Is anyone else scared of Greenland?

I spent a bit of time looking down at the world again, today.  On one of those websites which lets you scroll around a satellite image of the globe - not, sadly, whilst held aloft on my very own pair of dragon wings - and Greenland, as it does every time I look at the map, leapt out and shocked me.  

It is just so big.  And looming.  And white.

I realise there is actually more distance between Greenland and the British Isles than it appears there is on a map, but it is still a lot closer to us than I tend to think.  Besides, using that sort of logic which lets certain people I know be scared of sharks no matter which bit of water they have dipped a toe into, there is nothing in between here and there.  

I think part of the problem is the Orkney and Shetland Islands.  Once my eye follows the coast of Scotland and lands on those islands, my sense of scale distorts.  My brain is insisting that they can't really, in the case of the Shetland Islands, be more than 100 miles off the mainland.  It makes me see the distance as less, and, therefore, the distances to other places now looming from the edges of the screen must be closer, too.  Norway being so close doesn't freak me out.  Norway looks friendly, like its leaning over and checking on how the countries below it are doing.  Also, it isn't as big and pointy as Greenland.

Fair enough, Iceland and the Faroe Islands are there, too, but you can draw a straight line from the West Coast of Scotland to Greenland and not hit anything, and to someone who grew up being told the Atlantic was between us and America (and also not being told that the USA is only a tiny part, geographically, of America), Greenland keeps coming as a bit of a shock.  

I feel like I was lied to.  

Actually, I feel like my the bit of world I live in, or at least my brain's internalisation of the things my society has told me, has been lying to me about a lot of the world.  Some of it, of course, is definitely down to my inability to work out distances and to keep facts straight in my head, but a lot of the world map does not really look the way it looks in my head.

So many places are larger in my head because they are the one I have heard about, the ones which figure in the stories I have heard, and others are tiny or else their existence surprises me, because they don't figure in the stories we hear.  

There is also the small fact that I parcel countries up into bundles, and working out that Papua New Guinea is actually closer to Australia than New Zealand is did not sit well in my head, not when I see the latter two as in the same bundle.  Papua New Guinea is not part of that bundle, so it has no business being there, says my brain.  

Noting the places which still have strong legal, political, linguistic or ideological links with Britain also leads to a fair degree of wonder.  Yes, I do know that the Caribbean is all the way over where it is, but I still don't really compute the distances properly until I have just had to scroll across the Atlantic to find it (and yes, I do know that it is really a lot further than the few minutes of somewhat aimless scrolling suggest - just go with me, here.  I'm making a point about perceptions.) 

What I would love is a Google Maps which showed the world at different stages, so I could scroll around the world of the Ancient Sumerian period and check out which places were also building cities.  It would help no end with getting the spread of certain languages straighter in my head, too.  In fact, get on that Google Maps - add a year slider to your map facility.  I could watch the Roman Empire spread and make my brain properly take in that the rest of the world did exist around it, despite what we tend to get told in schools about that time period.  To hear my history teacher tell it, the world really was one of those maps on an old Playstation game, where you coloured in the world as you explored it, so the rest didn't really exist until it was on the map.  My worldview of 100AD ignores a lot of the world, but I did colour in some excellent drawing of men in sandals whilst in the second year of secondary school, so that's all right, then.  

Now, perhaps everybody reading this is clearer on the real shape and placement of everything in the world than I am, but I still find it disconcerting that so much of the way we think the world is, is skewed.  

It happens on a smaller scale, of course.  It took a two hour seminar at Uni during my MA for my tutor to stop marveling at the fact that people, when asked to draw a map of their town, would include the bits which mattered to them and blank the rest.  It seemed logical to me.  Ask me to draw a map of Doncaster and you will get a fairly detailed map of the walks I take the dogs on and then a vague squiggly line to Sainsburys.  I am aware of parks and houses and other shops, but I don't know what connected what to where a lot of the time.  

It did worry me the other year to find a boy in my tutor group didn't even know what Britain looked like on the map in his planner, though.  That is taking the subjective view of the world a bit far.  I am about 99% sure that the one little market town he lives in is not important enough that he will never need to know how to work out where the rest of Britain is.

Clearly, we can't all have a perfect knowledge of where all things are.  It makes me want one of those spinning globes to go in the office, though.  Maybe one with a drinks cabinet built in.  I could stand and sip bourbon whilst I span the globe and got freaked out each time Greenland showed up, looking like it's about ready to drop on something.