I’ve moved to a strange part of town, and suddenly every road is a dead end or a wrong turn. I love it
I am lost. This is not figurative or existential: I am physically unable to get my bearings. I thought I knew York inside out, having grown up here and spent the past few years in the city, but moving house has stamped on my internal compass. I tried to find a cash machine and ended up lost round the back of an out-of-town shopping centre, navigating only by glimpses of the big Lidl. Trying to walk the dog in the morning, we bumble into dead end after dead end; where I’m certain there should be a path, there are only cul-de-sacs. “How,” I text a friend, “do I get to that path by the stream?” then misunderstand her answer and end up at Costcutter. I have no instinctive, convenient rat runs here, and no sense of where I might encounter an angry alsatian or chatty local eccentric.
I don’t mind. Blundering your way into mentally mapping out a new place is part of getting to know it. I like the way small pockets of known streets gradually widen, then fit together as you explore further. “Oh, that goes there,” you realise, slotting the nice bakery in next to the dentist’s, when you’ve been going to each using different routes and modes of transport. You only really live somewhere when you can navigate back there like a homing pigeon (it’s not instinct, by the way: their beaks contain magnetite, allowing them to detect north). Magic happens before that, when you still get lost. That’s when you run into a parade of geese led by a man in uniform playing a drum or look up to see a window shrine to Elvis (I miss living in Brussels sometimes).
