Catmachine

As a child I was obsessed with many things. Continental Drift was one of them. I suppose it stemmed from my love of maps, especially maps of imaginary worlds such as those found in the front of fantasy novels like A Wizard of Earthsea , Lord of the Rings or some of the Narnia books. I always thought it was a shame that no map of the Great Eastern Ocean was included in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , but in retrospect that makes sense—it would have been mostly blank. I would spend hours drawing my own maps even though I don't think at any point I was planning to write an epic fantasy. I just liked drawing the maps. Some of them had peculiar features (probably inspired by The Isle of the Ear and The Hands from the Earthsea map) and all of them spanned continents, although I don't recall ever drawing a map of a complete planet. This was an odd omission given how obsessed with space I was. I can only surmise that for some reason I didn't like mixing these particu...

This may well end up being one of the oddest and perhaps most anal-retentive blog posts I've ever written, but it's an anomaly I noticed early in life and have never been able to find a satisfactory answer for.  Perhaps unsurprisingly it involves the London Underground tube map. As I've discussed elsewhere the iconic tube map captured my imagination at an early age and it was at this early age that the anomaly itself was in full swing.  It was all to do with the way the stations were labelled. Up until the end of H C Beck's reign as tube map designer the station names on the map were all written in uppercase. Presumably all the better to read you with – although not if you have dyslexia. Unfortunately at that time accessibility wasn't high on the list of London Transport's priorities, as can be seen from the fact no stations had step free access – despite the fact that so many of them had been originally been built with lifts. Nevertheless, the all uppercase pa...

We have already seen how - somewhere deep in my childhood - I developed an obsession with the Post Office Tower - or rather, as I discovered - Post Office Towers. I also liked encyclopedias of various types and was always disappointed that you couldn't take them out of the library. I had to make do with the ones I received for Christmas or birthday, but a lot of the time that was enough for me. Many was the evening I would spend poring over The Wonder Book of Do You Know or T he Guinness Book of Records . And it was thanks to this that I discovered that there were other towers in the world, some of them taller than the Post Office Tower. At first this made me feel irritated and inferior - I felt proprietorial about the tower I saw on a regular basis and the criticism implicit in the fact that the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building were taller upset me. But then I began to obsess about these towers themselves, drawing pictures of them, building replicas of them out o...

Brighton's skyline has changed over the past year as a tower has risen from the ruins of the old West Pier. I'd been aware that this was planned but somehow it never seemed real until the i360 reached its full height and the red light on its summit was suddenly visible from all around the city. And it was only when it did so that I realised it was tapping into something from my childhood, that I was more interested in it than I'd though I would or should be. Because one of the obsessions I had when very young was Towers. It wasn't the first obsession and wouldn't be the last. Over the years I would be obsessed with various subjects from Space Travel to Ants to Doctor Who to the London Underground . Whilst I don't necessarily remember how all of these started, I do recall the origin of the Tower obsession. It was around the time we moved from Birmingham to London. This was a bit of an upheaval for a three year old, especially given that, despite being L...

As has been chronicled several times in the past I was a child obsessed with the space programme. And no wonder; those were exciting times what with the moon landings, Skylab and the Apollo Soyuz Test Project . What with the Space Shuttle on the horizon I was sure that my future lay off world. It was only a matter of time. One of the most exciting things I'd read about in the Brooke Bond Race Into Space picture card set and Reginald Turnill 's The Language of Space was the Manned Flight To Mars . This was likely to happen in the mid eighties. I imagined that by the time I was in my forties that it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that I'd have been to Mars once, the Moon two or three times and the various space stations more often than I could remember. Spaceflight would be commonplace in the 2010s. Civilization's failure of nerve and imagination since the 1970s has never failed to disappoint me. We are living in an age when even the prospect of re...

Just as moving house had opened and closed the first book of my Tubehood, The Case of the Victorian Zodiac , so moving house once more at the close of the seventies would bring the second book, The Case of the Dism Rly , to an end and set the pieces up for the third and final book in the trilogy. We weren't moving far, just a mile or so down the road to Cranley Gardens. This was near Highgate tube and Highgate Wood (two of the primary locations of book two). Nevertheless things were very different now. For a start I was growing up. Not only had I recently discovered the allure of spiky women in general and Toyah Willcox in particular which had put an entirely different spin on things, but I'd also moved up into the senior school. This latter move was an extremely unpleasant one (at some point I will write a comprehensive blog entry explaining why), so suffice to say that I decided to continue concentrating on my inner life and as a result my enthusiasm for all things...

As my story nears puberty I find that the memories are starting to fragment and it's becoming more difficult to construct a coherent narrative of my childhood relationship with the tube. Perhaps because this is because I started to see things in less black and white terms and could no longer access the mental space in which I felt the simple joy of losing myself in a complex but highly ordered structure. In many ways it was liberating to move on from this absolute mental space as it meant I was less likely to get upset when this structure was disturbed. In retrospect such upsets were absurd, but they seemed very genuine at the time. One was when I discovered that the tube map was not to scale. Of course it should have been plain as a pikestaff given the regularity of the diagram, but nevertheless I was very resistant to the idea that the distance from High Barnet to Camden Town wasn't the same as the distance from Camden Town to Charing Cross. It was similar to the sense of b...

It hadn't occurred to me that wandering around old tube lines might be dangerous. Even though I lived in a world shaped by the terrifying images drummed into my head by public information films I didn't think it applied - I wasn't messing around with a kite near pylons or fooling about by some deep water. True, there had been an supposedly hard-hitting one about children getting killed playing on railways. The mere concept of this one had so terrified me when it was discussed on Nationwide that when they actually showed it I ran and hid. But this was the Tube. It was different. Besides, the ghost railways I had discovered didn't have any sleepers or tracks. I wasn't going to get run down now, was I? I finally discovered the secret behind these old lines purely by chance when going to visit a Great Aunt and Uncle in Fingringhoe. I found their bookshelves fascinating, just like the bookshelves of my grandparents. And what was this? A London A-Z from 1947. I turne...

Previously in this blog... At the age of nine or so an unnamed friend and I discover two disused platforms at Highgate Station. Now read on... The gorge was set into the side of a hill which meant that the cliff face that loomed over the eastern end of the platforms was much higher than the one to the west. In this artificial escarpment yawned two enormous tunnel mouths. My friend and I decided to investigate. There were no tracks or even sleepers present on the line, just pumice rubble and weeds. As we approached the twin maws we started to feel apprehensive. It was going to be very dark in there. "Shall we hold hands?" I suggested. I was serious. We only got a few yards in before panic got the better of us and we fled. But where did these tunnels emerge? A little nearer home than Highgate Station was Highgate Wood , reached by going through the park (which obviously had aspirations to be like its bigger scarier brother given that it bore the name Cherry Tree Wo...

East Finchley Station was quite an impressive building. I could forgive it for being above ground because it had an aura of mystery. For a start there were more platforms than the station actually needed. This was a conundrum. And then there was the statue of the archer looming over the platforms, caught in the act of loosing an arrow towards Central London. To feed my growing obsession I told the staff at East Finchley ticket office that I was doing a project at school and was given a red plastic folder which contained a collections of maps and timetables. This was wonderful. The map was far better than the ones I'd had to make do with up until now, tiny ones in the back of diaries and black and white versions in the A-Z. This one was in full colour and made of card, folded twice in to what years later I would discover was known as a “triptych”. I covered it in the sticky see-though plastic sheeting you got for covering school books. I made a nuisance of myself going back to t...

Alleyways weren't the only obsession during my first few years of life. The London Underground also captured my imagination. There was something about H C Beck 's brightly coloured wiring diagram that plugged straight into my childhood brain and lit up all the bulbs. I first came across the Tube when we moved to London at the tail end of the sixties. Most of the time when we went into town we travelled by car but on a few occasions my Mum had to take us into town by public transport. We would catch the bus from the end of the road (opposite the police box, just outside Tesco) which would take us all the way to Seven Sisters where we'd get on the tube. Thus my introduction to the service was the Victoria Line . The new Victoria Line as it was known at the time. I seem to recall talk of the trains being driverless at first but that people got too freaked out by seeing no-one in the cab as the trains entered the platform so they installed a person there to reassure th...