Monday, 9th.February 1976

Geography @ LSE

I spent two hours this morning studying Ordnance Survey maps of the Isle of Skye to find a suitable plot of land to build a country house. The plot would be substantial at about 10 square kilometres. Sadly, this was not for my personal benefit: I would not be moving to Skye upon completion of the notional house.

This was an exercise taking up much of a two hour Cartography lecture. Being a geographer I have a pretty good idea of where to build houses, and perhaps more importantly, where not to build them. At the time of the lecture there were many factors that had to be taken into consideration, but now in the 21st.century it is very important to additionally consider resilience to climate change.

In contrast, the afternoon Spatial Analysis lecture was, for me, nowhere near as interesting but was effortless. Mathematics was always a difficult subject for me, having managed to get no further than an ‘O’ level. However, I was beginning to understand – after a eureka moment – that I was good at statistics. This afternoon’s lecture was on Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient and, looking back, we did not have access to computers or even statistical calculators, so had to learn the formulae by heart and enter data by hand into notebook tables. I don’t think that was a bad thing.

Below: I stayed in this house on the Isle of Skye in 2022, and pretty marvellous it was too. Not to Passivhaus standards but I suspected not far off. And below that the view from the kitchen window. I could quite happily live here!