Are you a Cartographer for Social Equality?

My dad is one of the best archetypes you can find for Middle England. He's middle class, middle aged, lives in the suburbs in the Midlands, wears socks and sandals in the summer, has a beard and glasses, is a member of the National Trust and English Heritage AND seems to possess pretty much every Ordinance Survey map going.

What is it with men and maps?* Worryingly I seem to have caught the bug myself but it's gonna be a while before I inherit his pink Landranger series or start a serious collection of my own ... I would imagine. But I certainly did use to study them very seriously and (according my mum) I used to know pretty much every capital city going.

A couple of years my dad got a free map with his subscription of National Geographic (yet another Middle England marker) which showed each country in correct proportion according to it's landmass compared to that of others. I was recently reminded of the Peters Projection in an episode of the West Wing, where a special interest group was trying to show the administration how regular world maps show a huge advantage to the northern hemisphere over the south. Places like Europe and the US appear much bigger than they should whilst Africa and South America look smaller than they are. It always annoyed me how massive Greenland (or Antarctica for that matter) appeared on maps when in an atlas or on a globe it clearly looked a lot smaller, so to find a map that actually catered to my anal pedantry was a dream come true.

So after watching said episode of the West Wing I googled away, however my lower lip quivered at the knowledge that there isn't a real organisation called Cartographers for Social Equality. I was almost tempted to start my own ... for now though I think I'll just join the Facebook group...

* Don't answer that, I do know the answer.