As a guide, my nose is not to be trusted

A sense of direction is a wonderful thing: the instinct for following your nose that some people are endowed with.

My wife, for example, will say, as we meander in an unfamiliar town with signage designed solely for those who already know how to get where they are going, "I'm sure it's that way!" Usually she's right.

But if I follow my nose, the most likely outcome is that I will drive into a wall or over a cliff. My nose is not to be trusted.

On the other hand (and this is paradoxical), when she is driving and I am the passenger with the map, I never say, "Turn right, here" when I actually mean left. With the roles reversed, she has been known to do this.

"Right at the junction," she says firmly.

But I'm reading the sign, and it says the place we want is left.

"You really mean right?"

"Yes. Right! Right!" I turn right. Pause. "I meant 'left.' "

If there was one school subject I was most hopeless at, it was geography. I just couldn't squeeze a drop of fascination out of the question of whether there were coal fields in the northeast of England and potteries in the Midlands, or vice versa, or both. The names of oceans left me cold. Trade winds made me yawn. The delineation of continents was baffling. I had no discoverable interest in the equator, the Gulf Stream, the Cape of Good Hope, the length of the Zambezi River, the whereabouts (or spelling) of Albuquerque.

All this carefully fostered ignorance made me a strange driver when I first owned a car. I rather expected my car to know the way we were going. Very often, though, it let me down badly. I was reluctant to consult a map, possibly because of uncertainty about the points of the compass. Instead, when lost, I trusted I would soon find a recognizable landmark by continuing to drive. Surprisingly, this sometimes worked out well. Other times, not. Well, most times, not.

I have improved. On acquaintance, maps turn out to be clever and helpful. After careful thought, I can easily tell that east is to the right and west to the left, if one is heading north at the time.

I am still convinced that north is uphill, however, and that rivers must therefore, as they run downhill to the sea, travel north to south. The ones that appear to go from south to north presumably go uphill. Most times these days I get where I'm going. But I still occasionally jump in the car and head off without a thought in exactly the same direction as my previous journey. One time, as she likes to remind me, my wife let me go three miles the wrong way. "Just to see how long it would be before you noticed," she chuckled mischievously.

The Internet has opened up new possibilities for people to map routes or buy airline tickets. The results can be spectacular. One publicized case the other day was a young couple who booked tickets online to fly to Sydney. They assumed, when they boarded the plane, that they would end up near the famous Opera House and Harbor Bridge.

Instead, they arrived in a place without either called Sydney – in Nova Scotia.

And my brother-in-law worked out a route with the aid of the Internet. He was planning to drive his family from Scotland to a resort in northeast England. He thought it would be nice to stop at York on the way. York is an ancient and sizable city of beautiful aspect, a tourist magnet. But the route they followed led them ever farther west and into the county of Lancashire, which, because of a fracas a few centuries ago, is still jocularly "at war" with Yorkshire.

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