Inside the map

In Mongolian, the word for west is the same as that for right, and the word for left is east. It’s as if this traditionally nomadic people, making their way and their way of life across steppe and desert, forest and mountain, are in fact inside the map, looking out. It suggests to me an enviable quality of rootedness in movement, of belonging on and shaping your own path.

I’ve more often felt on the outside of the map, staring stupidly in and trying to make sense of what I see. Over the past four years in particular, I’ve been a paid observer of the lives of others. Now, as the days fill up with time and my diary with the dates and times of planes, trains, hire cars, lunches and dinners, perhaps I am worming my way back into the map.

If I were to open my brightly-painted ger door one of these fine late-spring mornings on the recent map of Ellieland, I would see, rolling into the middle distance:

Vines aligned like contour lines between 15^th century churches under a southern sun

The road curving through the woods of Gascony and opening onto avenues of plane trees

A frantic pre-dawn, pre-pedestrian search for the RER, unhelpfully off the map

The cobbles of the Louvre under the scudding wheels of a happily irreverent motorbike, the cable car to Montmartre, the retraced potted history of French monarchy since the Revolution

The lines of imagined rhododendron petals punctuating a Nepalese dance rehearsal in the 15^e arrondissement

The ley line from blinking infant to smiling mother in Herblay, home of musketeers

The Piccadilly and the Metropolitan lines, converging on Thai food and catch-up

The cantering lights of a night-time taxi ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan

The gentle, sometimes circular, sometimes backward motion of a rowing boat on Central Park lake

…And the whole intersected by the criss-cross lines of affection, humour, interest, love and concern that tie us together.