PINS - Rule Nineteen: Maps - More Special Features - Imagined Worlds
(Don’t harm any of God’s creatures!)
One of the points of PINS is escape. Escape from the increasingly humdrum job, the cut and thrust of professional ambition, the idea that a conscientious attitude to work, a dedication to your profession and amiable mucking in is not enough. Your ideas of joining in with the rest aren’t really what is required in the modern world. And there again, you can’t really be bothered doing what others expect as the norm. None of these young long haired buggers have heard of Gerald Finzi or care for Jerry Lee Lewis, or have done am-dram in Rossendale. Played the romantic lead, too. And none seem to have played tuba in a Newcastle trad jazz trio, or on Birdcage Walk, or in the Heworth Colliery Band. You constantly remind yourself you got your job by talking about Schubert with an amiable but very powerful old gentleman when you should have been talking about maintaining co-ordinatographs or examples of a tacheometric survey* like the rest of them.
This latter instance, a chimeric kink rarely found in life’s ever-shifting tectonic plates, should always be seen as a potent magic. You can’t really explain it to anyone, not for another forty years at least, but you aren’t sure whether that magic would turn against you if you started being like everyone else. You have had some fun out mapping stretches of the British Isles and this office job in a city isn’t the same, but never mind. The people here aren’t the same as the lads you went out surveying with. They were all youngish, ex NS or regulars, and like you, still on the Reserve, turning their experience of reading ground to good advantage. These new colleagues are all typical Lancashire city people, only used to offices, a bit full of themselves and their new notions, and sloppy to boot. Farm people are alright in Lancashire, but they tend to yell, or laugh at you in the fields when you’re practising your light opera.
There again, you can mix concrete on your narrow path using the portable mixer you borrowed from a pal who works on a site, and you’re not averse to syphoning off petrol from the car parked next to your rust bucket in the communal garage, which you bagged rent free from the prosperous neighbour, an amiable gent of advancing years who wants nothing more in life than to pick up shipping signals in the Bay of Biscay through a huge antenna attached to his handbuilt radio receiver. The thing towers over the brick outhouse next door. You might get a colour telly from him if you play your cards right.
So it’s important that - when mapping your imaginary world on the back of pre-typed letters that ask the client to examine the Plan of the survey (showing said site edged with a thick red line), and say, by return of one copy, which easements they require - to write out your worlds, their histories, their main players, and their topographies, in beautiful copperplate. Then the numb young long haired buggers with their notions won’t really bother looking, or think it’s not modern, and unimportant, and leave you be.
OK, that’s all very clear. Can you imagine some features for your maps that would suit the estate of these rulers, and their lands?
Herzog von Hochwurnz-Uiberwald (“die** Alt Uiberwalder”) - Sigismund III
Grossherzog von Holesien - Ludvig I
Grossherzog von Renesberg - Louis III (“Grand Duc”)
Herzog von Maamwich - Johannes III
Peter - Archbishop of Rainz (Holesia)
Johannes - Archbishop of Wippersdorf (HW-U)
*Red circles indicate ground marks such as pipe nails and pegs fixed by Tachy and fully described on all Observation Forms (O.S. 540).
**Surely the copperplate should show “der”?
An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.