something I said

My plans for a Daysaver excursion now have a parallel over at B:INS in the form of a group event aboard No. 11 buses. The idea is based on instantiations of elevens: getting on a Number 11 on November 11 at 11:00 and doing things in reference to other 11s: riding for 11 hours; stopping at 11 places en route, but could extend to traveling as a group of 11 people, reciting 11 poems, taking 11 photos, and who knows what else?

This is a brilliantly simple idea that lends itself to all manner of manipulations, so I plan to do something, hopefully something mapwise. This might consist of traveling in 11 degree segments, wandering for 11 minutes, 11 metres, or setting off to 11 compass points.

The first bit of preparation is to come up with a reasonably accurate GPS track of the route. So I improvised one last night and have stored it as a GPX file for public access. Open it in GPS Trackmaker or similar. If you want to see a display now, open this GPS Visualizer page and copy the GPX file URL into the field labeled ‘URL of static data on the Web‘, then press the button labelled ‘Draw the map‘.

Having made a rough track, a couple of things caught my eye:

• The outermost points of the route are almost diametrically opposite each other, and the midpoint of that diameter is a tree near MacDonald Street in Highgate. The tree at the centre of the Number 11 universe sounds like a great site for some kind of activity. Releasing 11 bus-shaped balloons? Putting eleven 11s on tethers and spinning them through the air? Pretending to track the progress of eleven toy buses in a scaled version of the route?
• From that point, the route can be divided into segments. I started by dividing it like a twelve hour clock, and located 11:00 near the junction of Church Lane and Church Green in Handsworth Wood. This might be a good spot to do 11 minutes and 11 seconds worth of activity.

The circular character also provides other opportunities, such as dividing the route into eleven segments (of 32.72 degrees) starting from the nearest stop (mine’s on Vicarage Road). Perhaps each 11th becomes a space for different actions.

Perhaps, in direct imitation of Paris, je t’aime, 11 one-minute movies will be produced and collectively titled Brummagems, oui luvs yer.