S. Worthen | Weblog

Yesterday, an envelope which looked like junk mail arrived in the mail. It was a single sheet of paper in a generic envelope with pre-printed second class postage. It told me that, a scant five weeks after applying, my application for British citizenship had been accepted, and that I should schedule the ceremony which would make me so within six weeks, and here was the address and phone number to contact. It was surreally anti-climactic.

Today, a nice, thick envelope arrived from the county council, sent first class. It contained a map of Chelmsford and another, hand-drawn map of the county hall. I love maps! I have never been to Chelmsford! A touristic opportunity awaits! The envelope also contained lots more information, on the actual ceremonial part which completes the process of gaining a second citizenship.

The enclosed letter was addressed, ‎"‎Dear Future Citizen".

As of yesterday, this process all felt like a bureaucratic function. Today, I am rather delighted to hold this relatively rare, liminal, transient status I must surely share with not much more than around a thousand people (at most!) at a time: that of future citizen.

One of the projects I have been working on lately is a certain amount of organization for today's Science Fiction Foundation (SFF) and British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) mini-convention and AGM, complete with two excellent Guest of Honours, two panels, two AGMs, and a wonderful venue, the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House.

The venue was particularly good for acoustics, which means that, unlike my attempt to hear her speak at Newcon, I got to actually hear altariel be interesting and insightful this time. It also had toilets so good that I several times found myself having conversations about the glories of a waterfall-like faucet, and admiring the design of having coat hooks/umbrella hooks positioned directly over a long radiator. It also had an elevator with a glass wall looking out onto a series of photos from outer space, worth a touristic trip up to the second floor and back with purplecthulhu just to see them.

It also had a quintessentially ideal library, complete with incunabula and an early book (Ratdolt's) with numerous intact volvelles. What fun! (Volvelles are circles which are attached to books and can be turned in circles. In astronomical texts, they can be used for building up working models of circle-based world systems.) They also have a copy of the Margherita Philosophica ("The philosophical pearl"), complete with its woodcut of an abacus user. And a decent impression of really lovely Mellan full moon engraving, although its edition is not known since the paper was cut down to circular at some point in the past.

My particular thanks to clanwilliam who nobly sacrificed her time earlier this week to try out a couple of pubs for us in the neighborhood and pick the best one for our needs.

I am now officially the secretary of the SFF, not just the acting secretary, and really will be taking over as editor of Vector beginning next year.

Really, my proudest accomplishment was being able to share with everyone the map I drew to show where everything that mattered - the designated pub, coffee shops - was in relationship to where we were. It was a very nice little map if I do say so myself.

Having just spent half-an-hour trying to figure out the right keywords in order to find these maps, I thought I would post the URL here for my reference and yours. Mark Easton posted them in late September to his BBC-based blog, excerpted from The Atlas of the Real World.

Here is what I was looking for: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/09/
And here is the related website, full of very informative maps: http://www.worldmapper.org/