I had a couple of longish solo car trips coming up, so I thought I had better cave in to my techie instincts and get myself a satnav. As it happens Amazon were selling a ‘fully refurbished’ Garmin for a very reasonable amount. Now I can’t imagine what goes in to refurbishing a satnav. It doesn’t have much in the way of removable parts which could be cleaned by a specialist craftsman and replaced in shiny new condition. However I don’t really see Amazon as an Arthur Daley type organisation selling knocked of previously owned satnavs in Rye Lane in Peckham. So I gave them money and they gave me a satnav. Isn’t commerce wonderful.

Fresh out of the box you are faced with a bit of a ‘so what’ moment. Unless you have somewhere to go immediately it’s not like you can give it much of a spin and standing outside turning around so you see the little car change direction pales after a while. Round about the time you start to become dizzy. Still I had some garden stuff in need of purchase so I asked the satnav to tell me how to get to the Everton Garden Centre. OK not a great test of it’s navigational skills, but we didn’t want to go any further. This was when we encountered problem number one. It loves you to put in a post code, but then it asks for a house number. Bit of a problem around these parts. Not having a house number is pretty common, and my recollection of post codes is that they can cover up to ten properties or something. Hardly a deal breaker, but something of a shortcoming to my eyes. I don’t know if we had spent more we would have got a bell or whistle which looked up house names for us, I suppose in the end it depends if the name is in its database.

Having successfully navigated the few miles to Everton and back, it got us within shouting distance, we decided on a greater challenge for the lady with no discernible accent. Incidentally is there some place in Middle England where the satnav people recruit from where the indigenous populace have no accent whatsoever? Or is there some Professor Higgins hidden away turning out electrically perfect Elizas? Anyways, we decided on a trip to the ‘local’ B&Q warehouse at Nursling to give our own Eliza a bit of a run out. As it happens it turned into a bit of a run around as we remembered in time that the New Forest Show had manifested in Brock that week and there’s one thing you shouldn’t do at that time and that is to drive along the A337 right past the show-ground. The primary reason being that you would become intimate with the back of the car in front as you (occasionally) edged closer to Lyndhurst. It gets a tad busy.

Having set the course for quickest route which would have been via the 337, we promptly turned in the completely opposite direction to head towards Beaulieu. I didn’t count the number of times Eliza said “recalculating”, but I think ‘multiple’ covers it. Strange thing is, you find yourself telling Eliza that actually you will not turn in the direction she is suggesting and what is she going to do about it. Or at least we did. Maybe that’s just us. However we had the immense benefit of not having to inform Eliza that we were a. In the UK and b. Wished our directions to be in English. We had been told by Yomping Buddy that the satnav in their (German) car had taken to believing it was in Dusseldorf and defaulted to German. As a result it had to be reset at the start of every journey. I had suggested that if it indicated she should drive across the Polish border it might be best to ignore the advice. Apparently it now behaves itself having been given a seeing to on the Great West Road recently. Just makes you think, would Columbus have ‘found’ America if he’d been using a satnav? Then again he was looking for the Far East, so maybe he was.

Well here’s a wonderful thing. We moved into the digital TV age several years back now and looked forward to brilliantly clear pictures and no more worries about tuning stations. Until last Wednesday. Now all our digital TV contrivances had been warning us we would need to rescan them on 25 March to be able to continue to watch anything other than four terrestrial analogue channels (We couldn’t get Five on analogue before anyway). I didn’t think it would be too tricky, after all I wrestle with networks of computers and t’Internet on a daily basis. All you have to do is find the right buttons on the remote and it’s pretty automatic.

And so it turned out, kinda. A subtle side effect was that all the favourites that I had laboriously set up on each digital TV thingy so they all matched had been wiped so they had to be recreated from scratch. Now in the scheme of things hardly a disaster I grant you. No-one was injured, no ambulances had to be called and no animals were hurt in the process. However just as every designer thinks they have the best design, demonstrably better than anyone else, so it is that every digital TV appliance designer thinks they have the best way to organise your channels. The idea being that you can shuffle the less than useful channels to the nether regions of your list, only to be seen when you are looking for an obscure radio channel. Well my experience tells me most of them are wrong. Of course I could have paused to read the manual, but that would have sat uncomfortably with my carefully nurtured techie persona, and therefore was effectively a non-option. Still the sense of empowerment after I had got the channels in the order I wanted almost made it worth it.  At least I know how much time to set aside the next time I have to rescan.

Now if that sounds a tad jaundiced, it’s probably because it is. See all the digital channels are transmitted on an analogue channel around 33-34 I think, so when you rescan, that particular channel becomes off-limits to any other gizmo generating a modulated signal. Like a video recorder. Yes I know, but a lot of people still have video recorders because they haven’t broke yet and getting a hard disk or DVD recorder means unplumbing an awful lot of wires in my case. And teaching all other members of household how to use something somewhat different to what they are used to. It will happen, but best left until disaster strikes. Not to say a certain amount of market research hasn’t been done of course, you have to be prepared. So anyway all it looked good on main telly, digital signal looks OK, no significant losses of channels, so I turn the video on to set up a recording and the picture on the TV breaks up.

Now you may recall that when Five was first launched, everyone had to have their videos retuned so they could get the signal. Ours was. Don’t know if it was on a different channel in London to down here ‘cos we were living in London at the time, but it turns out it was placed smack dab in the middle of what is now the new digital channel. Once I had realised that it was a simple case of retuning the output of the video so the picture no longer broke up. And yes I did have to read the manual to do that. Since in common with most we now use the Scart input exclusively, I can probably turn the modulator off completely. But that means I’ll have to read the manual again, so no rush.