Heritage app

English Heritage have an app.  This is hardly a surprise.  Many organisations have apps, and not just organisations but companies and while it is quite understandable that large stores have apps that let you, for instance, find your nearest branch of Woolies or whatever, surely it’s about time that somebody invented an app to locate places that want to be KFC, but aren’t quite as classy.  Indeed apps are becoming so commonplace that it can’t be long before every shop everywhere has an app, not just to let you locate where the only branch of that store is, but guide you to the products within that store.

So, stuck in Chipping Camden and looking for porn and pie?  Fire up your Chipping Camden News app, locate Chipping Camden News, situated between the bookies and the bank, top shelf for gentleman’s literature and back of the shop for the Ginster’s and the microwave.  Job done.

And why stop at shops?  Surely people should have their own app, and not just celebrities, but everyone.  An app for the bloke in the street could mesh together their mobile, their facebook status and their twitter feed so you could see where they were, what they were doing and what they thought about it, all the time.  Colin Fanshaw App: Location: Chipping Camden, Newsagents, feeling horny and hungry, is there an app for that?  Luckily for Colin, yes, yes there is.

The English Heritage app has a feature where you can see where you are in Britain (a great feature at any time, especially if you use ‘pubfinder’ a lot) and suggest days out.  Some of them are substantial, for instance a visit to a stately home, with a car park, a gift shop and everything.  Others are more…surprising, shall we say.  They are still sites that are owned and operated by English Heritage but some of them, at least from the photographs and descriptions, look indistinguishable from, for instance, a field.

Take flint mines.  Now, you might think that a bloody big hole in the ground with a barrier up around it to prevent unwanted plunging is merely an interesting geographical feature.  But you’d be missing three things. 

Firstly, a couple of thousand years ago, primitive man (heavy of brow and with a beard, like that bloke in the Joy of Sex illustrations but actually wearing a loincloth) took a deer antler down a hole and started chipping flint out of the wall.  Of course, once he had chipped enough flint, he could tie the flint to the antler and use that to chip flint.  And as soon as he put the fire in his beard out, primitive man discovered a) chipping flint creates sparks and b) health and safety regulations, which lead directly to the invention of the goggle.

It also meant that he could wander over to the next village and beat the shit out of those backwards morons still using just antlers as weapons.  And so the stone age and the arms race was born.

Secondly, you’d be missing the laminated sign telling you all this, but with added fact and a lot less speculation.  However, I concede that there would probably a fat bloke in a cagoule blocking your view of the sign.

Finally, you’d be missing the car park.  The car park serves two purposes, the first being somewhere to leave your vehicle (or more likely to have a cheese sandwich and cup of tea in your vehicle while waiting for the rain to stop), the second as a community amenity or, as the Daily Mail calls it, a ‘dogging blackspot’.

It’s amazing just how many sites English Heritage have, including one which is a barn.  That’s right, a barn.  Oh, it’s Elizabethan and everything, but I have to take issue with any ‘day out’ that involves me stepping over a pile of horseshit to buy a fridge magnet from the gift shop.

Of course what’s really required is an integrated app that locates various interrelated services, so that one can increase one’s knowledge of British history, then eat some fried chicken before finishing the day with a decent pint and that particular heritage snack – the pork scratching.