HERE I am back in sunny Cornwall after a quick trip 'up-country' as we say down here. Actually, 'up-country' down here can mean anything from Exeter upwards so to speak, but in this case it was Hampshire and it wasn't so quick thanks in part to the explicit route instructions I downloaded from the internet. I did actually know most of the way to Hampshire, but it was the final destination bit I was hazy about. In fact, I'm always a bit hazy about the end bit of a journey, frequently getting lost in the last mile. I once went round Exeter looking for a nursery for about an hour and the really annoying thing was that I could actually see it from the road but couldn't find the entrance. And yesterday, visiting Scawn Mill Garden near Duloe, which is a beautiful valley garden, I found myself doing a 27-point turn in a narrow lane, if you could call it a lane, because I had failed to take in that anything called 'mill' is bound to be next to a river and anything called a valley is just that, and not likely to be halfway up a hill. But there you go. I should have been a bit suspicious of the list of instructions to get to Hampshire because it said it was giving me the quickest route but would have sent me from Callington to Tavistock, and then across the moor. This would have involved dozens of speed restrictions, narrow roads, Sunday drivers admiring the view and goodness knows what else. Quick it ain't! The other problem was that a list of detailed instructions needs reading carefully and memorising because you can't read it while you are driving. So you have to keep stopping to find out if you have passed Deadman's Hill or driven 3.56 miles past it and are on the approach to Hangover Corner or you've turned off and are now heading towards Dagenham. And, yes, before you join the other dozen people who have said I needed a satellite navigation system, I know, and, no, I don't have one and, yes, I would like one. I had very little trouble on the motorway, apart from the fact that a vintage car was driving down the inside lane and holding everyone up and looked like it was heading for Bristol – and is probably not there yet – and the A303 was fine so I sped through Devon and into Wiltshire, spotting Stonehenge, which was obviously shut to the public because there were no ant like figures walking round it in a circle. Lack of people to give it some scale always makes it look rather small, a bit like a large rockery and you want to rush over and plant a few climbers and put in patches of aubretia. Well, that's what I thought, but then I was bored after driving for a long time and trying to read my instructions, which funnily enough didn't mention Stonehenge. You'd think that, given that they list every roundabout from here to Hampshire that they might have mentioned the largest neolithic structure ever built in Britain, but they didn't. Strange, because in its way it is a roundabout. Then I passed the 'Welcome to Hampshire' sign and got to Andover. And then the Andover Ring Road struck. Ring Road? More like Spiral Road. People age visibly on the Andover Ring Road. People get married and have children before they get off it. I swear the flowers on the roundabout came into bloom and died back as I passed them for the eighth time. The police don't bother to chase anyone for speeding because they know they'll be coming round again in the next hour and they'll get them then. The Andover Ring Road was designed by Franz Kafka. When I finally extricated myself from the Andover Ring Road, having done more than one Victor Meldrews, except I did believe it, I followed the signs for Winchester, praying that Winchester city council hadn't employed the same sadistic road planners and got its own ring road. It didn't, it just had one of those irritating one-way systems which the locals all laugh about because they know if you are not paying attention and miss the 'all other routes' sign, which is always very small and carefully placed next to a hanging basket so that the petunias are hiding it, you will be back in the circle and traversing their pleasant old fashioned streets more than once. I don't know if I had gained a good deal of paranoia by then but I swear there were people giggling at me as I passed them for the fifth time. Now you may be asking why I didn't stop and ask the way. Pride is only part of the answer. I have written previously about my friend Terry who will never ask the way. His reason is that he lives in America and fears people will shoot him, or worse. He's seen too many films where people stop in country districts and ask the way and before they know it they're surrounded by people with misshapen features playing banjos and with a very nasty gleam in their eyes. My reason is the fear of meeting someone who gives a hearty laugh without playing a banjo and launches into a long debate over the best way to get to so and so. This is worse if there are two people because they argue with each other over the merits of the B2345 or the A567 followed by a short detour down that little lane where they used to scrump apples when they were kids. And all the time I want to shout: 'Just tell me how to get out of blasted Winchester' because I can't stand the thought of passing little old tea shoppes and gift emporiums for the next five hours. I once got lost on Bodmin moor. Well, not once actually, because it has happened on more than one occasion, but this time I drove around for about an hour down increasingly narrow lanes and one right into a farmyard until I arrived back at spot where I had started from, a miracle in itself, and saw a man leaning on a gate. I leaned out and read him the address I was aiming for, and he said: 'You went the wrong way, didn't you?' Before I could answer, he said: 'I saw you and I wondered why anyone would be going down Slaggy Bottom Lane (or something like that) because it don't lead anywhere.' I managed to grit my teeth and not tell him that it did lead somewhere – it lead to a dozen tortuous lanes with grass growing in the middle of the road and no sign that humans had inhabited it for centuries and that it had taken me an hour to get back to the point I had started from which appeared to be about 500 yards away as the crow flies. He pointed to another lane, just short of the aforementioned Slaggy etc, and told me that that lane would lead me to where I was going. 'But the signpost is pointing down Slaggy etc,' I couldn't help saying. 'Yes, well,' he said, with what I took to be an eerie grin. 'It gets turned round sometimes.' I mentally heard the sound of banjos and hastily drove off. But back to the trip. I finally managed to get where I was going and staggered out of the car some two hours late. On the way back I was well versed in Winchester, a bit cocky really, and felt like giving the locals who were waiting for me to pass by several times a Winston Churchill salute as a way of telling them that they weren't going to get me a second time. I drove home without incident. Well, all right, without many incidents. The Andover Ring Road got me again but the detour onto the M3 was only a short one and I did see Andover town centre, which I presume not many people can say if they've been in the grip of the ring road. What I really needed was my son-in-law's instructions, the kind he gave me when I was driving to Germany. This was basically an idiot's guide to driving from Cornwall, finding Kent, finding the ferry, driving in the correct order through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and not detouring into Italy. It was perfect, although I had to smile because it actually started in my drive, and continued from there. 'Does he really not think I can find my way out of my own road?' I thought. 'Probably,' I answered myself. Of course, all you men will be saying that it's only women who can't find their way around. Not necessarily. When my son drove with me to Germany I was navigating and when we got to Launceston I said: 'Go straight on at the roundabout' and he promptly turned left and headed for Bodmin on the A30. 'I thought you said left,' he said. There ensued a terse conversation with me saying that I couldn't imagine how 'go straight on' could sound anything like 'turn left', and him saying that I had previously told him that we were going to go onto the A30 and then me saying yes we were but not the wrong way. For a long journey, it hadn't started out well. We'd only driven ten miles and were already going the wrong way and arguing. It didn't bode well for France, Belgium, Holland or Germany. Fortunately, it was the only wrong turn we made on the trip, thanks to my navigation I like to think (he didn't). On the way back I drove as far as Belgium, having to put up with him reminding me every half mile to drive on the right hand side of the road, and he took over just after the nastiest junction, which my son-in-law had marked down as 'the nastiest junction'. Somewhere in early France we took the wrong road and my son exhibited the trait many males have of driving in hope that there will be a turn off somewhere to take us back onto the right road, and refusing to stop and turn round. Despite my pleading, he drove for miles, peering at French road signs just to see if one of them said in broken English 'theese is the road you take eef you took the wrong turn at zee big roundabout with zee petunias on eet'. Of course, there wasn't one and, eventually, after seeing far more of rural France than we wanted to, and until I got desperate enough to look out for suspicious groups of locals playing banjos, he eventually gave in. After a dramatic and somewhat bad-tempered handbrake turn we returned from whence we had come. A terse silence accompanied us all the way to the Euro tunnel. Now I've amended my son-in-law's excellent instructions with the words 'Don't forget to take the first exit at zee roundabout with zee petunias on eet', except my son has said he won't be accompanying me on the drive again because I'm a rubbish navigator and sent him on the wrong way only ten miles from home. The cheek of it. And this is the person who couldn't find the M25 for love nor money the last time we went to Gatwick Airport.