Concrete is Fun and Interesting... Honest!

July 2020.  With the first lockdown lifted, I started looking online for a place to drive to where I could bag a few trigs.  Guildford wasn’t a million miles away, and there seemed to be quite a few on the way to Dorking.  A Trigpointing UK user had created and uploaded a zoomable aerial map of Great Britain, and overlaid it with little blue triangles to show where the pillars were.  Clicking on the triangles would bring up their bracket numbers, so this instantly became an essential tool for planning my “trigspeditions” (a perfectly cromulent word – I invented it myself) as I could draw up a long list of potential bags in a given area, cross-reference them against the visitor logs on the Trigpointing site, and narrow them down to an achievable short list.  I’d rule out those which were geographically difficult or inaccessible, or were behind Private or Keep Out signs, or which were guarded by overly curious livestock, or which required knocking on doors and ask...

I had a mate who would occasionally post random pictures on my social media feed, with captions I can only describe as “textbook enigmatic”.  It was like he wanted me to work out for myself where he was or what he was up to, and find out interesting minutiae along the way.  I’ve always enjoyed puzzles, and there’s not a lot you can’t find out with a few well-chosen keywords on Google.  Indeed, said mate had unwittingly sent me down a number of Internet rabbit-holes with some of the things he’d previously posted.  I wanted to reply like I knew what was going on all along, without actually giving the game away – as if I was a member of a secret club, conversing in a way no-one else could understand.  The best example of this was a thing he posted in August 2018: it was a zoomed in picture of a simple metal plate with a symbol in the middle and some letters and numbers, and he accompanied it with the caption “Wish you were here?”.  Because I’m a curious guy, I...