It is almost 8 weeks since I began mapping (21 March 2016). In my first Diary Mapping Thorneywood Mount I wrote:

One thing that keeps becoming clear is that I need Cards to id myself & give to others, plus, perhaps some literature to give to save myself 5 or 10 minutes explaining each time what the hell OSM is.

Thanks to a comment from LivingWithDragons I was able to get some funky little hand-outs from Andy Allan (thanks Andy), but still no personal ID. I was reminded of this following an unpleasant interaction with a little sh*t at Nightingale House, City Heights (the survey was made last Wednesday, 11 March 2016; I’ve consciously let 2 days pass to cool down, and to try to make sure that I didn’t swear whilst I wrote this diary; as you can see, I haven’t fully succeeded).

City Heights is built within the grounds of the old Nottingham Borough Lunatic Asylum (see the diary entry Nottingham Suburban Railway, Part 2 for more info) and has both new build houses in the lower parts and flats built within the original buildings erected for Nottingham’s lunatics.

This is Nightingale House (built 1880, this is just the front; there is also a long, long section behind & then another wing beyond that):

I think that you may be able to guess that some men, if put in charge of such a building, may begin to over-estimate their own importance. Even so, the cardinal error was mine and – as I do not wish to have to repeat it – have decided to make a public spectacle of myself by revealing it to you.

I’m still not very certain of the best way to map these multiple-entrance buildings, and would welcome links to how to best do it (explicitly, how to map the flat numbers). I took account of the Wiki & ended up using “Man Made | Man Made | Entrance” with “addr:flats”, each number separated by commas. Normally, I do belt ‘n’ braces & add a relation with various “addr:*” added (postcode, etc.) but I still haven’t discovered how to edit Relations, and therefore adding flat numbers to an associatedStreet relation was out of the question.

My current practice is to photo the entrance lodges to save having to write down each number. Here’s an example:-

I took a photo on my mobile of two, and then made my mistake:- I rang the bell for the Admin Office as to ask if they had a list of all flat numbers (and hopefully also locations) to save time – it is an enormous estate (125 acres) (0.5 km²) with 6 individual buildings.

I wasn’t thinking straight; on almost every occasion in which you ask an administrator for help they will say “No”. If you are especially unfortunate (as happened here), they will also attempt to deny you permission for other things (even if they do not have the authority to do so), which then puts you in a tricky position. Sigh.

The boss administrator turned out to be quite short, which on this occasion was a warning sign. His first statement was to tell me off for not wearing any ID on a lanyard (do I need to point out that he wasn’t wearing any himself?), then said that I should have seen the signs that said that this was private property (he was lying at this point - there arn’t any) and that therefore I’m not allowed to photograph the entrance lodges (also erroneous). I was on a hiding to nothing here, so made my excuses & left.

I’ve recorded & entered details for all flats in all buildings, and that is probably the best middle-finger that I could give.

HTH