[Here’s a link to other forays around my map.]

A bonus round. A little something extra. Let’s take a look at what you could have won…

I didn’t go out today to explore a grid square, but rather to see the squares between the squares. I suddenly found myself with a rare weekend afternoon to myself and decided to go for a bike ride to calm my nerves before the evening football match. I wasn’t even playing, just due to take my position in front of the TV, but still it was all I could concentrate on.

So I decided to head out on my bike, after lunch, and see how many of the squares I’ve visited so far I could link together in one afternoon. I am around halfway through my year of exploring a single map, so was interested to take stock on what I had seen so far. I would ride as far as I could, fairly quickly, until I ran out of time, and then I’d zoom home in time for the match.

Picking a route to link together grid squares is notoriously difficult.  The travelling salesman problem asks the following question: “Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?”. It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimisation, important in theoretical computer science and operations research. I engaged my brain for approximately five minutes to choose a route, plugged the places into Google Maps, and got on with it, trusting Google’s increasingly-impressive skills at finding good cycle routes.

It felt strange to set off without a specific grid square in mind, and liberating to not be lugging a heavy camera nor duty-bound to pay close attention. I was just going for a burn-up on my bike. Once you have built the habit of noticing, however, I noticed that it is hard to stop. So I noticed (and appreciated) the smoothness of a stretch of newly-laid tarmac. I noticed a squashed hedgehog on the road into town, sorry to see its insides and all, but also happy to see it for dead hedgehogs imply live hedgehogs and I’ve seen vanishingly few in these parts over the years.

Riding through town I was almost immediately on streets I did not know, gliding through squares I hadn’t explored. If I had ended up in this square rather than that one when I was in these parts months ago, how would things be different? My route today would be different, certainly. Determined by the lottery of the squares I’ve visited so far, plus my rudimentary Travelling Salesman solution, plus Google Maps’ algorithms, it is clear how small changes would alter the route of today’s ride and serve up an entirely different perspective. I would not have seen the small blonde toddler frown and hesitate to wheel her pink scooter wheels through a puddle, hear her indignant tears when they got muddy and her muscled father console her in (I guess) Polish, nor our exchange of grins of mutual understanding and him switching to English to say to me, ‘Daddy’s in trouble again.’

I would have missed the teenager running into bowl in a cricket match, glimpsed between gaps in the hedge as I passed. The batsman stood back in his crease, defended, and there was no run.

I might not have learned about the useful footpath cutting down behind the backs of houses, glass-strewn and graffiti-ed, but very convenient. The cheerful wall mural saying HAKUNA MATATA in colourful letters by the overflowing bin and fly-tipped TV. The barges on the river where sky and water meet, marooned on estuary mud for a few hours until the tide rose once again. A very young bride and groom posing for a wedding photographer outside their front door, startled by my joyful cheer to them. So many things I would not have seen or felt had my route taken me another way. Snippets of Larkin’s poem The Whitsun Weddings kept popping into my head; his observant, curious musings on the sheer multiplicity of our world.

I zoomed along, enjoying the freedom of the afternoon, enjoying the lightness of having to do nothing but pedal. Google was in charge of my route, and I felt no pressure to pause, pay attention, or do anything but ride and enjoy myself. As I passed from one familiar square to another via linking roads either new to me or not, I was reminded of the founding myth of the great ancient city of Carthage. The most famous version of the Dido story, is found in Virgil’s Aeneid. The 1st-century BCE Roman writer describes Dido as a daughter of Belus, the King of the Tyre in Phoenicia. We are told that her Phoenician name was Elissa but the Libyans gave her the new name Dido, meaning ‘wanderer’. Virgil recounts that Dido’s brother, Pygmalion, cheated his sister out of her inheritance and then, in order to keep the throne of Tyre, killed Dido’s husband. Dido then fled the city with a loyal following and a hoard of the king’s gold to sail west and a new life in North Africa where they founded their new city. Initially, the colonists were helped by the nearby Phoenician colony of Utica, and the local Libyan people (led by King Hiarbas) were willing to trade with them and offered to rent a piece of suitable land. The condition was that they could only have the area of land covered by an ox-hide. The resourceful Dido had the hide cut into very fine strips and with these encircled a hill which, in time, became the city’s citadel and known as Byrsa Hill after the Greek word for ox-hide.

The grid squares of my oxhide now span a large area after half a year of exploring. Today I discovered some great new squares that I hope to revisit in depth. I learned how close together some places I have visited separately actually are, and enjoyed making the connections between them, building up a better idea of the patterns of my map as I span the pedals.

At first I rode out from the tight terraced streets towards the marshes of the estuary, zipping down a disused canal towpath beneath empty, heavy clouds towards the very first square I explored, an inauspicious beginning where I drove my car into a ditch. From that far corner of my map I turned inland once more, swooping down narrow lanes lined with bushy green hedgerows. The hills were short and sharp through farmland and pretty villages, bringing me eventually to the high point of my map and expansive views in every direction. The sun had come out now as I glided down possibly the longest descent on the map, offering rueful grins of encouragement to a strung-out trickle of around 20 cyclists labouring slowly in the opposite direction. Their trendy cycling clothes (£200 for some lycra shorts, anyone?) and hipster beards suggested day-riders out from the city, whose highest buildings glimmered in the far distance.

Amongst the many, many benefits of bikes over cars is enjoying the sense of smell out on the road. I would be fascinated to learn how a blind person might experience all these squares I have documented. Today’s ride, for example, took me down a high street of frying chicken, past teenagers on a park bench and the high reek of weed. The smell of damp puddles and piss in a gloomy subway beneath a motorway, where nonetheless I lingered for a while to photograph the spray can murals of a blue tit and beetle. A muddy footpath along the edge of a golf course brought a waft of golfers’ Lynx into the weirdly spermatic scent of a sweet chestnut wood. As the afternoon warmed I smelled the softening of tarmac roads, the charcoal barbecue at a Bowls club, a car’s faux-pine air freshener at a traffic light, the heady purple scent of lavender fields, the fumes of exhausts and, increasingly, my own sweaty stink.

Dr Kate McLean works at the intersection of human-perceived smellscapes, cartography and the communication of ‘eye-invisible’ sensed data. To achieve this, she leads international public smellwalks and translate the resulting data using digital design, watercolour, animation, scent diffusion and sculpture into smellscape mappings. Her PhD was titled “Nose-first: practices of smell walking and smellscape mapping”. 

Down from the pretty hills I span, through an industrial area, miles of warehouses and industrial units and roadside burger vans. It made a pleasant change to ride fast, but I also missed slowing down, stopping and looking. Covering mile after mile in a straight-ish line gave me a better overview of the topography of the landscape than I had before, becoming more aware of how rivers and roads and elevations linked the land together. Arriving at another extremity of my map I turned once more, hungry now, and rode towards villages and small towns with enormous houses, gardens and beautiful views of rolling sunlit uplands. I slurped down a squashed banana as I rode. These millionaires’ homes were as far as could be from the homeless shelter I had ridden past just a couple of hours earlier. It seems to me that all of Britain can be found on this single map, so close together, so far apart.

I paused at a newsagent to stuff my face with sugar and calories. One of my favourite feelings as a cyclist is slumping on a warm pavement, grimy and weary, and shovelling food down my throat as quickly as I can chew. I filled my bottles at an outside tap and hurried onwards, feeling refuelled. I rode through wheat fields along pretty byways with grass growing down the middle of the lane. I watched a kestrel hover overhead and passed a field of bright purple lavender filled with folk snapping selfies.

I saw so many new routes today, different to the normal routes that I default to when going out to spin through some miles on my bike. At one point I seized the initiative from Google, convinced that I knew a better route through the woods. Years of experiencing my own shortcuts meant that I was not at all surprised to end up hauling my bike through knee-high grass, carrying it up muddy slopes and wriggling my way through dense thickets until eventually I was faced with a great wall of nettles. Too stubborn to retreat and concede defeat, I grabbed a stick and began slashing a route through the nettles. In the process my legs and arms got stung so many times that I later lay awake for hours as burning waves washed up and down my body. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant pain, but it did stop me sleeping!

Such ‘short cuts’ aside, I eventually reached the third corner of my map and hoped that I had time to make it all the way across to the fourth corner – an area of free school meals, brownfield development, and the constant rush of traffic. I headed in that direction but had to concede defeat along the way: the football would start before I made it all the way, and there was no way England could cope without me plonked firmly in front of the television yelling enthusiastically. I veered from Google’s route towards the remaining grid squares and pedalled quickly towards my sofa, singing loudly as I rode, “I’m going home, I’m going home, I’m going, I am going home!”

That afternoon I covered 91km in 4 hours 45, climbing 1000 metres along the way. These miles burned, apparently, 2119 calories which equates to about 9 pints of lager and a packet of crisps… I settled for a solitary, celebratory beer in a pub close to home. I was so happy with all that I had seen, so satisfied with the sensation of zipping along under my own power on a summer afternoon that I didn’t need more than that one beer.

And besides, England needed me. My timings were perfect: I hosed down my bike, jumped in the shower, and landed on the sofa just in time for the national anthems. Cheers!