As i was walking through a local park yesterday i saw an elderly chap reading a map. Holding it up and tracing lines on it like one would if running their finger along sentences in a book. Turning the folds as if they were pages. I stopped and made a comment along the lines of ‘you don’t see many folks sat reading maps nowadays’. And then the magic happened. His name is Michael and he’d parked his mobility scooter at the park gates and shuffled unsteadily to the bench. He was going for a walk vicariously through the map. After many decades of cycling and walking the moors hereabouts, this was how he got
out and about’ these days – through the map. It was a 6 Inches to a Mile map of Sheffield and the surrounding area. And it was older than me. He was a geologist with a geographers eye. He shouted out things on the map and asked if i knew what they were or when they were demolished. Railway stations. Dams. Parks. Ponds. Big houses. Secret paths. He’d come to Sheffield 60 years ago from a place 17 miles south of London. A geographers precision. We chatted about Bert Ward, about Ethel and Gerald Haythornthwaite, about architecture, about his decades of study in to the Sheffield dialect, about his favourite and least favourite buildings and places hereabouts. ‘Best be going now’ he said after maybe half an hour or so, the way elderly people say it almost half-heartedly when actually there’s not much to rush off to. I have his address and will drop some books off for him. I hope we get to sit and read his map with him again.
Afterwards i drove to the local co-op about quarter of a mile away. Michael had got there before me on his mobility scooter and was clearly pleased about that. I got a grin.