It’s the young who most regret the lost art of reading a map

Last weekend I went walking in the Peak District with my oldest friend. It was like being teleported back to the Eighties: by night, we lay side by side in our twin beds, talking as voraciously as teenagers; by day, we navigated the countryside using a real-life, paper Ordnance Survey map.

Well, she did. I couldn’t. Without the help of a little blue digital pin, I couldn’t even work out where we were on the map. The contour lines swam in front of my eyes like an optical illusion.

I couldn’t remember how to use co-ordinates to locate the nearest town, tell a footpath from a boundary or identify north from south. Without enough phone signal to power Google Maps, I was as helpless as a child.

And that, according to Sir Anthony Seldon, is very helpless indeed. The former headmaster of Wellington College says that modern children have lost the ability to read maps – and to understand the spaces around them – because of smartphones.

Sat navs, he says, have taught the young to “think of space in a purely transactional way: How am I going to get from A to B? They don’t think, what is the landscape I’m going through? What are the buildings?” And because of this, he says, “they’re losing a powerful grip with reality”.

I take his point. It just seems a bit harsh to single out the kids. We have a tendency, we old folks, to peer disapprovingly through our pince-nez at the coming generation, as if they were making a uniquely awful hash of things. But the phenomenon of de-skilling – of being “infantilised”, as Seldon puts it, by technology – has been going on for at least half a century.

Practical skills such as darning, sewing on buttons, baking from scratch, changing a tyre, wiring a plug or polishing shoes have long been on the wane, not least among my own generation, because mass production and relative affluence have made it easier to buy than to make or mend.

Smartphones now enable us to outsource mental skills such as map-reading, fact-finding and arithmetic. I don’t know anyone under 70 who doesn’t avail themselves of these services to some extent – even if it’s just the passive luxury of no longer having to remember phone numbers. Indeed, it is not the elderly who are working hardest to retain some analogue skills (for them, it comes naturally), but the young.

Knitting, baking and sewing classes are all growing in popularity among millennials. Workshops showing how to mend simple domestic appliances are springing up too, as the young push back against our throwaway culture.

The desire for tactile, “real-world” experiences has led to the revival of Polaroid cameras, vinyl records (almost half of which are bought by the under 35s), old-fashioned watches and paper notebooks. There’s no stopping the digital future; but those born into it seem to understand better than anyone the drawbacks of technological overdependency.

When Armageddon comes – when Russia unplugs the internet and we all have to sew our own shoes and do sums in our heads – my cohort of urban fortysomethings won’t last a week. We abandoned the skills of self-sufficiency without a backward glance. I have higher hopes for the young.