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Glamour model and pop singer Samantha Fox became one of the most photographed women of the 1980s. Her career as a ‘Page Three’ girl began after her mother sent a snapshot of her to a competition in The Sun newspaper. Sam – a native East Ender – had attended stage school from the age of five but had ambitions to become a police officer until she found that as a petite 5’ 1’ she wasn’t tall enough. She was happy to pose topless, and in those days there was no bar on teenagers appearing on Page Three. By 1986, Sam decided that a career in pop music was what she wanted, and her first record Touch Me (I Want Your Body) was a worldwide hit. Several successful albums and singles followed. In 1989, she presented the Brit Awards alongside Mick Fleetwood, but the presenters were given the wrong information and the autocue didn’t work! With her band Sox she tried her hand at a British Eurovision entry in 1995 but wasn’t selected. Sam had always been a supporter of LGBT charities and had a long relationship with her manager, eventually ‘coming out’ as gay in 2003. She is now married to her former tour manager Linda Olsen and continues to make music. She said recently that 2023 has been a great year for her. “I’m glad to still be here and be sane,” she says, “even after 40 years. Glamour modelling has changed since my time – we Page Three girls were just the girls next door!”
Travellers have always needed maps. A Greek gentleman named Anaximander produced a circular map of the known world back in 546BC and a medieval map of Britain, dating from around 1360, was presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1809. The American AA produced the first road map for motorists in 1905. Precision GPS satnav became available in 2000 and is available on smartphones so does that mean that paper maps have become obsolete? Apparently not. According to Ordnance Survey, in 2020 there was a 144% rise in the sale of paper maps, and a 28% rise in 2021. A backlash, perhaps, against the idea that satnav and smartphones had made it impossible to lose one’s way. We’ve all heard the tales of large trucks delivering goods becoming stranded in narrow lanes after being led astray by their satnavs. And here in Portugal, with many an un-named road, it can be really difficult. If you wish to use your phone to access an online map you must fix it to your windscreen or dash – holding it in your hand is illegal. A paper map can be consulted even when you have no internet connection and no signal. Detailed maps, as cartographers point out, can offer you clues as to why a place is as it is, and how you stand in relation to the places around you. You might know your GPS co-ordinates but not how to navigate to a specific location. And an old-fashioned A-Z gives you street names instead of just a vague blob within roughly half-amile of your destination.
ALGARVE P L U S
SAMANTHA FOX
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80s
PAPER MAPS
