No sat nav leads to trouble and strife

DIARY OF A DRAMA QUEEN
Mairead Wilmot
THERE is an issue with stubbornness here. It is nothing more, nothing less, and it has already caused an immeasurable amount of grief. “Please can you get a sat nav?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Please, please, please?” I begged. “No.” “I just think if you had a sat nav you would know where you were going all the time, which is important when, you know, you sometimes don’t know where you are going.”

A reasonable argument, I thought; to which he replied: “No”.

The crux here, in case you hadn’t realised, is that boyfriend refuses to get a sat nav and it is leading to disharmony.

Instead, he relies on a tattered and, as far as I am concerned, imperfect map to get about the place.

Possessing, as I do, a fantastic sense of direction when I know where I’m going, I find it difficult to understand why he would not just get a sat nav when, often times, we find ourselves going in the wrong direction.

I like to bring the issue up again and again and again and again – mostly in the vain hope that he will allow said machine a place in the car and partly because I enjoy irritating him.

Take last week, for example, when it took us two-and-a-half hours to exit the city of London after we attended a party with friends.

Had I behaved myself at said party and not retreated to bed at 9am, I’m sure I would have coped with the long, long journey out of London.

Unfortunately, though, circumstances being as they were, I was in a questionable state when we eventually did leave the city.

When we first set out on the mammoth journey back to boyfriend’s abode, I held out a small degree of hope. I figured it was Sunday afternoon – and who would be on the road on a Sunday afternoon?

This, it transpired, was a terrible mistake on my part. It seemed like everyone was out that Sunday afternoon.

We trundled through the streets of London town at a snail’s pace, and everywhere we turned there were cars and more cars and more cars.

Every once in a while, he would say: “Hand me that map”, and dutifully I would pass it to him.

He would then veer left. He might follow that up with a right, then perhaps, another left.

We went over the River Thames via bridges ... not once, not twice, but three times. Even in an extremely delicate state, where my brain was functioning at only half-mast, I knew that we were, in effect, going around in circles.

My head pounded, my tongue was dry and my stomach craved salted goods.

“Do you think,” I whimpered, “if we had a sat nav, it might make things better?”

“No, it’s the traffic; everywhere we go, there is traffic.”

“Mmmmmm, yes, but we seem to have gone over this bridge before,” I said.

“It was not this bridge.” “It was a very similar bridge, I think.” On and on and on and on this went … the minutes ticked by, then the hours.

I didn’t start crying immediately. No, I waited for a while and then the tears came. They welled up and flew down my face in quick succession.

“If only we had a sat nav,” I thought, silently. “I’m sure my hangover would be a lot better.”

“Are you crying?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Pass me that map.”