Get lost

Elder daughter lives in South Wimbledon. At least, that's what she keeps telling me.

However, when I check Google Maps to place stories she tells me about her neighbourhood, it appears to be Merton. I don't like conflict, but I do like to be accurate.

Part of this is because I'm a family historian, and it's important to get place-names right.  Take a few weeks ago, when I was trying to convince a guy who has "manages" the grave of one of the Resident Fan Boy's distant cousins, that he had the wrong birth registration, and that the said cousin was born in Kensington, not Suffolk.

After some polite wrangling, my documentation convinced him, and I went to fill in the correct birthplace at Find A Grave, only to find that the only option that the automatic field would accept was "The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea" - which didn't exist when the said cousin was born a century and a half ago.

See, London has gone through many administrative changes in its long history, and the confusion isn't mitigated by the fact that many versions of the geographical, political, municipal districts/boroughs/what-have-you continue to co-exist.  Some disentangling is in order.

This is not a bad place to start. It's one of many, many videos created by Jay Foreman, on the many, mystifying aspects of the organization of London, and, indeed what is, and is not London. The videos have high production values, and are hilarious.  You also need to keep your finger on the pause button, because there are several jokes that appear in a flash. His latest YouTube video is tackling Tube maps.  You have to be very witty to make that sort of thing engaging -- and Foreman and his team are.  Even the ads at the end are funny.

But what if you have concerns beyond London? For example, my mother was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, but many websites will only permit me to say that she was born in Wolverhampton, West Midlands.  

This "Map Men" video, presented by the afore-mentioned Jay Foreman, plus Mark Cooper-Jones, doesn't solve my fillable fields problem, but is a damn entertaining intro to the crazy world of English counties - and whatever happened to Huntingdonshire and Rutland.

And if your geography problems are global (and whose aren't?), the Map Men can distract you from those too.

All clear, then? Good.

Shutting out and being inclusive

One text from elder daughter in Ottawa today: "The news cycle isn't getting any betterrrr..."

Damn right.

Yup. One can only take reality in small doses these days, so I offer this video of James Acaster, which sort of has something to do with recent changes in my circle. Or not.

Only in Britain

So Absolute Radio in England was collecting listeners' memories of their dead dogs (as you do), and someone got the idea of putting these to music and making a loopy video. Would this happen anywhere else?

Literary England

This nifty poster appeared on a distant cousin's Facebook page. I saved it to my computer to get a better look at it, and this turned out to be a fortunate thing, because the item suddenly disappeared from the said cousin's page. Copyright? Do you think I'll get a warning? I think it's from Waterstone's, a bookshop we don't have here in Canada.

Anyway, before this disappeared, the cousin remarked that Charles Dickens did not appear to be on it, and I think she may be right; I checked Southampton where he was born and Chatham where he was a small boy, and he doesn't appear to be in the London area at all, which is odd when you consider this year is the 200th anniversary of his birth. I also failed to find Oscar Wilde in Dublin, where I expected, but he's there, evidently in the Reading area where he spent the last years of his imprisonment, so I guess that works.

I was going to write about something else, but I'm packing for the trip to Victoria. (I hate packing.) I'm tired and I want to go to bed. So I hope this will enlarge for you if you click on it, but if it doesn't, I'm too bushed to do anything about it. God give you goodnight.