SPEAKER_16 0:01

Hello and welcome to Wild I radio show with a collective view on ordinary every day objects and subjects one theme per episode with various reflections opinions and ideas and of course music Wild Anger Today's theme is maps.

SPEAKER_13 0:48

I think I mentioned before that I've recently returned from a family holiday in Japan. In fact, I know I mentioned it because I mentioned it to everyone at every opportunity because it was awesome! Navigation in Japan is quite a challenge. Of course there's a language difference, but also most residential streets are unnamed and the train stations are often vast and multi-leveled. But our daughters, aged twenty-two and nineteen, have grown up with the digital technology and navigated us through this complex landscape with ease and fluency. With a flurry of thumbs, there they are on Google or Apple Maps. Look, they've identified a narrow alleyway in eighty meters, which is a shortcut to the restaurant. And now there is a picture of the restaurant fronted, so we can't miss it. And there's the menu. Better just check the reviews. And now they've opened a link to the bus timetable so we know how long we can linger in the restaurant. This seamless flow of digital information enabled us to pack so many great experiences into our two-week stay. How different from my first independent travel experiences in my late teens and early twenties. A to Z street maps of London. This map continues to the west on page 13 and to the east on page 55. Definitely no Zoom facility and crucial details hiding in the inner margins. Or laden with backpack in Greece or Indonesia, a lonely planet guide in hand, knocking on the doors in search of a bed for the night. The one place that we struggled to negotiate in Japan was the mighty Shinjuku train station in Tokyo. Our accommodation was in an alley just off the aptly named Bright Shopping Street, a few hundred metres from the station, the busiest in the world with its fifty-plus platforms and two hundred axes. We made the mistake of arriving at Russia, and to give you an idea of how intense it is, London's busiest station, Liverpool Street, handles around a quarter of a million passengers daily, about the same population as the Glastonbury Festival. On the other hand, 3.5 million passengers daily pass through Shinjuku, comparable to the combined populations of the cities of Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, and Manchester, through one building. Power generating floors convert this massive footfall into renewable electricity. On the platforms, white-gloved passenger arrangement staff, or passenger pushers, are employed to shove and squeeze additional passengers onto carriages which are already crammed way beyond capacity. But we survived. We navigated Hinduku, which gives me faith that we could navigate most situations in this life. There is one thing I miss about this amazing digital navigation technology. The human interactions that flow from asking for directions. Traveling around France in the 1980s, my travel companion had taken an even class in basic French enough to introduce herself or ask for basic directions. But she hadn't really excelled in the language. Imagine my delight when she approached a local with a muddled request for directions to the bathroom. In Paris, we stopped at a cafe to ask directions to a garden recommended by Alan Titchmarsh. The park of the citron built on the site of the old citron car factory. The waitress was amused by her awful French accent, but a sudden flash of insight passed across her face and she disappeared. We thought to seek the advice of a colleague. She returned a few moments later with a plate of delicious lemon tart. After my dad passed away, we needed to locate the funeral director in the small Devon town where he lay and rest. Asking for directions, I received the reply. Just beyond the black galaxy. The funeral director's premises indeed turned out to be across the car park. Just beyond the black Ford Galaxy. Maps. The front bottoms.

SPEAKER_03 5:44

And I've got big, big points. But I can see them slipping through, almost feel them slipping through. And I move slow. Just low enough to make you uncomfortable. Say I hate you, you mean it, and I love you. Sounds fake. It's taken me so long to figure that out. I used to love the taste, I would do anything for it. Now I would do anything to get the taste out of my mouth. And you're so confident, but I hear you crying in your sleeping bag. But you were broke bad. And you were bad at hell. Well, you had done anything with anyone else, it would have worked out so well. You are an artist, and your mind don't work the way you want it to. One day you'll be washing yourself with hands to open public bathroom. And you'll be thinking, How did I get here? Where the hell am I? If the rules were reversed, you could've seen me sneaking up, sneaking up from behind. She sees these visions, she feels emotion. She says that I cannot go. She sees my plane in the ocean. And what about your friends? Don't you love them enough to stay? And I say, If I don't leave now, then I will never get away. Let me be a blue rap. On the blue sea, I'll blend right in. There is a map in my room, on the wall of my room. I've got big or big on what else But I can't see if you fall and throw us what I'm flipping through. And I'm slow slow enough to make you uncomfortable. You were broken at yourself. You were bad yourself. You wouldn't want anything with anyone else. You are an artist, and your mind don't work the way you want it to. One day you'll be washing yourself with hand soap in a public bathroom. And you'll be saying, How did I get here? Where the hell am I?

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Hello, today we're talking about maps, and I'm going to talk about what I believe to be a slight dependency that we find in society, certainly Western society, on SatNav, Google Maps, Apple Maps, anything like that. As soon as we drive somewhere, it's automatic. Google Maps comes on, sat nav comes on. If we're walking to somewhere we've never been to, a different cafe, we plumb it into our phone, and we just follow the screen and it takes us to our location. But I believe that there is a certain beauty in getting lost in not being dependent on the phone and just going with intuition, seeing which way to go. But when we follow a sat nav, we set ourselves into these rails, undeviating rails along some kind of fate. Granted, we're going to get to our destination probably much faster than if we get it ourselves. But all those lovely secret hidden things that we miss out on with a with a sat nav, we're probably not going to discover that secret hidden beach. We're not going to go down that beautiful lane lined with flowers or discover a strange shop in the middle of nowhere. Talk to an unusual person. It can almost be assimilated to how in life we try and plan things. We want our life to go like this. We want we try and figure everything out to the T, but life's not like that. We end up doing all these strange different things, and often it's the unpredicted things that are the best. And I believe that this is something that can be assimilated to maps in general, road maps, path maps, anything like that. And talking of the maps and the paths of life, the song I've chosen today is Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads. And here's the beauty of getting lost.

SPEAKER_07 10:20

Where we know where we're going, but we don't know where we've been.

SPEAKER_08 10:28

And we know what we're knowing. But we can say what we see when we know the children. And we know what we want and the time to work it up.

SPEAKER_09 11:09

Come on, that's that's what I'm gonna do.

SPEAKER_12 14:30

I quite like London. My work takes me there a few times a year, and like many, I live there for a year or two. Plus, my sister moved there in 1990 and has never really left. So, generally speaking, I spent a fair bit of time in England's capital city. So when someone says the word map, to me, one of the first things that springs to mind is the London Underground map. Now there will be a few facts about the London Underground map heading your way. But I wouldn't wish for anyone to think that these facts are about to reel off, have come from my own memory bank. Indeed, whilst researching this topic, I thoroughly enjoyed finding out loads of fascinating information. And like I say, we'd like to share some of that with you. But before I go deep into the map itself, I shall remind you all that the first part of the London Underground was opened on January the 10th, 1863. I'll do the math for you, just over 163 years ago. I never knew that. It was known as the Metropolitan Railway, and its inaugural section connecting Bishops Road, now known as Paddington, and the Farrington Street, making it the world's first underground railway. Naturally, more and more was added to it, and I can imagine it was a little confusing to navigate around. There were maps of sorts from around 1908, but they were shown as a more traditional geographical design. The first official underground map was devised by Mr. Beck in 1931 and published two years later. If you compare the current underground map, it looks very similar to the original design, albeit with a fair few more lines and stops now added. However, there was a twist, because in 1960, a new and widely criticized design hit the scene. It was designed by Harold Hutchinson, who was at the time London Transport Publicity Officer. The issue about it was because the entire map did not have a single curve on it, and therefore was described by many as being too spiky. Therefore, in 1972, a return to the style closer resembling the original design with Kirves Galore. Now, of course, actually making sure you get on the correct tube, making sure it's heading in the right direction, and ensuring you get off at the scheduled stop can still bring in challenges. But before you ever set foot in a tube station, there is absolutely no excuse for not knowing exactly how to travel across London. And what I also know, categorically, without any shadow of doubt, is that without this most simplistic, colour-aided, easy-to-follow masterpiece of map design, myself, along with hundreds of millions of other people over the years, would never have got to their destinations on time, if at all. My music choice this week is an easy one. It's my favorite band. It's the jam, and down in a tube station at midnight.

SPEAKER_08 18:01

To take them home to The ones that I love and who love them forever The Christ that is next Repeat my own and reflect my thoughts Calling on inviting Partially naive Miss a ball Talking rabbits and a smallest pipers Mr. Jones got run down Headlines of death or so bowl, madman on the right height And I'm down in a Tuesday setting of midnight Fumble for change Pull out the queen smiling big Island I put in the money And pull out the plum Behind me Whisper's in the shadows Ross blazing voices A to wait in boy ain't shout Have you got any money? When I say it, I've been checking money out and take a while cowry I'm on the right, I'm to my wife She'd be nodding up and counteria now she's expecting me but I shouldn't have got she said pulling out the coke I'm down in a two-stage shut up midnight I first smelled a fist And then a kick I could now smell their breath The smell to pubs And one with scrubs But too many right-wing matins More life swam around me It took a look and drowned me and it saw a distance The smell of brown leather If they did it with the weather I said not a map at the last shot Hi'Anna and I'm thinking about maps.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

My story is from about nineteen years ago when I moved down to France with my husband and children and my father in law. was gonna come out and see us with his uh wife and my husband's grandma who was ninety-five at the time and he really loves so he's so happy she's coming out to see his new place. Anyway, uh he meets his grandma and she's like Oh you know don't you worry we'll we'll be with you in no time you know about A because your dad says it as a straight road one straight road for the airport and my dad my husband's like getting worried he's like no he doesn't want to worry his grandma so he brings his dad a few days before he says Dad you know you're I guess and I do know how to get here and he says don't you worry some I've got it all sorted or see you about eight um I knew the way but don't worry okay eight o'clock comes on the day nine o'clock still not here so my husband understandably is getting quite worried you know he's got a 95 year old woman in the car with him so I thought he knew they landed but he's like that's it I'm I'm gonna go down and try and find them because I've driven about an hour to an hour and a half to get to Marseille and the phone rings and it's quite much very modern phone and she says right um well you know we got a bit lost um so we're gonna go and see a hotel um and your dad just you know gonna pull in there in a minute so you know he says it's going to you don't need to come um and we'll see you tomorrow all right Ronnie um just all the time I think that and I guess it's about an hour after he gets it. This time it is that I'm sorry I'm sorry to trouble you but um we are not in a hotel because your dad, silly bugger has been following the signs to Hotel de ville and hotel de ville means town hall in French. So of course it's closed because there ain't gonna be hotel and everything else is also closed so we've got nowhere to stay. Don't worry so there we are I'll come and get you back with pajamas an hour and a half back down to Marseille and pick them up and so his grandma's like I'm getting in the car with you. Those two have been at it like a cat and the dog fighting all the way grandma and turns out when they'd actually got home got back to our house that they did have a map all along and his stepmum was trying to use it and his dad was saying no and she got so fed up that she woke wan down the window and threw it out. So that is my map story.

SPEAKER_15 24:57

And on that note my song is Every Day is a Winding Road by Cheryl Crow I stride with a vending machine repair man He said he's been down this road more than twice He was high on intellectuals I never been with the push nice Everybody gets high everybody gets got a daughter She was born on a Tuesday night I'm just one of the so I am a stranger Everybody gets everybody gets so these are easy I've been I get a little bit closer every day as a fairness I get a little bit closer to feeling when I was in Switzerland I did a module called thematic cartography thematic cartography is um maps that have that are supposed to express data or convey data so you might have like a map of London and you know the ethnic makeup of London different colours or you know the different um regions and how much the average salary is and that basically is what thematic cartography is. So I did that again while I was abroad in Switzerland we had to finish a report create the maps ourselves and download files and build it from scratch. It was actually very difficult to do um somehow I managed I was with some uh random Swiss guy Nathan Wobbler so we managed and I'm just looking through what I submitted and we created two maps. One of the maps was Switzerland divided up into cantons as the subdivisions and just from light purple to dark purple with the average age of the first marriage that range from 29 to 32 with the Italian region to Chino and the Romanic speaking um Quizon having a higher average first age. I think we just linked that to um maybe second religion I can't remember exactly what we did. Second map was divorce rates per thousand inhabitants and put against average salary. Again we didn't find anything too interesting it was in the French speaking cantons the lower the salary was there was a correlation with higher divorce rates at the end of the day I think the professor mainly wanted and cared about how good our maps did how how they looked as opposed to the conclusion we drew from them. But yeah it was uh it was fun it was interesting um and our report does look quite good I learned a lot about the different types and names of cantons in Switzerland anyway I've chosen raise of the prize by flaming lips in this renewed age of space race um I think this relates to maps quite well and I'm currently looking at a globe of the earth with Africa staring back at me.

SPEAKER_14 34:58

It's an old globe but it's slightly faded blue and Africa is basically yellow at the top yellowy at the bottom and green through the middle where the equator passes where the jungle is but I wanted to talk about when I need to go somewhere different like for example a theatre in a different city or if I wish to go to a museum in a different town I'll often use an app like Google Maps or Apple Maps to look for where it is and when I do I'll find the place and then I'll use Google Earth to look at the street and to actually look at the building see what it looks like and I find that this really helps me. So when I arrive I can recognize the building I don't recognise any of the people that are in the picture they're not there. I don't know why they're not there but anything to disappear however when I want to go on a walk my wife and I do a lot of walking around where we live but I don't do it that way at all I do not want to see what it looks like. I get my IGN map out and it's equivalent is a French equivalent of the what do they call it oriented map the hang on second ordinance survey map the equivalent of the ordinary survey map in the UK I trace the path I intended up to the UP number 90 and on its way up I'll see that we'll pass through the US or mix it with limit I see that we'll pass through it or pass by an old tumbled ruin probably a chapel and I'll see that we'll pass by a stream or a waterfall and in my mind I imagined that looks like and if I don't want to see it I guess I romanticize it and then when I arrive at the point that I imagined before I said that it's usually completely different. And the funny thing is what I imagined in my mind I can never remember so I thought I'd share that because for me when I'm traveling by car I use a visual photography map if you like on Google Maps or Apple Map when I'm going on a walk through the nature, through woodlands and stuff like that, I prefer to use a map an idea and all that ordinance and imagine in my mind what it looks like onto my song and it's called a map and in my mind when I think about when I listen to the song I imagine Michael style and looking at the legend at the bottom which is also another word and I I I imagine him singing the romance of maps in places that he's never been to before and I imagine him thinking about legends in the sense of myth through his imagination. I don't know what you think but as the song begins it sounds like he sings a batch of eggs.

SPEAKER_11 38:06

But it can't be that can it be Wild Angles Hello I'm Scott The map is not the territory it's a phrase coined by Alfred Korzibsky and is arguably the most important concept to grasp if you want to understand why humans bless our hearts are so consistently prone to misunderstanding each other. Let's imagine you're planning a hiking trip through the Alps you open a topographical map and it shows you elevation lines, the trail markers and the peak names it's incredibly useful but it's not the Alps it doesn't have the biting chill of the wind, the smell of pine or the physical exhaustion of the climb if you try to eat the map you won't get any calories and if you get mad at the map because it's flat or the mountain is steep you're kind of missing the point. The map is a reduction of reality and designed to help us navigate it. In neurolinguistic programming we apply this to the human brain we don't experience the world directly but we experience it through our senses which are then filtered by our beliefs language and past experiences those filters include deletion we ignore the hum of the air conditioner for example distortion we misinterpret a friend's silence as anger I let's say and generalization we decide that oh meetings are a waste of time based on one bad Tuesday afternoon. Your map of a situation is your internal representation is just a simplified version of what's actually happening. When two people argue it's usually because their maps don't overlap even though they're standing in exactly the same territory. The goal isn't to find a perfect map a map that is as big and detailed as the territory is just the territory itself and it would be impossible to fit that in your rucksack instead the goal is to update your map constantly when you encounter a place in a conversation or a project that doesn't match your drawing you don't scream at the land you redraw your map you remember that the menu is not the meal and you should navigate accordingly This land is your land this land is my land from the coast of Cold to the Scottish Highland from the sacred forest to the holy highlands this land was made for you and me as

SPEAKER_06 44:00

I walked out through the homeless counties, the traffic raging, raging all around me. I closed my eyes and dreamed how it could be. This life was made for you at me. This land is your eye. This life is my night.

SPEAKER_08 44:44

No one can stop me. And don't wait to win this bad big.

SPEAKER_06 46:46

From the teaming stitchy, I made my escape to find my place in the mystic landscape. I'm not the first here, nor am I the last here. This line was made for you at me.

SPEAKER_08 47:07

This line is all that's made your life. This land is your life.

SPEAKER_16 47:52

This land is my Hi, it's Maive. Uh when I think of maps, I think about the time when I needed one most. Now, if someone dared me to come up with a plan or a m map out a trip so badly that you couldn't have planned it better to plan it badly than I'm your man, because I've already not planned that trip. It was 1992, and we just had the best summer of our life. We finished the Vondage, which is the great begin, and we had about 2,000 francs, about £200, and we wanted our summer to carry on. Friends had told us about the Middle East, and with about three or four minutes of sort of preparation, we decided that was where we were gonna go. So me and Vinny set off first, and then Jai and Mark were gonna follow us after. We got picked up after literally five minutes. Our friends were all cheering, crying and laughing as we set off. See in Athens, we said. This young man was kindly enough to pick us up, and he dropped us all the way the other side of San Maxine, which was about twelve kilometers away. So we only had another two thousand five hundred and twenty kilometers to go. It was then that it dawned on us that we had no idea where we were going. We had absolutely no clue and no map. All we could say was auto route in Italy. Now if you were in a shop and you pointed to an apple, or pointed to something you needed, even in France or any country, you could just point your way to it. You try pointing to Brindisi, or even worse, try pointing to Athens. It's not going to get you very far. It took us about a day and a half to eventually get to Italy, by which time our mega rations had won out. Once in Italy, we realized that we didn't speak any Italian whatsoever. It was hard enough in France, but in Italy, it was literally like another world. We had no lyra and absolutely no clue where we were or where we were going. We ended up in a small coastal town. Vinny was having a nervous breakdown, which stood out it was a Sunday morning, the only thing that was open was uh a church, and Vinny was rocking the back and forth on his heels. Luckily that grabbed the attention of two very unfriendly looking coppers, both with these aviator glasses on, smoking cigarettes. To be fair, they put us on the next bus out of that uh small coastal town, and that took us to J Genoa. They spoke to the driver, and to be fair, the driver took us to a little sort of municipal police station in the outskirts of Genoa. He said to me to him in Italian, I pointed to Athens, and they put us onto another bus which took us to the train station in the middle of Genoa. Now, once we were there, we managed to find a bureau de charge. And we managed to decide whether we were going to go north or south, once we got our bearings. And I even managed to pick up a map of Italy once we were in there. And while it only had the main sort of places, it gave me some sort of idea where we were actually going. The rest of that trip is actually really is history, and I will, over the course of doing this show, probably relate to it a few times. But needless to say, me and Vinny took a train all the way down to Brindisi, spending about a quarter of our hard-earned money. But still, we weren't hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere. We eventually bumped into our friends in Athens after about a week. And while we thought we'd had a bad journey, they were traumatised for life after this. They had travelled also with no map, and God knows how long it took them, but they rode they arrived about three days after us, by which time we'd already like spent a few days in Athens. So next time you go out for a long road trip, please plan it before. Imagine looking at Google Maps, and you put in the destination of Athens and Port Remo as your location, and it tells you it's gonna take 36 hours driving, it's uh 2,531 kilometers, you press start, and there's nothing in between. That was my brain, and that was our trip. I'm gonna leave you with this song, The Long and Windy Road by the Beatles. You guys enjoy that and make sure you plan your trips carefully.

SPEAKER_08 52:12

The long and winding road to your door will never disappear. I've seen that road before lead me to your door as the race was left to love Jesus and know, and many times I've tried, many ways you never know, many ways I've tried to know why you left me standing here a long, long time ago.

SPEAKER_07 55:07

You let me stand in here a long, long time ago.

unknown 55:21

Don't keep me waiting here.

SPEAKER_17 55:47

Music was by Johnny Rose. This has been a go beyond production.