Ponder suggested that he, @sincerely-chaos and I have chips with @consultingcas last night. It occurred to me that the chippie is 10 minutes from Gordon Square.
Because I have apparently chosen a certain path in life (literally), this led to us spending our evening tracing Sherlock and Faith’s steps. It occurred to the participants about five minutes in that logically this constituted a hen do.
The brown marker at the top of the map below is Gordon Square (the #suicidechips bus stop. The orange one in the bottom right is the bench where Sherlock chucks the gun into the river. The first ‘F’ isn’t shown on Mycroft’s camera map (inset) but if you zoom in you can see the rightmost tips of the ‘F’ and extrapolate the rest.
Here’s the #suicidechips scene from The Lying Detective. NB the bus stop was brought in by the Sherlock production team:
Normally a bench lives there. Note my arm with #suicidechips:
And… @consultingcas realised that she has a running tracker app!! Behold our evening’s peregrinations as recorded by it, though first we had to walk quite a way from Gordon Square to reach the ‘F’:
Spelling ‘FUCCK’ with two Cs is the result of a detour courtesy of London’s notoriously sprawling roadworks.
I worked near to this route when my bipolar was at its worst. And what did I spend my lunchbreaks doing? Trying to deal by racing around some of these very same streets, high. Or suicidally depressed. Or both at once. Therefore to inscribe FUCK OFF upon the streets in tribute to the show and fandom that helped keep me alive on the eve of marrying the man who helped keep me alive was deeply satisfying.
The next bit isn’t on Mycroft’s tracking map, but it’s the logical extrapolation of how Sherlock and Faith would get from the ‘F’ of ‘OFF’ to the bench, taking the straightest route:
And our final destination:
So that was an accidental hen do, with my intended and two fangirls.
Should anyone ever wish to attempt this same trek, the basic ‘FUCK OFF’ section was about 5.5km. I guess it’s about 10 if you walk all the way from Gordon Square to the bench.
Oh my god @pennypaperbrain you are amazing. What a great hen do. I’m glad you guys had a good time, and congratulations!
Over the past couple of months I’ve been slowly making note of the dialogue, plots, characters, and scenes in Season Four, HLV, and TAB that have been recycled from previous episodes.
This week Improbable Press will start publishing Spark, a bi-monthly newsletter of Sherlockian, writerly, and affirmative content which hopes to be a conductor of light, sparking bright ideas. Subscribe to Spark mayhaps?
This is just the best newsletter. I too am a bit shouty and sometimes I forget that it is ok to be a bit shouty and sometimes it is even ok to be a lot shouty.
Wow, this project is proving popular! I’ve refined the master map to be a little more useable – the key is explained, and rather than fitting *everything* in I’ve shaved off the outlying regions (they will still be covered on their own pages).
There will be some proper testing in the field with @sincerely-chaos next week, then I’ll share the whole document.
*brings a stack of two newly printed guide books, straight from the printer*
Sherlock Fandom Archive 