Sat Nav

A friend to Richard Madeley Appreciation Society writes:

"Satellite Navigation was created to send four highly stressed individuals the wrong way up a one-way street in the middle of a place called Atherton. Being only a friend of that saintly presence that usually writes this blog, it falls to me to admit such folly. Such human failing. I still couldn’t find Atherton if you paid me in Nigel Short t-shirts (he apparently grew up in Atherton), except, perhaps, by beginning how we began: by taking a slip-road from the East Lancs. Either that or by using a voodoo doll set to ‘traffic hell’.

Being latecomers to the world of cars, slip roads remain a mystery to us. I was navigating. I was the one who said, ‘keep to the left and we can’t go wrong’. One moment the Mini was on the East Lancs and the next it's on a motorway (another new experience) heading north towards Bolton. Only a few good things come from Bolton so it was blind panic that made us turn off the motorway and land in the middle of this Atherton hell-hole. Then Sat Nav suggested that the wrong way up a one-way street was the way to go. I'm ignoring how close we came to a crash, how we found ourselves on a new housing estate that according to Sat Nav didn’t exist. Ignoring too how I threw myselg in front of a post van or how the driver saved us by setting us in the direction of Lowton and the East Lancs again. I'm ignoring the fact that we got home and that we’re going by train in the future.

I’m just concentrating on one fact: my father briefly opened his eyes today and looked at my sister. She says there were tears in his eyes as he tightly gripped her hand."