AN UNPUBLISHED WEEKENDER COLUMN I WROTE FOR THE GUARDIAN GUIDE IN JULY 1995

By the time you read this, I will be gone. I will be somewhere in Western Canada, looking for a town that isn't there, trying to be a sort of needle, sent by a series of weird coincidences.
This is a true story.
One evening in Spring 1994, I was hurrying down a wet hill to London's ICA to attend a lecture by Ken Campbell, the best one man showman in the country.
My eyes were on the pavement ahead, but I couldn't help but look at an interestingly large building looming on my right. I tried to swerve around this black bin in my way, but I slipped up and fell down on my face. I stared up at the building and saw it was office of the Canadian province of British Columbia. Ignoring my sodden knees, I got to the lecture just about on time.
The best part was when Ken read from a letter from an old schoolfriend detailing a theory termed Geographical Acupuncture - you are the needle and the world is a body, flowing with pressures and points of tension. Now, as a very specific needle, you naturally have a very specific point at which you can be effective; a location on the planet where the place feels right for you and you feel right for the place. We are drawn to our point like eels to Sargasso Seas knowing only that the being there is worth the getting there. Some people are born at their point of geographical acupuncture, for others it's the next city, but for some it's on the other side of the world.
If the speech itself wasn't interesting enough, Ken delivered it straight down my eyes, as though he had decided I was the one that needed to hear this the most.
After the show, I asked my friends what they'd made of geographical acupuncture. "Yeah", they said, "that bit was quite good." I told them how my eyes had been hijacked by Ken in there, and that the words "British" and "Columbia" had kept rolling around my mind like useful coins in an all but empty pocket.
Anyway, the next day I told my friend Sue about the fall, the show, the concept of geographical acupuncture, and the staring. She said "Oh", and asked where British Columbia was. I, eager, took down an atlas I had last looked at in, maybe, 1983. Flicking through the irrelevant continents, I got to North America West, and there was British Columbia. "Oh", she said. "Why is this town circled?"
"Eh?" I said. I don't know how or why but she was right, a town in B.C. called Jackson Bay had been circled in 2B pencil.
So over this last year, I have been telling people about my being drawn to Jackson Bay and the concept of geographical acupuncture: I have been an evangelist preaching of a New Heaven. Last month I booked my ticket for the journey, and went inside the British Columbia building to plan my route, confident in my destiny.
But the town of Jackson Bay DOES NOT EXIST! I have looked on every map of the area circled in my old atlas, and there is no such town there! Incredible, huh? My friend Dan thinks this might be an example of a "ringer" - a feature cartographers invent and put on maps so that if other maps feature it too, they know their copyright has been infringed.
I don't know. I still think Jackson Bay is out there for me and the maps are wrong but if I go to the place where I think it is, I'm pretty sure I'll find something worth finding.
I am a needle with a point.

ONTO NEXT ITEM

BACK TO MISCELLANEOUS PAGE