Driving Miss D.

It has been known for people to suggest that sometimes I gild the lily.

Occasionally, so they say I will not let the truth impede a good story.

I of course always tell the truth and will be completely honest in my recording of events.

So anyway today we had to facilitate contact for little D with his mum in the South of the county having picked up his little sis on the way.

Therin came the first problem. She had phoned for directions but as far giving the MD directions you might as well give her coin and say heads is left and tales means right.

We did get the right country, that's the advantage of having the sea on three sides in Wales, you have a 75% chance. After copious wandering round we decided to let technology take the strain, on went the GPS.

Now here is the genuine technological proof that her driving is bonkers.

With her at the helm and roughly on the road we lurched bounced and screeched along and the GPS could not get a fix on our position. Millions of pounds of technology in space could not get a bead on the Xantia with her at the wheel. The yanks have spent billions on stealth technology when all they needed to do was learn to drive like management!

I did venture to share this information:

"I am only doing 40" she said indignantly and here you come across another of the MD's little foibles.

She learnt to drive on a Morris Minor which compares to the Xantia as an abacus compares to a super computer. On the minor there is a simple gauge and if it says 40 it means you are doing 40 MPH*. When she said we were doing 40 in the xantia we could have been telling me the speed, the revs or the engine temperature. And crude statistics tell you that there is only a 1 in 3 chance she got it right....

Now, she is quite miffed with me for these observations and she says that the GPS would not work because of something called a Faraday cage which was stopping it working inside the car and saying that once it was attached to the windscreen it was able to tell us where we were.

Of course I would love to believe her, but that would be letting the truth impede a good story.


* It should be noted that if the minor gauge says Zero it does not necessarily mean you are stationery; it actually means you are stationery or the speedo is having a British Leyland moment and has gone on strike. To prove that evolution is not always forwards; at least the minor speedo can be removed in a reasonable amount of time and does not require total disassembly of the car and removal of countless electronic components each of which has it's own pin number to achieve.