Satellite navigation is, for me, one of the greatest inventions of recent years. I was always a nervous driver (and occasionally still am
if I have to do hill starts in a manual car with loads of people watching and filming me) and when I started driving regularly six years ago, navigation was always a sticking point. I would go the wrong way, get lost, get panicked, start driving erratically and get in quite a tizz. With satellite navigation that problem is largely eradicated. Even if you go wrong or get lost, the sat nav will get you back on course and itÂ’s more than paid for itself in the three years IÂ’ve had it,
by getting me to gigs that I would have been late for otherwise, just in time.
But sometimes it stops working or stalls or takes you to the wrong road (with the same name – not entirely its fault) or things have changed since the map was made. I have had two days in a row of sat nav trauma. Yesterday in Windsor it got me to St Leonard’s Road and I drove up and down it looking for the Arts Centre but with no luck. I started to panic and sweat, aware I might be late. I rang the box office and told them where I was and got some oral instructions, but without the security of the sat nav I got lost and confused and started to sweat, proper manly adrenaline filled sweat. I am slave to the sat nav and can’t work without it’s comforting voice and assured instructions. I only managed to get where I was going by putting the name of the road that the Arts Centre was on the junction of, and suddenly there was no problem. The ridiculous people of Windsor have split the road in two, so there’s another road in between the two bits. I was frazzled and hassled and ended up parking half on the pavement, half on the road when I finally came to a stand-still. I don’t usually get like this with driving any more. Sat Nav is my saviour.
Today as I left London it took ages for the machine to kick in and I started considering what I would do if it was broken. How would I get where I was going? I so totally rely on the sat nav that whilst I feel confident that I could have found Coventry without it, how would I locate Dolomite Avenue, where my hotel was. I started wondering what would become of the world if all the satellites broke and then wondered how they went about fixing them if they broke down or were hit by an asteroid. I am so reliant on this technology now that I am not sure I could function in a world without it. Though part of me would like my sat nav to break so that I can get a new swish up to date one. I am an idiot.
When I got to Coventry I happened to pass signs to the Arts Centre so decided to drop my stuff off before going to the hotel. My sat-nav kept complaining at me that I was going the wrong way, or at least gave me messages of how to get back on course for the location it thought I wanted. When will it learn that sometimes I change my mind?
But when I had dumped my programmes and minimal props, I was back on course, but perhaps in a fit of pique, the sat nave took me down an unpromising looking road, telling me I had 500 metres to go, before sending me down a no-through road that definitely did not have a hotel on it. Was it a punishment for my disobedience?
I drove around for a little while hoping to find another way through, but it was clear that the sat nav was expecting a roundabout that wasnÂ’t there, so I tried to get out and around the problem, hoping that if I came from another direction it would work.
I found myself approaching a dual carriageway and the sat nave confidently told me to turn right, but if I did that then I would be driving against some busy traffic. But at a point of such panic like this when I was again starting to get hot and bothered and worried about being lost it wasnÂ’t beyond the realms of possibility that I would blindly follow my directional guru to my death. It is dangerous to become too reliant on technology. Ultimately as we all know technology will rise up and make mankind its slave. And this attempt to murder me might have been the first step in the revolution.
Luckily I am not entirely Borgified and was able to make my own decision and thought that driving against traffic might be a bad idea, so I turned left instead and found myself trapped in a system that took me about four miles away from where I wanted to be.
But luckily on my return the sat nav chose a different route and managed to get me to the delightful and misnamed Village Hotel, which is right in the heart of an industrial estate and with its leisure centre is I am guessing the closest that Coventry gets to Disneyland. It was another depressing place to spend the night at this most depressing section of the tour, when IÂ’ve done the show so many times and yet the end is still not in sight.
At least I was alive.
Though sometimes when youÂ’re on tour, death does seem an enticing alternative.
The gig was another one that was slightly hard work and there were more walk-outs – one bloke leaving during the potarto bit which is only 20 minutes in – I don’t think he can have been too offended by that and just thought I was shit (incidentally I saw an Agatha Christie film yesterday afternoon in which Tony Curtis said “potarto” so that’s who it is who does it- slightly ruining my joke, the bastard). I can’t work out if I am doing something differently or if I have just been unlucky to have three slightly more reserved audiences in a row. I am a bit tired and ill and being a little more bitter in performance and pushing some of the naughtier ideas a bit further. Is it too self-indulgent? Have I stretched the elastic too far and broken things? Or is it just that I have had three slightly more middle-class, middle-aged Arts Centre kind of audiences in a row. The Free Beer Show in Oxford tomorrow should sort out the confusion.
The second half picked up a bit and someone put some white powder in my water which made it look like monkey semen. I wasnÂ’t going to risk drinking it, it could be a date rape drug or poison or monkey semen. But the old people on the bonfire, perversely decided they would try and murder me by drinking some of the concoction. Why do they hate me so? Apparently they are rather like the kind of characters who talk to schizophrenics in their heads, becoming increasingly unpleasant and self-destructive. I donÂ’t think I am mad though.
