Colm O'Regan: Where would you be going without a wall map?

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Pic: Denis Minihane.

You can’t bate a good map. A scale, a legend, A sprawly map with a rip in the middle of it from being folded wrong. Sandwich stains and mug-a-tay rings.

The new map in the house has no rips. It does sprawl on the sitting room wall though suspended with bluetack. 

Its presence is a result of being asked by the children where certain countries are and not knowing the answer.

Look it’s easy to point fingers but… Actually, that’s the point. It’s easy to point fingers at the wall to show where countries are. But I love maps anyway. 

Maps allow classic Dadly chin-stroking. Mouthing the word ‘Bhutan’. Maps let you dream of going somewhere while staying put. The ultimate in zero-carbon travel.

In the 2011 Muppets film, Kermit and co need to get to Miss Piggy in France. It’s way too far to drive, says a foolish human. Fozzy Bear replies: “Then maybe we should travel by map.”

The funny thing about having a map on a wall - you think you know a place but still looking at a map of the world you say things like “I thought the Philippines were higher up.”

You see things in context. For some reason, you become fixated with Baffin Island. A big hoor of an island near Canada.

Google Maps is a small window. A wall map is a mural.

I’ve been in mappies since I was in nappies. Dad’s AA book charted the painful expansion of Ireland’s ‘better road network’.

My first school atlas was another milestone. As atlases go, it painted in fairly broad strokes. 

The kind of atlas that would represent the entirety of West Africa with a picture of a happy worker picking an orange. Asia was a man hunched over a rice paddy. Australia had a kangaroo and a man with mysterious swirly symbols representing the Dreamtime painted on his face. America was ranching and skyscrapers. Europe was industry and a dairy cow.

On one page of the atlas was Europe Political. The map was a mix of colours. The EEC were in reassuring green, COMECON, which was the communist countries’ trading block and not a comic convention for people dressed as superheroes, was in angry red. A threat on a map.

Then there were sort of in-between countries. Countries in EFTA, the European Free Trade Association, were given a sort of lukewarm yellow colour. 

The map seemed suspicious of them as if it doubted their loyalty. A few then were in grey. Yugoslavia was one. The map was saying: I don’t know WHAT they want.

Our new map on the wall looks weird because it has a projection which depicts continents according to their actual real size. The Peters Projection. 

The one we’re more used to looking at is Mercator. You know the one, it makes Greenland look big enough for us all to live in in future when everywhere else is 55 degrees in the shade. 

It makes North America look massive compared to Africa when in fact Africa is nearly as big as Asia. 

They reckon the Mercator projection influences how we perceive the importance of areas of the world because it makes Europe and North America look massive and diminishes countries in the Global South. 

Although to be fair to the lad Mercator, all he was trying to do was just make a flat silk purse out of a spherical pig’s ear. And it was 400 years ago. Mercator is still useful for time zones and navigation apparently.

Crucially, a wall map is a very handy way of sitting on your arse and pretending you’re parenting.

Ask me another one Daddy says the youngest. “Okay, Peru”. And she has to go and find Peru on the wall while I drink my tea. 

Peace atlas(t).