When did finding my way become so complicated?

ONCE a high-flying magazine editor in Dublin, living the classic, harried executive lifestyle, Kate Kerrigan swapped it all to be a fulltime novelist and live in her idyll — the fishing village of Killala, Co. Mayo. But rather than being a sleepy existence, it’s been anything but for the 50-something mother of The Teenager (15), and The Tominator, seven (oh, and there’s the artist husband Niall, too). It’s chaos, as she explains every week in her hilarious and touching column...

MAP?’ I said. ‘I don’t need an ordinary map – I’ve got a cool map on my phone!’ We were going up north to stay over with a friend.

‘Oh,’ my mother said, ‘I just thought you might like to see where we were going.’

‘I can see,’ I said, whipping out my iPhone, ‘look!’

I LOVE my phone map app. ‘Amazing,’ she said, not bothering to put her glasses on and looking vaguely in the direction of the tiny black slab I wave at her to look at everything from family pictures to interesting emails.

‘Just reminding you that while I can’t drive, I’m very good at reading maps.’ Dictionaries, encyclopaedias, maps – all the useful things Mam was good at reading – are now obsolete. Sad, but that’s progress!

‘I’ll rig up the Sat Nav in your car,’ Niall said as we were leaving.

‘No need,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to Enniskillen dozens of times and I have the phone app.’

‘Even so,’ he said, ‘you know what you’re like. You can turn the volume down on it. Have it just in case.’

I skimmed the email from Katie. I called out the address in Florence Court which Niall typed into the complicated black box.

The electronic voice started before I had even pulled out of our drive: ‘Turn left in 20 metres’ then, ‘Turn right in 200 metres,’ at the end of our road.

This is going to drive me mad, I thought, so I turned the volume down and enjoyed the sunny drive to Sligo with the two boys snoozing in the back. However, the Sat Nav was winking away at me, trying to communicate so when I reached Sligo town, out of a mixture of curiosity and guilt, I turned it on again.

‘Turn left in 100 metres,’ the box was saying. ‘Eh?’ I thought, ‘but I’m already on the Enniskillen road?’ ‘Turn left now,’ the voice said with, I imagined, a slight inflection of urgency. So I did that. Even though I knew I was already on the right road. Even though the road it was guiding me up was a narrow, country road.

‘Turn right in 200 metres,’ straight over a hedge and into the sea. When I didn’t do that, it instructed me to do a U-turn, on a narrow, winding road. I did take its advice on this and got back to Sligo.

But by this time, I was confused and no longer trusted either my own judgement or the sat nav. So, I followed its instructions round and round the outskirts of Sligo until, eventually, we got back on the road I was familiar with as the right road in the first place.

I should have turned it off then and consulted a map, but I didn’t have one. So, I switched on the map app on my iPhone, which has a little blue pulsating button that tells you exactly where you are. I also left the Sat Nav on – our dysfunctional relationship was now in full swing. I mistrusted the machine but, nonetheless, suspected it knew more than it was letting on and wanted to keep it on side.

It all went horribly wrong at the border. In Belcoo the plentiful signs for Florence Court (this was The North where they have road signs) clashed wildly with the Sat Nav. I turned the hateful, lying slab off and followed the road signs, feeling angry with it but somewhat vindicated that I was right and it was wrong.

NO sign of Katie in Florence Court and no mobile coverage. I checked her email and discovered that we were meeting where we were staying, in a place which the Sat Nav had been repeatedly guiding me towards. However, by this time there was NO WAY I was going to listen to it again, so I switched on my phone. For the next hour I drove us round and round the back roads of Fermanagh as my iPhone map went in and out of coverage, and the blue ‘you are here’ dot zoomed in and up the route in the right/wrong directions.

My mother sat next to me in silent forbearance, a look of resigned dignity plastered across her face. Back in Belcoo for the umpteenth time, I went into a newsagent and bought a map. I gave it to my mother who, with cheerful, speedy accuracy guided us to the front door. After I parked she turned to me and her lips began forming around the words, “I tol…’

‘Don’t say it,’ I warned. And, in fairness to her, she didn’t.