One Direction

I have always had an acute sense of global positioning.

I must have a built in, hard wired navigation system , no doubt part of my genetic inheritance on my Father's side from his love of maps and his many years of belonging to the Scouting Movement.

Put me in just about any location and I can orientate to all points of the compass. That is not to say that I do not get lost on occasion, usually when I am tired, tetchy or just too stubborn to just take out the map or ask someone who lookes like a local for directional assistance.

Take the time I drove my family to within a hundred metres of the confrontational borderline of North Cyprus when simply trying to find our resort based hotel.

Equally hazardous was the time I just got into a perpertual loop of Warrington when trying to find, what appeared to me, to be a mythical link rather than a seamless carriageway from the M62 onto the M6 and out of the North West.

My family with great sympathy put it down to fatigue and I was happy to play along.

My personal GPS was put to the ultimate test on our three week trip to the Southern Hemisphere and I must say it fared reasonably well in South West and North Eastern Australia. I had been a bit concerned on the basis that a flushed toilet south of the equator goes in the opposite direction to its northern counterpart and that this might translate into a mightily confused sense of direction.

As well as having a natural gift of spatial awareness I have, over the last 23 years, also developed a very adept skill in timing a journey so that I arrive at my destination at the exact minute required to honour a pre-arranged appointment or meeting.

I use 23 years as the benchmark because that is the period over which I have worked from my office based in Hull, East Yorkshire and from where on a daily basis my livelihood has and continues to take me to all parts of God's Own County.

Give or take Bank Holidays, family vacations, absence through ill health or other emergencies and disregarding weekends I have, realistically, had nearly 6000 actual days of employment in that period. On just about each and every one of those days I have been required to get to a specific address at least on the hour, every hour which equates to roughly 30,000 properties.

Under such a concentrated effort I have assumed, for my home region, what is akin to "The Knowledge" so prized and revered by those seeking to be a London Black Cab Driver. This intimate resource stored deep in the hard drive of my brain has served to amaze and astound friends and colleagues if they have asked about a particular location be it a town, village, hamlet, main road, street, avenue, cul de sac or terrace and I have answered their query without hesitation, repetition or deviation.

What it means for me is that upon being given my diary for the day I can guage when to set off in order to reach the successive appointments strictly on time. Certain influences which have caused me to fail have been outside of my control. Adverse weather, Acts of God, Traffic accidents, animals on the loose, landslips, jammed mechanisms on lifting bridges, punctures and a misread miles to zero setting in the car being amongst some of the proverbial spanners in the works.

My sense of timing works best from a fixed point. For 16 of the 23 years this was my city centre office. The last 7 years have been from the new out of town premises but any adjustment of distance and time was facilitated by the fact that the new office was within a mile of my actual home which obviously served as my fallback or default fixed point.

Everything has however, over the last 5 week period been catipulted into disarray by the phenomena of my moving house.

The epicentre of my in-built GPS has shifted by 5 miles in an easterly direction from office and former residence and has not yet re-adjusted sufficiently for me to resume my uncanny and some may say unnatural propensity for turning up on a doorstep at the allotted time.

As well as the difference in distance to be allowed for there is also a fresh new set of obstacles and inconveniences to be assessed as to their impact on my working day. What poses the biggest threat is the tendency for the railway crossing barriers which punctuate my new road routes to descend just as I approach with great regularity. I am slowly getting used to the main offending trains and can compensate for this by devising a short cut or more roundabout trip. There is also the quandary imposed by school catchment areas and that discernible but invisible clogging of the neighbourhood roads by extra traffic during term times although I cannot ever recall seeing school children in a car under such circumstances.

Slowly but surely I am becoming re-calibrated for my new home location.

The ultimate test will be on a forthcoming appointment in a large seaside town on the East Coast. Hopefully my genetic GPS will deposit me at the exact front door and not, as feared, just off the shipping lane on a low tide sandbank some five miles offshore.