Geographies of Lostliness

Why Lostliness?

If you have ever travelled any significant distance in England, you have doubtless at some point experienced an inexplicable sense of becoming lost. Depending on your circumstances this might evoke dread or delight, confusion or calm and increasingly a fluttering sense of de ja vu. This is intriguing since we all know the place is, relatively speaking, tiny. If countries were cash, then the whole of the British Isles would be the small change unthinkingly turned out of a pocket when undressing for bed.

It should not really be possible to experience lostness in England it is so small that you are never more than couple of hours drive from its edge. There just is not enough distance involved in navigating such a place for it to cause us any real difficulties. Surely, something only slightly more than 50,000 square miles (130,000 square kilometres) in size is not large enough to encompass the complex landforms that would make detours and diversions necessary. And yet there is that recurring experience of becoming utterly and hopelessly lost. There is something disturbing and uncanny about becoming utterly and hopelessly lost whilst being simultaneously no more than 20 minutes away from where we should be.

Mercifully, at least for most of us, this a short lived experience. We spend a brief period of time peering at devices with intermittent network connections or resort to dog eared atlases excavated from glove boxes. We meander, turn round and try to find our way back or find ourselves follwing some other traveller in hopes that they know where they are going. When we eventually stumble back on course we quickly forget the disquieting lostliness of twisting by ways and suburban ring roads.

But, what if we did not find our way back? What if we were to remain lost, not in the middle of some trackless vastness but, instead, entangled in the tortuous topology of a parochial district or the convolutions of some nameless conurbation. How might it be to live in a place permanently misplaced? Perhaps occasionally wandering on to the edge of the map to catch a brief view of a world where distance was something to be traversed rather than endured?