A Sense of Place

If History is not what happened, but what you can remember, then Geography is not where things are, but where you left them.

A good thing about the US is that towns and cities stay where they're put. Atlanta, Georgia; Lincoln, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado. You may not be able to point to them on a map, but that doesn't mean that you don't instinctively know where they are, and they prove to be very reliable. Sadly, this is not true of many other places around the world. They've obviously drifted, or meandered off while nobody was looking, like members of your family on a shopping trip. And there is a hard-core cadre of distinctly unhelpful places, proper wrong'uns, who've been bugging me for years.

Why on (Google) Earth, for example, is Billericay in Essex with Basildon and Chelmsford when it should obviously be in Ireland? And Staines, which should be in Essex of course, turns out to be in Middlesex, across the other side of London!

Why do Dungeness and, good grief, the Isle of Sheppey, persist in being in Kent when the western coast of Scotland is clearly where they both yearn to be? It's maddening. (But I have to share with you that there is a tiny place north of Dungeness called Lydd on Sea - if that's not overweening ambition I don't know what is..)

Britain seems to be full of mis-places. Tring in Hertfordshire is another place that sounds like it wants to be in Ireland, as is - of course - County Durham.

Small fry, you may think: British idiosyncrasy. Well, how about a whole country? Oh yes, where's Suriname then? Not in West Africa, tucked up in the Gold Coast. No, not in South East Asia either. It's in South America of all places. What is it doing there?

Perhaps I'm just showing my ignorance, but sometimes geography is deliberately unhelpful. Why Bologna and Boulogne? Is it really necessary for them to be so similar? And FOR CRYING OUT LOUD have you seen how many Guineas there are? It's bordering on obsessive. No wonder the post is always getting lost.

Until this can all be sorted out I suppose I'll just have to muddle through. Now please excuse me - I need to GoogleMap my car keys...