A wayward sense of direction
Any time I jump into a car and go anywhere I am accompanied by an going potential disaster in the form of a location and/or directional cock-up. I don’t know why this happens – folklore has it either that women are hopeless map readers compared to men, or (alternatively) both sexes are equally bad at map-reading – the only thing being that men won’t admit it and would rather drive around, floundering, than ask for help.
All I know is that – and this quite innocently, I’d maintain despite any evidence to the contrary – I tend to have a lot of bad luck when trying to get to somewhere I’ve never been before. In fact, the frequency with which this happens to me must surely take the problem away from simple ‘random chance’ to something of a propensity – even though I’m usually to be found somewhere in the background moaning “Why does this ALWAYS happen to me?!?”
And then there’s the ‘you’re expecting it to occur, so therefore it does’ syndrome.
I DEFINITELY suffer from that one.
I’ll give you just three representative examples:
I once attended a family wedding in the north of Italy – Verona, Vinci and the Asiago Plateau came into it.
For much of the time I was one of the designated drivers conveying all sorts of family members about.
My group was staying elsewhere from the main wedding party – I was making the trip from one to the other several times a day … and about one trip in every three got lost in doing, whether it was going from A to B, or B to A.
Especially at night. It got so bad that one evening, after attending an opera in Verona, I made a deliberate point of following another family ‘designated driver’ in a luxury black Mercedes on the way home, so as not to get lost.
Everywhere he went, I followed. At one point, he turned off along a side road and up some semi-made up country lane that got more and more remote.
Finally he stopped by a country house or farm building. So did I. It transpired that somewhere along the line I’d mistaken this farmer’s vehicle for the car of the ‘designated driver’ I’d deliberately set out to follow!
It took quite a while to eventually find our way back to our hotel … as the three passengers in my car have never let me forget!
Second example. Two years ago, I was scheduled to take my father to the funeral of his oldest old school pal. I collected him from the coast in good time and with a huge contingency time to spare – the funeral was taking place in Fulham – and … er … what could possibly go wrong?
It happened to be a day on which south-west London got completely snarled up from about 0930 hours through to 1300 hours, that’s what.
We had intended to go over Putney Bridge into Fulham (it was the most direct and easiest route). Gridlocked. I rang my brother who was already at the church. He suggested trying Wandsworth Bridge. We turned to double-back around the toast-track of roads in Putney en route to Wandsworth and then immediately became trapped in a foul-up involving a long line of gridlocked-escaping cars that couldn’t get over Wandsworth Bridge and were trying to switch to going over Putney Bridge instead.
Eventually – after the service had begun – we switched and drove up Castlenau, seeking to get over Hammersmith Bridge. Forty minutes later we hadn’t even reached the Bridge, the service was over and people were now on their way to the wake. There was no chance we were going to get there any time soon, so in the end we just turned around and drove back down the A3 to the south coast in a state of blind fury and great frustration.
Yesterday’s near-debacle was a trip to take my father from the south coast to deepest Kent for a funeral.
The sat-nav coordinates were programmed into my dashboard sat-nav system – the estimated time to travel the 78 miles was just over two hours. We set off in good time (and with a contingency) and you know what? With 50 minutes to the start of the funeral, we had reached within a quarter of a mile of the village and the church we were aiming at.
It was then the sat-nav lady commentator took us up a right turn and somewhere up a hill, featuring narrower and narrower roads, and out into the countryside. I mean seriously narrow roads – winding up hills and down dales – meeting cars, tractors and vans coming the other way at breakneck speed. And having to stop, drive into hedges at the side of the road, or back up in order to let them pass.
This was weird, we were seemingly going further and further away from the village we were aiming at. Eventually the commentator lady said “You have reached your destination”.
Yes, and we were now miles from bloody anywhere.
Abandoning the sat-nav, it took us another half an hour to get back to civilisation. Of the first two people beside the road we stopped to ask, the first was not a local [that’s inevitable whenever I stop to ask someone!]… and the second was a local but had no idea where the church in his own village was!
I’ll just say that in the end we reached the church with fifteen minutes to spare before the start of the service.
After the service and other things, we drove back to my place around a rush-hour M25 on a journey that took us two and a half hours but which should have taken just 50 to 60 minutes maximum on a clear day not in the rush hour. Talk about gridlock and slow-moving motorway traffic!
I cannot wait until they invent a (perfectly driverless) drone that can carry a human being and then I won’t have to spend so much of my time ‘lost’ all over the UK road network.
