And immediately I could see where I wanted to go, descending along the river to Glenbatrick bay and the solitary house by the white sands. I sat in the sun for half an hour in a state of extreme bliss. I could see Ireland, and across the glinting sea to Colonsay and all the other isles beyond, all the way to Lewes. Looking north again, I noticed the treacherous Gulf of Corryvreckan, which separates Jura from Scarba.

It was here, in 1947, that Orwell was shipwrecked when he miscalculated the tides and took his boat into the whirlpool that lurks between the two islands.”I find this interesting now, not so much as an objective description of the place but for its subjectivity, as a description of what George Eliot calls (in Daniel Deronda) “the unmapped country within”. True to the Ordnance Survey spirit, I wrote in my notebook: “I could now see the whole island; a mass of brown, purple and green contours thrown into sharp, crinkly relief by the black shadows and the dazzling sunshine, like an atlas. I climbed to the top of one of the three Paps, the mountains that loom over the island. Until we bring our imagination to bear upon it, the map is simply a collection of marks on paper, so the act of reading is a collaborative, creative process.

How you read a map thus depends very much on your own internal limits. There is a world of difference between a trip (a loop, ending where you began), and a voyage. A voyage knows no limits, and suits a quite different state of mind.A few years ago, I went exploring on Jura, the Hebridean island where Orwell lived and farmed towards the end of his life. Only later did maps succumb to the common man’s need for something more practical; something for the sea-discoverers, merchants and navigators.The ambiguity of any map is implicit in the term “map-reading”. CD-i is still very much alive, and many software companies support it, but even Philips now accepts that its dream of a CD-i deck in every home is unlikely to happen.. Ellis Martin’s illustration for the cover of the 1919 edition of the one-inch Ordnance Survey map shows a pipe-smoking Glen Baxter type in shirt-sleeves and pullover seated with knapsack on a grassy-hillside vantage point studying a map of the countryside beyond.

This is a generalised landscape with storybook woodland, a glimpse of river and bridge in the valley below, distant steeple, and far-off cliffs and sea. The idyll invites us to step in through its oak-garlanded frame and identify with this questing, leisured figure. The map before him is the kind that suggests where you are going to, and it is quite distinct from another kind of map; the map of where you come from.
Parish maps, like the original Mappa Mundi, naturally fall into the second category. The Mappa Mundi was a mythic map showing the world as people imagined it; it showed where they were “coming from”; but it wouldn’t have been much use for a circumnavigation.

When CD-i was conceived, no one imagined that millions of homes around the world would have a PC, or that home computers would become powerful enough for multimedia. The chances are that Philips will launch an upgraded version of CD-i using DVD, although the new machines will also play today’s CD-i titles.CD-i has been a brave venture by Philips. The stakes were high but the prize of setting the standard for home multimedia would have been great But the future has a nasty habit of surprising everyone. Primary schools in particular like CD-i’s attractive and easy-to-use software. In the US, Chrysler has purchased nearly 5,000 CD-i players for training. Philips has even launched CD Online, a service that allows CD-i owners to surf the Net on their TV with the aid of an optional Internet kit (price pounds 100).But where does CD-i go from here? The format faces stiff competition from the PC and the new 32-bit games systems like Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s PlayStation, both of which cost the same as a basic CD-i deck. Then there is the forthcoming arrival of the Digital Video Disc (DVD) high-density CD, which stores around seven times more data than today’s version.Despite the amazing growth of the home PC, Philips argues – with some justification – that few people will want a PC in their living room and that there is a market for a multimedia box in the home.