I had another little look at the Clust’r Map in the right hand column over there, and found that there was someone in Petropavlosk Kamchatsky reading this.
Of course I had to look up where Petropavlosk Kamchatsky is. In my day that was ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ and you would be blasted by a lightning bolt if you even looked it up on an atlas.
My school atlas didn’t even have regions marked in those days, just a big fearful red blotch of colour behind the Iron Curtain. But times have changed and we are now allowed to look at the Soviet countries, talk to the people in them, sell them dodgy hamburgers, move next door and marry their daughters.
The world is very small up there isn’t it? You don’t realise how crammed together those places are, everyone is crowded in a little circle around the North Pole, you could take a canoe around with no trouble.
It’s a wonder they aren’t better neighbours being so close, but that might be the problem. Living too squashed together causes outbreaks of name-calling and petty insults, you know what the High Rise are like.