My First Car

Last month I rented a vehicle in London to pick up stuff from outside London and I was allotted a BRAND NEW VW Golf straight from the showroom, with a million buttons, bluetooth, sd card reader, digital DAB radio, all the bells and whistles. The pedals (manual) were super sensitive, and everything was still mysterious. This generally meant that everytime I panicked and hit the indicators and buttons, the windscreen wiper would fly about, lights would blink, and the car would make beep sounds, adding to the general confusion.

It was good that the man at the counter was really busy, so he did not see this mad wiper/light/car-jerking-stalling action right outside the huge shop window as I spent the next ten minutes trying to recall how to start up a manual car in Central London lunch hour traffic.

(Note: people who still remember my "getting-stuck-trying-to-go-up-UOB-carpark-slope-in-third-gear-at-peak-hour" story, this trumps even that incident, except this time around, no one was there to witness my mortification...)



The story is generally that it was supposed to be a really simple half-hour drive back from Victoria (the pickup point) and Stoke Newington (my old house), and I had studiously mapped the entire route out already with a marker on my little A-Z map while standing at the counter. But the car rental guy told me that I could avoid the congestion zone (and the £8 congestion charge) by going by some devious route around the zone. As he spoke, he pointed to my map and accidentally smudged my carefully drawn marker line, which was still wet. I should have taken this to be a portentous sign and driven through the congestion zone anyway, but in trying to take his advice to avoid the congestion zone, I missed a turning and found myself in the nether regions of Maida Vale (west London).

MORTAL TERROR! AND FRANTIC CONSULTING OF MINIATURE A-Z! Which, doesn't help very much while driving. So I just drove around in circles around Central, desperately trying to find a familiar east london road like Old Street or Kingsland Road...

THREE HOURS LATER... I finally got back to Stoke Newington, where I was still forced to park ten minutes from the house because no one is allowed to park outside the house without resident's permit (due to its proximity to Arsenal's football grounds...).

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if your car parked a few blocks down has begun spontaneously combusting while you were away? I suppose for sanity's sake I better not buy a car in London if/when I move back there...

All I can say is that the experience as a pedestrian in London was much more pleasant than as a driver in London, where the roads are tiny, the road diversions are many, and the name of the road you are on is often not apparent as the only thing that is clearly signposted are the names of the roads running perpendicular to the road you are on. There is also nothing pleasurable about the start-stop driving with a manual car on small cramped London roads, plagued with construction boulders, unruly black cabs (one clipped my mirror, but no damage was done), and swarms of unpredictable cyclists. Fortunately my friend was much more steady at driving than me, so she helped me drive around on the other days.

I used to feel 'crippled' in the sense that I felt I couldn't afford to take too many cabs in London, yet the buses were wont to be late at times, or the tube might stop working, or some other public transport disaster might interfere with your onwards journey. So one might be late for something even despite one's best intentions, because of not being able to access the roads with a car. In Singapore I feel like I can get anywhere instantly because if the need arises I can afford to take a cab, and it will get me there as soon as possible. But after this driving experience... I have no idea how people even manage to get where they are going in London. The roads... are a nightmare. How does London even function? How do drivers and businesses cope with the massive jams and road diversions? This is a mystery to me...

But enough with the digression - what I meant to say is, I've never actually had a car all to myself before. Although i've previously driven VW campers and large transportation vans before, I guess driving other people's vehicles doesn't really count. So this makes it my first car, even if just for a weekend... and surely this is worth a photo moment:



MY FIRST CAR!

Tiny Housefronts, Big Gardens

A DREAM ABOUT... PROPERTY TAX?

Yesterday night I had a dream in which I went back to my old house in London, which had been redeveloped by the landlord, but my friends were still staying there. In this dream, the entrance to the house was very tiny (as it has always been). But as i went up the stairs and with each successive floor, the house got bigger and bigger. There were now 5 levels to it. It was soon apparent that the top floor was the hugest floor, and the house must have been built in a sort of inverted pyramid.

When I got to the top floor, the logical explanation I came up with for this phenomenon in the dream world was that the houses were taxed by their footprint on the ground, ie: the land area the ground floor occupied, rather than plot ratio or the type of uses for the building (commercial/residential). So as a result, in the dream, people built houses with small ground floor areas and expanded vertically and horizontally on the higher floors.

I think the dream logic arises from my observation that residental flats in London seem to have very tiny house fronts but huge back gardens. I was told that the reason for such small housefronts facing roads was because some portion of the UK property-related tax (perhaps council tax, for maintaining roads and other public works) was calculated by how much of the house faced the main road. So a dream about houses with tiny footprints but larger floors when you went higher and higher was just a logical extension of this idea! (Funny how sometimes ideas come together only in dreams...)

Does anyone know more about property tax in the UK? So is it really responsible for affecting how houses have been built over there?

Lines

Recently while at a friend's house in London, I read parts of Tim Ingold's book about the anthropology of the line. One of the works featured in the book was Richard Long's A Line Made By Walking (1967), which consisted of the artist walking back and forth in the grass in a straight line in the English countryside, which eventually left behind a path.

Richard Long - A Line Made by Walking

Another thing I saw in the book was the Chutchi map of the underworld, which consisted of interesting swirly wormholes indicating where souls entered the underworld and apparently wandered constricted by the lines which they could not see - thus forming some manner of an invisible hell that one could not escape.

(Right page) "Chutchee maps representing paths in the world of the dead"

I like this idea of lines that cannot be seen which still define our travels through spaces or across territories. And this is where this project begins.

dream syntax / dream maps

From 2008-2010 I was collecting my dreams in the form of hastily scrawled maps (replete with lines indicating the path of motion within the dream space), with the idea that I would one day piece together a massive interconnected map of these maps to form a giant dreamscape. A dream world.

As dreams are highly visual, I felt that the only way to adequately document my dreams would be to draw maps of the spaces. At the time when I began the project I was inspired by Bill Hillier's theories on "space syntax", which suggested that the navigability of a space and its isovists (the field of view from any one point) had direct affect over social behaviour within those spaces. Since humans spend about a third of their lives sleeping and presumably dreaming (whether or not we remember our dreams), I believe that the dream spaces we experience may also play a significant role in shaping our behaviour in waking life.

Earlier this year, a friend who grew up in Cornwall noted that all my maps had buildings in them, which was also a reflection of how all my dreams had buildings in them. They could only have buildings in them because I had always lived in a big city. And it could also be said that my maps were less like maps and more like floor plans. My dream maps were focused on the imagined spaces within the imagined buildings, even though I sometimes traced out a line which indicated my passage through that imaginary space.

But what if there were no buildings? One could still navigate through space, through dream territories all the same. But how would I map it then?

Difference between Journey Maps and Floor Maps

Another thing was that I realised that I didn't draw the same types of maps sketches for daily navigation - I just drew lines to indicate the path I would have to take. The use of daily maps was for me to get to a destination, and while interior building maps were fine and good for illustrating spaces, they were not that useful for navigating with. It was as if the spaces did not exist without the buildings - but very many paths and roads do exist without the crutch of buildings around them.

Kynance Cove, Cornwall.



Lengerich, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Travelling between city and countryside within the UK (London/Cornwall) and Germany, (Berlin/North Rhine-Westphalia), I thought it might be a good time to collect maps and explore the handdrawn map-making process.

More on that in the posts to come...