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In this picture, you will notice that on the sat-nav screen, we are actually in the sea, which is not as alarming as it could be, since we’re on the Agger-Thyboron ferry. In fact, in the perennial argument about what's better, the sat-nav or the map, the answer, surely, is that they both have a place (and perhaps it’s no accident that you can see both navigational aids in this picture). As it happens, the other day, I heard the famed intellectualist Will Self talking about how our conceptual understanding of space, and perhaps time, was being warped by these modern devices, which appear to have had the unfortunate effect of diminishing our proper sense of orientation, whilst wrongly increasing the focus on the "destination" as the be all and end all of any trip. In fact, as Self pointed out, the "journey" and our grand sense of where we are in this vast cosmos, was, and must remain, as important as, if not more important than, the destination. I reckon Self is absolutely right; what would a road trip be without the road or, for that matter, the trip? You might even say that the best road trips do not boast a destination; the true destination reveals itself as the journey unfolds. However, from our perspective, we enjoyed the challenge of the sat-nav. We saw it as a thing to be used, abused, conned and cheated so as to give us precisely what we wanted; namely access to places where people in general were not encouraged to go. You can achieve this by deliberately taking small, but determined, steps in the wrong direction, towards the wrong place and perhaps a map is a useful counter to the sat-nav in this wildly anarchic process. I suspect that Agger-Thyboron may be one of those places, those desirable wrong places that they don’t want you to find. And that ferry route; it’s like the Humber bridge, it goes from nowhere to nowhere, so there’s no way it would ever figure on any “sensible” journey plan. When the dust settles, and the gas stove is packed away, someone will ask “Where have you been?” and you’ll say, “The wrong place the wrong time, the place where sat-navs fear to tread”.
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Michael Monaghan I saw man reading a Jack Kerouac book yesterday. I remember coming late to 'On the Road' and thinking that it was all rather dull, having done a bit of roadwork myself.