Google Street View comes to the aid of the environmentally responsible researcher

Non-fiction authors have always been expected to visit the places where their story's events took place.

Historians have always been dubious about this bit of advice even before the concerns arose about needless long distance jet travel doing its carbon-spewing bit to destroy our environment.

Take , for example, "DIVERSE HOPE" my blog-book about wartime penicillin.

Like all previous authors on the subject, I feel compelled to tell a little bit about the chief protagonists' parents - that alone takes me back 150 years and the wartime penicillin story itself was basically over 75 years ago.

That means that all the adult protagonists are long dead and even child eye witnesses are thin on the ground.

No need then to visit physical locales, in passing, while interviewing living humans.

Usually the only essential reason for me to visit distant places is to see unique collections of vital materials from the period of wartime penicillin, documents found in those archives that refuse to put more than a token bit of their collection on the web.

And a visit to any historical story's locales reveals always the same thing : yes, yes, the weather, geology, topology remain basically the same, now as then.

But all the factories have invariably closed (along with the original residences of most of the protagonists) and even the very street themselves have changed their names, been extended or cut in half. Farm fields are now suburbia and once posh and slummy areas have now reversed in social status.

The exteriors of the grandest public buildings usually remain the same as they were a century ago, but their interior rooms, the actual site of all their historically important activities are changed beyond all recognition.

And if and when you do arrive, at great expense to yourself and the environment, the locales look exactly as they did when viewed at home on Google Street Views.

So why bother ?

Why indeed ....