It was after an unusually long pub lunch in the winter of 1956 that the editor of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle decided - almost on a whim - to abandon the paper's popular weekly feature on 'Stars of Stage And Screen Who Have Visited Our City' and have a 'Metaphysics Today' column instead. Exactly why he did so is one of those mysteries of the nineteen fifties which it seems impossible to explain. The fact that the column proved to be a great success - a year later it was being syndicated to metropolitan publications across the globe - seems even more baffling.
Without 'Metaphysics Today' the editor's famous line that "those who under-estimate the intellectual hunger of the Bath masses are treading a doom-laden path!"would never have found its way into the Cambridge Book of Quotations or had the impact it did on the cultural climate of the time. And the residents of our prefab estate might never have spent hours leaning over their garden fences and exchanging thoughts on a German philosopher called Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
Although making "maps of one's own life" was not the first Benjaminesque theme to be highlighted in 'Metaphysics Today' it struck a special chord with the paper's readership. (The first Benjaminesque theme the column had mentioned was the idea of 'aura' - the distinctive atmosphere that surrounds a particular object. It made us realize that our prefabs were almost alone in contemporary mass society in being saturated with a unique 'aura'). 'Spinoza Dice' the pseudonym of the team of journalists given the daunting task of writing the 'Metaphysics Today' column - suggested that Bath & Wilting readers take a cue from Walter Benjamin and "have a go!" at making maps of their own lives.
(The "have a go!" phrase was of course inspired by Wilfred Pickles, the folksy chap from Yorkshire who was host in the highly successful "Have a go, Joe!" BBC radio quiz which was first broadcast in 1946 and inexplicably taken off air in 1967).
The Bath & Wilting promised that the five most intriguing 'life maps' compiled by readers would be published - along with photographs of themselves and their favourite pet - in a special souvenir 'Metaphysics Today' supplement. In Twiverton's two prefab estates the idea of drafting out 'life maps' took off like wildfire. Although the ones drawn up in the Redland Park prefabs have long since vanished into the Sargasso Sea of sitting-room drawers, a 'life map' made by residents of Newtin and Woodhedge Road (which, oddly enough, never made it into the Bath & Wilting's special supplement) has recently been discovered in the back room of the My Full Moon public house. Before we take a nostalgia-drenched look at it, here is Walter Benjamin's original effort at sketching out his own 'life-map'.

"I have evolved a system of signs, and on the grey background of such maps they would make a colourful show if I clearly marked in the houses of my friends and girl friends, the assembly halls of various collectives, from the 'debating chambers' of the Youth Movement to the gathering places of the Communist youth, the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night, the decisive benches of the Tiergarten, the ways to different schools and the graves that I saw filled, the sites of prestigious cafes whose long-forgotten names daily crossed our lips, the tennis courts where empty apartment blocks stand today, and the halls emblazoned with gold and stucco that the terrors of dancing classes made almost the equal of gymnasiums."

That was Walter Benjamin's pre-war 'Berlin'.

Here is our post-war 'Twiverton'.

"We have evolved a system of signs, and on the green background of such maps (laid out on the baize of a subbuteo table football pitch) they make a colourful show. We have clearly marked in the prefabs of our friends and girl friends and key gathering places of Twiverton youth. These include the 'jug and bottle' entrance to the 'My Full Moon' public house, the fish and chip shop run by Mr and Mrs Tobin, the open bedroom window of prefab number thirteen through which - on one unforgetable occasion - a young lady dressed only in her swimming costume gave us a friendly wave, the kerbstone on the corner of Woodhedge Road on which we sat and pondered our futures, the tree branch benches in Pennyquick Wood, the not-over-prestigious cafe hut in the football ground, the playing field on top of the old coalmine which would have made a grand site for tennis courts, the secret pathways to the Gothic turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel in Silk-Farr wood, and the greens emblazoned with daisies and buttercups on which the dazzling prowess of our sporting skills was displayed evening after evening to an awestruck world.