Farmer writes: the road less travelled

I don’t know about Google Maps. You can still get lost. Recently I had to visit a farm near Rhode, Co Westmeath. Now I know how to get to Rhode. It’s easy – just straight down the N4 to Milltownpass (or is it Rochfortbridge?) and hang a left. Long ago, I used to go down there regularly for Ford tractor parts to the late Tim O’Sullivan.

But, rather than mess around with my memory, I had an Eircode for the farm and stuck it into the phone leaving home.

Fool that I was. It brought me a contorted route and down country roads with grass in the middle. Yes, I got there, but I didn’t want a scenic drive on a very frosty slippery evening when I had to put the Hilux into reverse thrust when I met another vehicle.

Fortunately, I didn’t meet much traffic as the motor car had not yet reached these districts, but you’d be afraid of meeting a milk lorry. Or maybe a beat-up 1995 Trooper straight out of Crocodile Dundee, lashing along with a cub at the wheel and he on the phone and three cows behind.

Have you ever tried to find your own place with Google Maps? I have and our house isn’t that remote, but Google brought me home through boreens I’m never on and localities so isolated rural electrification hadn’t arrived and they post their letters with a Penny Black.

But let me qualify all this by saying Eircodes are brilliant. Lorry drivers can find you without ringing 10 times for directions and I don’t care what scenic route it brings them, as long they’ll get here.

Furthermore, in the pre-Google Maps world, going to, say a funeral with Mrs P, in an unknown part of the country was never much fun, because we’d definitely get lost.

With the clock ticking, all hell would break loose as I do the 10th handbrake U-turn and tell Mrs P if she was the great Billy Coleman’s navigator in the Lancia Stratos, they’d be so lost that Billy wouldn’t have completed the 1979 Circuit of Ireland yet.

That shows up the cracks in your marriage fairly quickly. And it can still happen with Google Maps, but, thankfully, much less often.

But that said, if you’re thinking of settling down with a girl, ask her to pick an unknown destination at least 100 miles away, throw the phones out the window and see how you get on.

If she’s still with you on the way back, you’ve a good one and hold onto her. That’s what I did.

However, I think I’m on borrowed time with the voice-over Google lady. She’s doing my head in and it may be likewise. In the early days if you didn’t follow her instructions carefully and got it wrong, she’d say recalculating. Nowadays she’s so polite you don’t even know you’ve made a mistake.

Now I’m not anti-vax or into conspiracy theories, but I still reckon she’s keeping a record of my mistakes and of not following her instructions.

I fear a day is coming when she’ll tell me: “I’m sorry Mr Potterton, but you are downright bloody impossible and you never do as I say. Goodbye.”

She sounds lovely, but it’s a good job I’m not married to her. But could we not have a nice Irish lady with a more local accent? A lady who has no problem with place names like Ballivor, Borris and Kiltimagh? (There are no such issues with Rhode, it’s just its spelling that may catch you out, as it did with my favourite writer LTC Rolt.)

And my favourite accent is the lovely lilt spoken in the northeast of Northern Ireland. Could listen to that all day.