Jeff Peel's Diary

The Isle of Man gets to show-off its Gold but NI is greyed-out and our athletes are forced to relocate to England.

I’ve been having something of a twitter-spat with Ordnance Survey regarding their Team GB Medal Map.

Despite the fact that the wall-to-wall coverage of Olympic trivia is distracting from the fact that the UK economy continues to be in the shitter, I feel compelled to make my readers aware of the fact that the Team GB Medal Map chops off Northern Ireland.

Now I probably would have got over this fact had the Ordnance Survey given me some logical explanations.  But as is typical with state-funded quangos I received a great deal of nonsense by way of explanation.

First explanation, Ordnance Survey doesn’t actually cover NI.  It’s a GB mapping agency.  Therefore it doesn’t have data for NI.  Perhaps it was unable to find the phone number for OSNI – its sister agency here.

Secondly, it claimed, it had included the Chambers Brothers in the GB map as they now lived in Maidenhead.

This would have presented the agency with difficulties had it mapped the medals for the Munich Olympics when our very own Mary Peters won the only gold medal for Team GB – and did so without the need to relocate to the Home Counties.  Similarly it doesn’t really explain why Scottish athletes, who now live in England, appear in the map in Scotland.