Maps are my life and I've even stolen a few (From Worcester News)

Maps are my life and I've even stolen a few

11:40am Monday 22nd June 2009

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ON first impression, Mike Parker isn’t the sort of person you’d choose to be stuck with in a lift. Not that he’d rob, defraud or kill you, more that he might be in danger of boring you to death.

For Mike Parker has an all consuming passion for maps.

As a child, he’d rather spend time running his fingers across the surface of a map tracing the route as it unfolded, than looking out of the car window at the scenery. Road junctions, B routes or crossing country boundaries sent him into ecstasy. Seriously strange behaviour for which he probably should have had therapy.

Surprise then, on meeting him, Mike Parker isn’t that barmy.

He’s turned a life’s passion into a job and written a funny and entertaining book. The title of which, Map Addict, just about says it all.

In truth, it’s not all about maps.

Because he has taken the central theme like an A road, but has veered off it down country lanes to explore other obscure topics. Such as how they put the “rut” into Rutland, for example.

As a lad, he took the train every day from Kidderminster to Worcester, where he spent 10 years at the King’s School, a journey for which he didn’t need a map. But at weekends, he piled into his grandmother’s aged Ford Corsair and the pair set off, Mike with a map on his knee and no idea where they were going.

He said: “I’d be given carte blanche with the navigation and would take us off down lanes that from the map looked worthy of a snoop or which led to places with odd or interesting names.”

Most of the maps, he freely admitted, were stolen. He said: “While my mates were nicking records, sweets or fags, I was making regular forays into a book shop to fill my schoolbag with bright, gleaming Ordnance Survey maps.”

He found it way too easy. While the shop assistants kept beadie eyes on the pens and notepads section, none thought to watch over the maps. After all, who in their right mind shoplifts maps?

But Mike Parker did and by the time he was 15 he was the unofficial map library to half of Kidderminster.

He said: “If anyone was heading off for a weekend in Aberporth, or a trip to auntie Ethel’s in Godalming, it was me they came to for ideas on planning the route and getting the appropriate maps.

Little did these upstanding citizens realise they were handling stolen goods.”

He recalls the teenage outings with his grandmother with some affection. Mike said: “Although 30 years on I find it faintly odd I have far clearer memories of the way the map looked than practically any other part of those glorious days out, rambling purposelessly but fired with adventure.”

Mike left King’s in 1985 and moved to London to study English and drama at university. After which he only lasted less than two years in what he called “a proper job” – charity fund-raising, in fact – before the seduction of running his hand over a map proved too great and he launched on a career as a travel writer. Since then he has worked on the Rough Guides and produced guide books to the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Greater Glasgow, Bristol and Bath. No wonder he can produce a good autobiography.

Now living in the Principality, in a little village near Machynlleth, Mike also writes and presents offbeat travelogues for Welsh television.

Disparagingly, he added: “When I tell people I’m a travel writer most of them look insanely jealous up to the point where I say I am writing about Barmouth and Birmingham rather than Bermuda and Barbados. The response is usually: ‘Couldn’t you get anywhere decent?’ But for me it remains the dream job. I do love travelling abroad, but, as a writer, I have only ever wanted to specialise in the amazingly diverse landscapes and culture of our own islands.

“It probably also has something to do with the maps. My devotion to British mapping, especially Ordnance Survey, leaves me feeling disorientated and slightly perturbed by exposure to foreign mapping, particularly their inexactitude, harsh colours and inappropriate symbols. We map addicts are the oldest patriots.

Maps bring out a curious British nationalism even in those of us normally allergic to displays of flag waving. Wherever we go in the world, we pick up a local map and our very first thought is ‘Hmmm, not as good as an Ordnance Survey’. Even Johnny foreigner grudgingly admits we are still world beaters in cartography.”

One final thought. Mike observed: “Among my friends and relatives, many of the good map readers are women. I’ve hardly ever encountered the proverbial hopeless female who looks at an Ordnance Survey as if it is an impenetrable equation in quantum physics. My suspicion is that map reading is in the same category as driving; an area of life that’s perceived to be masculine, and therefore one in which men cling to the belief they are better than women, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

So, getting stuck in a lift with Kelly Brook might be no bad thing.

● Map Addict by Mike Parker costs £12.99 and is published by Collins.

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