I love reading maps and navigating for my husband, and we choose all kinds of interesting routes together. However these days I'm spending a lot of time on the road alone, going to places I've never been before, often negotiating city centres at night, and after a series of really nasty moments trying to read a map or directions as well as cope with traffic I finally snapped and demanded a SatNav. The crunch was when I was in Blackpool and Google directions suggested I needed to turn left ... which would have had me in the North Sea.

Anyway we have a TomTom and it's great. It has given me a couple of good anecdotes to tell over dinner, like taking me round the Luton one way system twice for some unaccountable reason and (recently) taking me on a magical mystery tour over a dirt track through fields instead of the more conventional route to my destination, but it's certainly saved my jangled nerves more often than bamboozled me. And we have John Cleese's voice, which is absolutely SUPERB if you want to have an argument about his directions.

Anne