Let me spin you a yarn.

During this summer's first trip, I was so motivated to get to England, I couldn't sit still in truck stops for the usual extended periods. I had to move. So keen, was I, in fact, that I arrived at the ferry port a full day early, which is even worse than sitting about in truck stops, because instead of a highway and some fields, you have hundreds of shoppers and a load of teenage rice boys bumping shite music and singing along at all hours of the morning. And to make matters worse, they have no idea about sound, so they push the bass to max and everything else to zero, resulting in all the songs sounding like a recording of a wonky escalator played in a cloak room.

Determined not to tolerate the reggaeton, I looked up a little beach and punched it into my wonderful Garmin navigation device, feeling sure that it would take me directly there. Now, up to this point, I've crossed five countries without using it at all, and I've arrived a day ahead of time, but for this local trip, I figured a nav could help me traverse potentially confusing side streets and avoid wasting time.

Mmmm.

An hour into my twenty-minute drive, I started to wonder if the bastard thing was up to its old tricks. I had entered the zip code and the street name, seen it on the map, confirmed it and checked it again, before setting out, so I suspected it might be set to avoid highways - a setting I would simply change, resulting in my snappy arrival at the beach. It was ten-past-four.

I pulled over and inspected the settings. Nothing wrong, there. The only other thing to check was the destination, which had, of course, changed, for no good reason on Earth. And not for the first time. Remember when Google almost killed the entire Burt-family, during The Boskovice Experience ?

Now an hour south of my actual destination, and only an hour-and-a-half shy of my unexpectedly new destination, I called it off.

On the way back, it showed me the wrong speed limit for about half the time, attempted to send me down no less than four dead ends, and (sadly, also not for the first time) put me on the wrong highway and led me into the wrong country. Today's shenanigans have earned it a place on my archery range, right in front of the bullseye.

Now retired from the technology game, I'm back to my 10-year-old road atlas, which has never let me down. I'm taking back the map.