Saturday, July the 10th, 2004
back to: title, date or indexes
It was made using embroidery, crayons, buttons, string and grease, and it was enormous. It was stored in an aircraft hangar. The forty aeroplanes that used to occupy the space had all been smashed up by an aeroplane-smashing machine. What a fantastic machine it was! Did you know that it could pulverise an Immelmann in less than two minutes? And do so almost silently? It would not be true to say that you could hear a pin drop, but a box of pins, yes, that you would have heard. No pins were used in the making of the map, except for that patch of darning where the canal cuts through the site of the Old Shabby Bakery, where a tiny lock-keeper's hut now stands, marked on the map by a tiny drawing of a tiny lock-keeper's hut done in red crayon. (The lock-keeper is tiny, not the hut.) The crayons used, incidentally, were waxen ones, as used by small children when first learning to draws cows or other barnyard animals. There are no cows pictured on the enormous map, because no cows stray near the canal. The elegantly-detailed border, however, is decorated with schematic motifs representing linnets, shrikes and cormorants, also in red crayon. Some have questioned why eels are shown thrashing about in the canal at various points, particularly near the darned portion of the map and at what is known as the “Mad Section”, but I am not at liberty to divulge the full facts of the matter until the centenary anniversary of the map's completion, by which time I will be old and incontinent and white of hair and dribbling and incoherent. I can hardly wait.