Pedant! You know what I mean

If nobody has to write counties anymore, a whole load of people will know nothing about them.

As for the Bay, at least the M5 isn't far. The number have people I know who've never crossed the Tamar is staggering.

But we're funny folk over here. We eat babies, and there are dragons and monsters and things.

It's funny, isn't it, that only 200 years ago it was unusual for anyone to leave their town or village. Now we think it's strange if people are happy in their own little worlds.

I've got an insatiable appetite for knowledge. I know about places all over this country and around the planet, some of which I will never ever get to visit in person. Yet, I also feel an increasing desire never to leave my front door again. I'm happy, cocooned in my home. Everything I need is here, and I can get things delivered to my door if I so wish. What need do I have to actually venture out to such foreign parts as Chatham High Street, or Sittingbourne?

We used to have a geography test every Wednesday after breakfast. It would be a different continent every term and I used to do appallingly at it as I couldn't be arsed to revise. That said, some of it stuck!

Geography for me was always about how and why land formed and what I called "people geography". We never learnt that X was in county Y or that Sheffield was up north (I had always thought is was next to London for some reason) or that it was called the Lake District not the Late District...We did do a little about the local area though, but it wasn't very much...

Same here.

Heather, just wondering, have you read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops?

Nope. I'll look out for it at the library, though.

We learned the counties and key towns, plus the major countries of the world and their capitals, as part of geography at school. We learnt about the composition of land, weather etc. as well, as well as population densities and GDP...

+1

We picked that sort of stuff up as a consequence of discussions on the actual topics we were learning about; we were never directly taught it. That and general knowledge from outside of school.

Geography was fun until humans came along.

Avon was only ever an administrative "county". It was not a county in the true sense, and thus Bath is (and always has been) part of Somerset (within the traditional borders).

To quote the government at the time of local government re-organisation in 1974:

"They are administrative areas and will not alter the traditional boundaries of counties, nor is it intended that the loyalties of people living in them will change."

Oh ok, so it was always "cermenoially" (as i believe the current term is) in Somerset, but it's UA was Avon.

Indeed.

Schooling is crap. I learnt more about maths in 6 weeks on the croupier training course than I ever did at school. I opted out of uni to start work and to be honest I'm glad I did.

Grumpy now as it's raining and I want a smoke.