If a picture is worth a thousand words...

...how many words is a map worth? This section of map, pictured here with the pocket compass I bought back in my teenage years as a Scout, covers the area where I grew up. The first house I remember living in. On this map, still in a small estate surrounded by open ground as it was when we moved in. The open ground I played in, made dens and hideouts in the long grass. Before it too was built over as the houses filled in the gaps. The park across the main road where I played football. Kicking a ball about with my father. Then the house we moved to while I was still at primary school. A house right next to the secondary school I went to for six years. Where I remember my Geography teacher talking about a map as a palimpsest, remnants of the past hidden by layers of redevelopment. The same park up the road from the school where we went for games. In the opposite direction the shoreline where I went birdwatching so many times - most Sunday mornings, rain or shine. Following the water's edge along to the castle, then onto the more open spaces of the sandy beach. Sometime out onto the sandbanks when the tide was out. Approaching seals hauled out on the sand or counting wading birds, curlews, and godwits, sanderlings and plovers. Sometimes just for fun, or sometimes as part of more organised surveys. Going there with the telescope I had bought from a schoolfriend who had upgraded to a better one for his astronomy and had no need for the simple one he had. Streets that were so familiar as I walked to visit friends or went to the different parks to play football in gams that lasted all afternoon or all evening until it got dark. Safe quiet streets, with wide pavements, along which I usually had a tennis ball at my feet, helping to pass the time on my way to and fro. The Scout hall, down in the old fishing village part of the town where I went on Friday nights. Stopping off for a quarter of sherbet lemons from RS McColls. Hogmanays, when we wandered the streets, from house to house, dropping in on friends' parents' more adult celebrations, before we moved on. So many little stories.
I guess these things are in my mind for a couple of reasons. Later this year there will be a class reunion, at a venue that is also on this little bit of map. And last week a TV sitcom started up set in the same place.