The Co-Operative Society

Co-Operation like we've never seen!

Once upon a time, I lived in this map. It was 1980 and I was in my last year at primary school and not thinking about maps at all, and then on May the 4th, we moved out of this map and into another one entirely.

The new map was in Doha, Qatar, and in those days almost nobody had even heard of it, but my family and I lived and worked and went to school there without any idea that we’d left Darth Vader’s helmet to get there, much less that we’d accidentally chosen what would later be known as “Star Wars Day”

I remained oblivious to the map until some time around 2016, when I bought it from an antiquarian bookshop for £1 - and it wasn’t until a year or so later that I decided to colour in a route I’d taken that it began to come to life.

My sister and I had gone to St Vincent de Paul school before travelling to Qatar (at that point our youngest sister and baby brother hadn’t yet started school) and I decided to draw out our route to school, the path round to our Grandparents’ house, the school field we’d played on (in the days when that was allowed) - and by the time I’d finished I really could see Darth Vader - or a soldier, or maybe an Angry Bird.

I showed my little treasure map to a few people over the years and they were generally quite amused with it, but then I posted it through someone’s letter box and it was never seen again - however, I did capture a video and a couple of stills before we parted company, and now I know it’s there I could easily reproduce it.

One of the reasons this map had interested me initially was the fact that my good friend’s daughter had moved to the same street - there was quite a time difference, but I had been noticing a lot of “coincidences” so it seemed significant, especially as I’d ended up working for a company called Wedi Systems (UK) Ltd between 2008 and 2014 and had begun to think of us (the employees) as “Walter’s Jedis”

Grandma and Grandad Feven had lived round the corner from us in “Vader’s helmet” in those days, and sometime in the interim a family of four Fyfes had moved on to the same street and set up a new family business as the main UK distributor for a German company. It was only after I’d left the company that I started noticing these synchronicities, but what especially struck me was that the German company had been started by a Master Tiler called Helmut Wedi.

From Helmut Wedi to Vader’s Helmet, via some Fyfes and a Feven…