Arterial Route Planning
Written by Rob Cleaver
Everyone has something they use to signify the home stretch on a long journey back at the end of an even longer day, or at least in my head they do. I look at people and decide they use Sainsburys Local as the final step on a quest for home. Others I reckon navigate merely by a set of traffic lights or the trampled remains of one of London’s many pizza boys, crushed to death by the sheer ferocity of bus drivers hurriedly ushering the five o’ clock scrum back home.
For me though, it’s Battersea Power Station. I live south of the river, but study north of it, so when I cross Chelsea Bridge all I can see are the power station’s four triumphant chimneys, like the upturned udders of a cow, milking coal for all the semi skimmed electricity it had. Dead and lifeless, they stand as an heirloom to a past we’re no longer connected to other than through the stories of the dead, and the buildings they created.
Without these landmarks, where would we be? I’m as adept at reading a map as I am at cooking; reasonably useless, but I hear horror stories of people wandering wildly off course in a signposted, urban area.
How is it possible to walk beneath a road sign, and then walk five miles in the wrong direction before stubborn abandon gives way to frostbite, fear and fast approaching fatigue?
It’s not dissimilar to studying anatomy, where it’s so easy to be bogged down in the destination that you lose track of the vessel taking you there, before hurriedly clutching at the superior mesenteric artery dearly hoping you know which way to turn.
The art of map-reading is lost. Like the ability to tackle a fellow football player without being executed. Satnavs guide us to our destination, where our forebears navigated by the stars. If the three kings had used a Tomtom to get to Jesus, they’d have taken an ambitious shortcut, involving an ‘at the next possible moment perform a three point turn’.
I would not hesitate to say that the human race has lost it’s way.
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