“WHICH way does your house face?” Emerson asked as I bemoaned the constant extinguishing of my pilot light and why that might be.
I wracked my brain, trying to remember the real estate blurb, but couldn’t. “No idea,” I eventually admitted.
“Go outside and tell me where the sun is.”
“Wait … It’s in front of me.”
There was a slightly strangled silence on the other end of the phone. “Is your back actually to the house? I don’t want to find out you’ve just turned around to look at the sun and you’re telling me it’s in front of you.”
Eventually we established the lay of the land, but I do fail to see the bigger picture when it comes to directions – bigger than “left at the petrol station”, I mean. Emerson’s way of navigating by sticking his head out of the window and locating the Sirius or Etamin clusters (instead of reading road signs like the rest of us), seems like a pretty complicated way of working, so I’ve gone and bought a compass.
On getting it home I see it’s a fiendishly complicated one. You can do a magnetic Azimuth reading with the bits and pieces that flip off it, which kind of presumes that the owner will know what an Azimuth looks like if they happen across it in the woods. On a more basic level, you can shake up the compass like a snow globe and the needle will still end up pointing in the same direction, which I think has something to do with magnets, the North Pole and sorcery, but I can’t be any more specific than that.
If you ever see me out, though, scream: “WHERE’S NORTH?” and I’ll tell you.
Keeper? I don’t think I’m really master of the compass yet. Coming tomorrow: I find my finger and pull it out of my arse.
Hey man, now you're really living 
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