school. She turned my piece of paper slowly through 360 degrees. "I\'m not too good with maps," she said, "I\'ll get my mate."
Her mate came through from the back room and they both twirled the map like they were thinking of making something useful from it. "It\'s quite a walk," the second woman said. "0.7 miles," I replied. She looked doubtful. "Oh no, it\'s more than that. And it\'s all uphill." Like I said: there\'s a difference between real Accrington and Google Accrington. Hills, for a start. I was really enjoying being lost. It felt like a good place to be. I went for a nice cup of tea, because I was in plenty of time and to be lost gives you a kind of succulent freedom.
Very few people seem to be lost these days, though. Satnav gets you from door to door and it tells you when to turn right or left from the station, even on a gloomy west Pennine day; iPhone apps tell you where you are, where you\'re going, where you\'ve been, where you\'d like to go and where you\'d like to go next after you\'ve been to the first place.
This may or may not be a good thing, and I\'m not thinking here about the satnav sagas of the articulated truck stuck down the narrow, narrow lane just before the duck pond, when the driver was only following the computer\'s directions to Godmanchester. "She had such a lovely voice," he\'ll say later to a baffled copper, "soothing and sexy." That\'s not lost, really, that\'s unfound, a traveller\'s version of what psychogeographer Iain Sinclair has termed the reforgotten.
In the distant, black-and-white days before satnav and apps, I once got spectacularly, almost surreally, lost in London. I\'d spent my last couple of quid before the train on a plastic pinny with a representation of the tube map on it and I had to use it to try to find my way from Buckingham Palace to King\'s Cross station. It flapped like a plastic banner, and it was entertaining, in a limited, street theatre kind of way; my wife didn\'t help the situation by suggesting that I take it back and swap it for one showing the Monopoly board. "Why don\'t you ask somebody?" she said. What, when I\'ve got a tube map apron?
So, here\'s a manifesto. The Manifesto of the Lost, worked out in a little Accrington cafe over tea and eccles cake. Get lost. Just get lost, will you? Get lost once a week, maybe. Turn left when you should have turned right, east when the map says west. Get out at a station and just walk, straight as a vapour trail, until you\'ve got no idea where you are. Don\'t ask anybody. Carry no map, no app, no nav powered by sat.
The world will seem a brighter place, somehow. Well, it worked for me in Accrington. Next week, do it blindfold: that\'s deep lost.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ngton-getting-lost-maps-google
