The Far Side

Eeee, when I were a nipper maybe ~11 y.o., I was introduced to the conventions of Ordnance Survey mapping. 

• contours close together said "hill"
• blob ⬤ surmounted by + is church with spire
• otoh filled square ■ surmounted by + is church with tower
• coniferous forests were kiki🌲while deciduous / broadleaf forests were bouba🌳
• T was telephone box [remember them?] - PH is pub - PO is Post Office 

With these tools in my carton, the next step was to create fantasy islands with footbridges, gravel pits, houses, power-lines, railways and their stations. It was a Bobby-no-Pals occupation, true; but engaging and harmless. I blame my pal Gibbo for giving map-play a darker more destructive dimension. That's by way of back-story to explain my interest in islands . . . of which there is an index [N = 70!] hereabouts.

I am not alone in paddling my sofa around distant alluring islands. A similar obsessive is Judith Schalansky who was born 45 years ago in Greifswald DDR, so an Ossi as a young child who couldn't travel beyond The Wall until it came down abruptly in 1989.  Schalansky has written a whimsical book about her interest in The Far-off and Sea-girt:  Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. Fünfzig Inseln, auf denen ich nie war und niemals sein werde (2009). Here auf Deutsch is the N=50 list with links

So when Dau.I the Librarian had the English translation float into the Returns box, she reserved it for 'er dear old Dad and sent it to our branch library down-country. Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands - fifty islands I have not visited and never will. Translated into English by Christine Lo (2010). Here's the island list-of-links in English. I guess a) someone had to create some extra Wikipedia pages for the less well-kenned ocean-pimples b) some islands never made the cut because Schalansky couldn't rustle up even 300 coherent words about them.

For each of  the final fifty, four pages have been allocated 

1. data! Latitude and Longitude; the several and sundry names; the area; the human population, if any;  distances to a selection of other places; a telegraphic and quirky time line of its discovery and subsequent events
2. a lovely map on a 1km:5mm scale. Part of the absurdity is to represent, say,  Tromelin [80 hectare] the size of mung bean in a wash of blue  && Easter Island 160 sq.km bleeding into the gutter margin
3. & 4. A 300-400  essay about some peculiarity of the island's geography or history  . . . because it would be an impertinence to attempt a comprehensive narrative of who did what to whom over 500 years.

One of the peculiarities of this our blue planet is that all the land is crammed on one side map [as R] source and the CC licence. So only a few Europeans can claim that someone else is living exactly on the other side of the world. The Antipodes Islands in the far South Pacific barely graze the coast of Normandy, for example. Most of a flipped New Zealand would be in the Western Med, although Christchurch [43°32′S 172°38′E ] maps close-but-no-cigar to Nice [43°42′N 7°16′E]. Irish people must be content with Campbell Is, NZ [52°32′N 10°51′W] an uninhabited 112 sq.km which is antipodean to a patch of Atlantic Ocean ~60km West of Loop Head, Co Clare [52°34′N 9°56′W].

My fantasy island [above R] takes its perimeter from one of Schalansky's Fifty Favorite Islands. Hazard a guess, which? Answer below the fold.

Why yes, it is Laurie Island part of the South Orkney archipelago which was gifted to Argentina by the UK in 1904 and then claimed back after it didn't seem after all to be worthless. It is 800 km from South Georgia [whc prev]