Why I'm never lost

Recently I had to drive to Salisbury to collect a kitchen I’d bought on Ebay. (I say ‘had to’; the truth is that I about as far from ‘had to’ as it’s possible to be – I chose to buy a second hand kitchen on Ebay, against the strongly worded advice of all the key stakeholders in the operation. But having committed to buying it, I had to drive to Salisbury to get it). Although the collection, carrying and installing of the kitchen proved – as all the aforementioned stakeholders had predicted – to be 50 shades of horrendous, the six hour round trip across London and the home counties in a long wheel arch van was, astonishingly, relatively pain free. I would like to share with you all the secret of my success…

There's one question I always dread whenever I arrive at a destination I've never been to before in a motor vehicle: "how did you get here?" It tends of course to happen only outside London. In London only the certified insane or the suicidal drive. It also tends to come from a man. It's one of Man's favourite things to talk about at a social gathering. In fact I have been to social gatherings where groups of Men have spent almost the entire evening discussing which way they came.

"Which route did you use?" Man asks, "did you come down the A614?" *

"Oh no," Other Man replies smugly, "I never take the A614, you get snarled up in traffic at the Mansfield roundabout. No I came along the B612."

"Oh!" Man replies, clutching at his testicles to prove he still has them, "but don't you find the 612 is slower generally."

"Well of course if it's busy I just slip onto the 629." says Other Man.

"Oh yes," Man says doubtfully, "Julie likes the 629. I prefer the motorway myself."

And so it goes on. For men of a certain generation discussion about routes is their party mainstay. It's why they came to the party. They're not interested in gossip or what's happening in Downton Abbey. They would only be interested in soap opera if the B614 were having an affair with the A319.

The truth is that I haven't the faintest idea which way I came. I haven't looked at a roadmap since circa 2008 and I don't pay the blindest bit of notice to the route I'm taking. I have road number dyslexia. And yet I almost always get exactly where I intend to be with the minimum of fuss, and I am almost never late. The reason? I am part of Generation Sat Nav.

I don't know how to get anywhere from anywhere. I am 28 years old, I have been driving in the UK for over a decade and I honestly couldn't tell you where the M1 goes from and to. Or the M2 for that matter, or the M3. Is there an M3? Actually wasn't that a boy band? I know the M40 goes to Birmingham because at one point I had to drive to Birmingham a few times in a row for work and eventually I noticed that I often seemed to be on the M40. For a while I got a kick out of telling people "I know the M40 like the back of my hand now, I've been up and down it nonstop these last few weeks." It felt like a very Manly thing to be saying. But then I stopped going on it and before writing this I had to google it to check it was definitely the M40. I didn't want to look like an idiot.

I'm not a frequent driver, I'll admit, but I do drive fairly regularly for work, often on short deadlines, often under pressure, and all over the UK. I can honestly say I have never been seriously lost. When setting out on long journeys I will take a road map with me but I take it not exactly to use when lost but as a kind of talisman against lostness. And so far it seems to have worked very well.

In my experience of being in a car in which two or more people are discussing which route they will take to a particular destination I have quietly observed that far more stress is incurred and far more time expended than if all participants had agreed before the journey commenced to silently follow the sat nav with blind abandon, regardless of what they knew about that road and the traffic around that junction and the winding roads through that village.

Because of the nature of my work I often drive with older, more experienced men in the car. They DO NOT TRUST sat navs. They will often say things like:

"These young people often can't even read maps these days"

and

"Some people just blindly follow the sat nav, they don't even know where they're going"

I keep quiet and nod. I do not say "I am basically one of these young people. We can read maps but we choose not to because maps have been rendered obsolete by sat navs."

These older Men are particularly vexed by sat navs because they are yet another in a long line of gadgets, from the vibrator to the electric can opener, which have contributed to the Great Emasculation of Man. But they are especially riled because sat navs have revealed the great unspoken secret of driving which I will share with you all now: it doesn't particularly matter which route you take. Don't ever say it to a Man, particularly one over the age of 45 (the cut-off point, I find, for being able to trust that the sat nav is definitely going to take you to your destination and not another place three hours in the opposite direction which the Royal Mail has mysteriously assigned exactly the same postcode).

But if you don't believe me, try a little experiment one day when you have a little time to spare. Try taking a wrong turn somewhere on the route. Not just a little wrong turn but a flagrant wrong turn. Go down the A218 when you meant to take the B624. Or whatever. You'll see the ETA indicator on your sat nav creep up, sometimes by a few minutes. But - and I know you don't want to hear this, Men - the thing is it really won't go up by that much. Certainly not as long as you might spend faffing at your point of origin, say looking for a map, or discussing which route you're going to take.

“But sat navs can’t predict the TRAFFIC!” I can almost literally hear you cry. Wrong. They’ve figured that out now too. And besides, there might have been an accident on the road you were going to take – maybe someone was arguing with their spouse about the route they would take and got distracted at a busy junction.

If your new road is ludicrously wrong - as in, totally-the-wrong-direction wrong - you will need to make a U-turn, in which case the sat nav will, very sensibly, tell you to make a U-turn. But in most cases it will simply calmly take account of your decision to go down what is quite obviously not the right road and recalculate your route accordingly. Your ETA might creep up from 15:34 to 15:38. Nobody will die.

What is so refreshing about the sat nav's response to your changing journey plans, though, is the calm efficiency with which it will recalculate this alternative route. Unlike an actual human navigator (like your spouse for example) it will never be annoyed or even perplexed by your choice of direction, however obtuse. Unlike your spouse it will never send you the wrong way down the B613 because it had the map upside down. And best of all, unlike your spouse, if it persists in telling you you're going the wrong way you can quite simply switch it off.

* Men, please note that all road numbers are fictional. Obviously I haven't a clue where these roads actually are.