Trig Points

 

Every day he would go cycling thru the deserted streets, starting at Camden lock, down to the towpath, along to Little Venice, and find a new story pinned to the wall under the lights. He never saw who left them there. Each one was written by a different hand as far as he could tell. He took to setting out earlier and earlier to try to catch whoever was putting the tales there.

Sometimes he'd hear someone running away under the road bridge, but he never saw them. He collected the pieces of paper, and scanned and OCR'd them, and added his own pictures to liven them up.

So far, he had found sixteen of what he called his Camden Lockdown Stories.

                                               

Later on, he came to realize that the pictures had always been there. They were trig points left by the authors, like pins in  a ghost map, to show where they were written. And like the ghost map, maybe he could find the fount at the center of all those points. He started to travel around  the  city trying to match pictures to locations,  always  remembering that the location might be in the past, or even  not there yet.  He had read that you could triangulate any person if you knew three different facts about them, like area they lived, age, and favourite animal, for example, or hair style, pet  hatred and time over a hundred meter swim.

Perhaps one of these,

or even her,

or else one of those:

In the end, he realised that the author must be at the intersection, the triangulation from all of these viewpoints.

He must travel to all these places, and follow the logical ley lines. And as with all trig points, equipped with his moral compass, he must find where all the three lines intersect.

His careful reading of all the stories, and attention to detail in the photos, led him to write down this list of threesomes, and from this, in each case, he must try to identify the story’s writer:

Leonard Cohen, Mornington Crescent and Bicycles

Guinness, Beamish, Murphy’s

Punch Cards, Punch Brothers, Penny Farthings

Toyota Hilux, Camel, Paris

Bond, Aston Martin, Dragonfly

PG Tips, A Lemon Tree, Dr Watson

Tattoo, back to black, sharpies

An Arrow Boat, a lock, an undoing

Do not lock the pump, The Brewery,

Teak, The Garden of Forking Paths, The Sense of a Beginning.

Suffice it to say that none of them had a camera, but almost all seem to point towards Camden Lock in some way or another, and that’s where he was from. Could it be that after all, he had left these stories for himself? This would be undeniably cliched in the extreme. And what about the triangles that did not intercept the lock? Paris, Dakar, Buenos Aires, Baker Street seemed to figure, and as far as he could recall, he had only been to two of those famed places. So far. It now became his new plan to travel to the Argentine and Sengal as soon as possible to rectify this situation. Then he could finally take ownership.

Photo credits (mine):

Everything is BEFORe YOU DIE