I have such a terrible sense of direction that pre-satnaves I used to carry a compass in the car to help me navigate. The satnav (Garmin first, then TomTom, which I found better) was the saving of me - but it does deprive you of any cultural context. You know you're on the road from Cavan to Fermanagh, but not what towns you're passing, or even where you might stop for a pee!

But after a couple of years of using it I went back to maps - especially when I discarded the car and took to the bike. Now, I do a combination - using various web services to check out and nice routes, and spreading out a map on the floor and putting a ruler on it to see the most direct route between two points, then looking for secondary roads where I can amble along without looking over my shoulder for insane staring murderous drivers out to kill me.

It seems to me completely insane that we should use private cars at all, at this stage of the climate change emergency and when oil is so depleted that we need to hoard every last drop for industrial use. In Ireland, 40% of all trips by car are under 5km, a nice 20-minute bike ride. It would be a much better model to have a mainly cycling population, good public transport, and cheap hire cars and vans available for when you need to get a load of concrete blocks or the like.

Cycling can be wonderfully social, and is a real improvement to neighbourhoods, with people able to wander along chatting and stop for a cuppa in a local cafe, and services like this cycling-for-the-very-old scheme, which started in Copenhagen and is now rapidly spreading across Europe (an Irish chapter opened last week).