BELLS AND WHISTLES...

I took delivery of a new car about three weeks ago. It`s fine. I like it very much. It`s a Nissan Qashquai N-tec, 2.0 litre, petrol, manual - all the stuff I`ve been used to driving for about 50 years. It`s very comfortable, has a nice high seating position, a nice glass roof with a kind of blind that covers it up if it gets too hot. It`s got a good radio, cd player, aircon, no less than six gears and a nice big boot for Barney top make himself comfortable. Feel a `but` coming on?

But, it`s got a lot of bells and whistles. An MP3 thingy, bluetooth whatsit, i pod something or other and a satnav! Now I have absolutely no need for the bluetooth, the i pod thing or the MP3, whatever that may be but I thought the satnav might be `interesting,` so on recent trips, I thought I would check it out and see how it worked. I thought it might have been especially useful on our journey to and from yesterday`s family wedding in Richmond, where our middle son, Kevin, was finally and enchantingly wedded to the lovely Claudine. More on that story in a later edition, however.

Back to the satnav. We had to make the journey from here in Kent up to Richmond. Now, normally I would have a look at a map, jot down the roads to follow and more often than not, get there without too much problem. But we punched the route into the satnav and tried to rely on the lilting tones of `Jane` to see us safely there. To be fair, we were held up by the closure of the M26 due to a bad accident, giving rise to a longish detour and some more delays on the M25 which seemed to throw Jane off course. She constantly urged me to make u-turns, come off at Motorway exits only to go back on again and suggest that I should go down routes I didn`t want to go down.

I`m sure she was trying to be helpful and efficient, but so far at least I haven`t grown enough in confidence with her and I`m pretty sure she feels the same way about me. I sense the early stages of an interesting relationship developing here, a power battle emerging and a grim determination to be proved right. But today I found my way home alright without any help from her, thank you very much. Fifteen all in the opening set at the moment.