Can anyone fix my internal sat nav?
Alex Roumbas laments her navigational ineptitude...
My sister and I seem to have divided family talents between us. I have my mother's aptitude for programming gadgets and assembling flatpack furniture, along with my father's gregarious personality. Kathy gets our ma's completely unflappable confidence with infant kids and dad's interest in history.
Neither of us, sadly, has mum's internal sat nav. A woman who can guide natives around their own city after a morning's acquaintance, my mother is an excellent driver and I swear has her very own mental BlackBerry map. Very simply, she never gets lost. I, on the other hand, could get lost in my own house.
So where did the myth about women having no sense of direction from? Probably my past lives...
I navigate by landmarks. And the problem with landmarks is that they move, or change, or look the same from different angles. Just the other week my boyfriend stood on the other side of the road laughing while I wandered, confused, trying to work out the way to Covent Garden tube station from Drury Lane.
I have, with just the benefit of a map and a very shonky sat nav, driven to Bristol, St. Leonard's, Bury St. Edmund's, Ramsgate and Oxford, but all those trips required leaving half an hour at each end for overshooting, taking the wrong road, getting confused, crying and calling my mum.
And anyway, even if I hadn't been borrowing a crappity office sat nav (with a broken base so it had to be propped on the passenger seat), you can't exactly trust the common or garden navigation system these days. If it's not guiding you onto train tracks it's sending you over a cliff. I'm a technology journalist, for heaven's sake, I know how to operate the damn things, but I swear they take one look at me and the magical demon thingy inside has a good cackle and adjusts the software to direct me to the Outer Hebrides when I'm just trying to get from Hendon to Harringey. As a result even the age of the cyborg wouldn't help me - I'd just end up hurling myself, comedy lemming-like, off some precipice.
The only solution is to keep driving to a place over and over again until I remember how to (I've had to do "trial runs" to places like Abingdon before just to make sure I can get there in some semblance of "on time"), or to take public transport which may shut down, delay me or just plain not exist (the number 72 bus) but does at least have helpful types milling around stations willing to laugh at me as they point me in the right direction.
I know many women with jaw-droppingly enviable navigation skills. Don't tar them all with the same brush. It's all my fault.
Alex is the Deputy Editor of Shiny Shiny and she's planning her route to the toilets.
