GOOGLE MAPS

Right. Due to popular demand, I've included some pictures with the last post. Maybe it's the way the sunlight filled the rooms or lit up the once-beautiful old-fashioned wallpaper, but the dilapidated house actually looks much more charming today.

I was really bored this afternoon so I started looking things up on Google Maps. I looked up where I went on holiday in 2008 and was sorry to see a single tent in a flooded campsite. Then I looked up the Hollywood Sign and saw nine white boards making shadows on a hillside. That's all that thing is. I looked up the White House, Downing Street, Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Nazca Lines. You know what, if aliens carved those things as landing strips for their spacecraft, they did a really weird job of it - they just look like random lines to me. I'd have at least expected some lettering with the Zunussian equivalent for 'Free Parking' or 'Do not leave your flying saucer unattended' or something.

Street View's fun as well isn't it? I visited the house I lived in in Bath and was interested to see a Ford Focus parked outside our old neighbour, Mondeo Man's house. Then I clicked my way through the city, over Midland Bridge and out along the Lower Bristol Road where I once walked a girl home late at night. Things were so different then.

I watched the seasons change as I clicked. Google does that - it stitches together views from different days so that one moment you're looking at a sunny view down a tree-lined avenue, the next, the trees are brittle and the sky is cold and grey. Cars are frozen, pixelated pedestrians are caught mid-stride with their shopping bags and their cigarettes - then a moment later they've disappeared into a different world.

I remember my old colleague James and I used to play a game called Walsall Roulette. He was from Walsall and I used to try to impersonate his West Midlands accent. He used to say it was 'not even clowse to a West Midluns accent, Stubbsay' and eventually I think I offended him. Anyway, Walsall Roulette was a lot of fun. I'd find Walsall on Google Maps, pick a random street, zoom in on Street View and he'd tell me exactly where it was. One day, I zoomed in on a high street and he was convinced he saw his Mum wandering out of the Pound Shop. We had to stop Walsall Roulette after that.

Eventually I had to stop exploring today as well. It turns out that there was actually some work for me to do which was more important than me faffing about pretending I was somewhere else. You know sometimes I wish I was like those snapshotted pedestrians - one small click away from disappearing into a different world altogether.