Before the fall

Yesterday's post was rather pretentious, but fear not. I was deservedly and appropriately humbled immediately afterwards: we got lost on the motorway. It was my fault, but that's what comes of printing out directions from a route-planner website, failing to look at junction numbers, falling off the route then not knowing how to get back on. As a result, the first topic for The Valley of Lost Things is: losing your way.

In the positive spirit of the site's insipration (see yesterday's post), I bought myself a road atlas. The very nice lady in the shop in the service station pointed out that I didn't need to buy one because there was a map on the wall nearby, but as soon as I saw the claim "1.5 miles to the inch", I knew that I had to have it.

It's by Philip's, and is grandly called 'Navigator Britiain'. It runs to an amazing 380 pages including town maps, index and county boundaries at the back, and costs a whopping £19.99, but I'm delighted with it. My previous road atlas, now tatty and out of date, with the well-used pages fallen out and tucked inside the front cover, and, most crucially of all, left at home for yesterday's journey, was 2.5 miles to the inch, and I'd thought that was an unusually large scale.

One of the first things I saw in it that's happened since my previous atlas was the National Forest - a splendid idea, and one of the few new things we do in this country where the full benefits won't be seen until we're all gone. This reminded me of the Clock of the Long Now, but that's such a big topic and some way from the current theme for the blog, that I'll reserve it for another post. (But have a look at the Long Now Foundation in the meantime if you're interested in the clock, and at Brian Eno's essay on thinking about the longer term.)