Is it news to anyone that country folk have a better sense of direction than their city-dwelling counterparts?
I assumed it was because there are still parts of Suffolk where access to Google Maps is, shamefully, not considered a birthright. Apparently, though, it’s all to do with upbringing.
To find out if childhood environment has an influence on navigation ability, neuroscientists looked at how almost 400,000 people from 38 countries played a mobile video game specially designed for the purpose.
“We found that growing up outside cities appears to be good for the development of navigational abilities,” said lead researcher, Hugo Spiers of University College London.
Furthermore, urbanites raised in higgledy-piggledy places (my term, not his), such as Paris and Prague, performed much better than those from orderly, grid-based cities such as Chicago.
Personally, I think there’s more to it. It doesn’t take Isaac Asimov to grasp that the universal rules of the space-time continuum no longer apply once you depart suburbia, where most of us would drive into a river if our phone told us to.
If you’ve ever tried to click-clack a country mile in heels after a boho barn wedding, you will be acutely aware that a “local” pub with rooms means something very different in the boondocks.
Out of town, a totally different sensibility is at play when it comes to getting anywhere. In the country, there are only four directions, and it’s easy to tell where you are going if you know how to examine the lichen on the trees, follow the swifts or maybe even reach into the glove compartment for a map.
But map-reading skills are dying out, much to the chagrin of the country’s cartographers, who have been warning us for years that over-reliance on technology means the thousands of churches, ancient woodlands, stately piles and eccentric landmarks that make up the tapestry of our landscape are fading from public consciousness.
Last year, the Army announced it was preparing to ditch maps and compasses in favour of modified mobile phones worn on body armour that act as both a navigation tool and an encrypted instant messaging device.
The Dismounted Situational Awareness system (DSA) has been hailed as “a game-changer”, not least because of a battery that’s capable of lasting for eight hours. When that fails, troops will have a generator they can use to recharge devices.
And if the generator fails? They’ll be wishing they had picked up that leaflet from the tourist kiosk – and that someone back at base had taught them the Ordnance Survey symbol for a graticule intersection.
Once upon a time, children, every last page of every AA Easy Read Britain was stained with women’s tears because the men would insist on driving, even though they were better at the map-reading. Every nightmarish journey played out the same.
I lost count of the number of occasions when I was reduced to sobbing: “Can’t we just skip to the stage where this is an amusing ancedote?” Once, in rural France, we drove for 90 minutes along the wrong road because I was too scared to admit I’d misread the map again.
It took days for that to be a funny story. So let us thank St Isidore of Seville, patron saint of technology, that we have satnavs to guide us. Oh, and if you’re desperate, lichens grow on the north side of a tree trunk.
