I want to marry sat my nav!

New research says it rots your brain, but that hasn’t put off VIRGINIA IRONSIDE

BAD sat nav directions cost us 29 hours of wasted time a year, according to a survey last week. And University College London has proved that using such a device shrinks your brain.

Apparently, the part of your hippocampus that would otherwise be stimulated to work out different routes for yourself shuts down. Charming.

Personally, I couldn’t care less. I’ve spent so much of my life working out routes that my hippocampus must be wondering whether my skull is big enough to accommodate it. If anything, my hippocampus could do with a break. And surely the anxiety I’ve felt when I’ve got lost hasn’t done my brain any good whatsoever?

I remember once trying, and failing, to find Heathrow Terminal Five on Boxing Day to catch a late flight to Uruguay. I drove along uncharted roads in the dark. Sometimes I could see the runway lights winking in the distance, but the airport eluded me. I flagged down the one car that passed me, to be met with a crowd of drunken lads going home after an evening out. No help.

When I finally arrived (my hippocampus must have swollen to the size of a Space Hopper with the effort it took to work out the route), I staggered up to the check-in desk and burst into heaving sobs.

The next time I got lost was on my way to a show in Norwich. I’d been given written directions, but I couldn’t decipher them without my reading glasses. On the motorway, I had to change glasses to consult my piece of paper, putting myself and other drivers in considerable danger.

I arrived in Norwich from the wrong end of a one-way system and had no idea how to get to the theatre. My directions were useless as they depended on arriving from the south-west. I got there ten minutes late, with no time to change or set up, and had to fight back tears all the way through. Not surprisingly, the show was a disaster.

As for trying to work out house numbers in a street in the dark when driving . . . All things considered, it was time for me to get a sat nav.

THE

salesman who was showing me how my first one worked said: ‘You’ll probably want a woman’s voice, won’t you?’ It was as if he’d suggested that I marry my sister. ‘ Certainly not,’ I heard myself replying coldly. ‘ Women have no sense of direction.’

And then Mr Right appeared. Not locking eyes across a crowded room, but emerging from a tiny box on my windscreen. A velvety-voiced bloke who has completely taken over my driving life. Having Mr Sat Nav around has made driving an experience rather like being chauffeured about in a Daimler.

Often I have no idea where I’m going or in what direction I’m heading.

I punch in the postcode and, amazingly, in just the number of hours and minutes that Mr Sat Nav has predicted, I arrive, having negotiated ring roads and one- way systems and sometimes, in a fit of daring trust, agreed to be taken down cross-country backroads, over fords and through what appear to be private farmyards.

Of course, it’s true that when you get a sat nav you might end up not with Mr Right but a total cad.

There was that one bloke whose BMW ended up on a cliff edge, and a bunch of Japanese tourists who drove into the sea when trying to reach an Australian island. Then there was the unfortunate Belgian woman who was guided to Brussels via Zagreb in Croatia. But they must all have chosen the wrong voices.

Mine is pure gold. When we arrive he always says: ‘You have reached your destination.’ Yes, it’s better than ‘ you have reached the destination’ which is what a friend’s sat nav says, but I’d prefer it if he said: ‘We have reached our destination,’ because that would mean he felt the same about me as I do about him.

Even when I tried to have a row with him — I was convinced that Biddenham was to be found up the A1(M) and he disagreed — he never lost his temper.

He just continued to say ‘turn left’ all the time — which eventually, of course, I had to do. Unlike a real man, he never refuses to ask for directions, because he knows the way better than anyone else.

He warns me of every speed camera en route, and advises me of the correct speed at which I should be travelling. I know some people drive more dangerously using a sat nav — apparently they position theirs in the middle of the windscreen and follow orders blindly, without using any common sense. But I’m safer with mine.

He doesn’t let me exceed the speed limit and, because I know I’m taking the right routes, I don’t come to screeching halts and make screaming U-turns having only just spotted a sign.

I know I’m in good hands. Mr Sat Nav has guided me across the Fens and, more bafflingly for me, a hardened West Londoner, south of the river, wherever that is. Once, on my way to a disastrous dinner party, he even had the wit, by falling on to the floor of the car, to beg me to go back home before we’d even arrived.

He is like a god to me. He forgives me all my sins, and is always by my side, through every success and every emergency — calm, kind, caring and knowing.

I want to marry Mr Sat Nav. We’d arrive at the church and he’d say, at the start of the aisle: ‘Continue for 50 yards and then stop. Say: “I do”, then turn around when possible. Continue for 50 yards . . .’

And we’d both live happily ever after.