An Aside: Navigating with Jane TomTom

Jane is a little like a fellow traveller who is absolutely certain she knows the way, but is basing all her conviction on an imperfectly memorised copy of the 2004 road maps for the whole of Western Europe. If, for example, someone has imprudently closed off a little-used lane, or pedestrianised another, or made one-way a narrow, yet busy byway, she is oblivious to it. Various possibilities then emerge. One can blindly follow her directions in the hopes that the road is still navigable, or one can take one’s route choices into one’s own hands for a while, ignoring Jane and letting her pick up the pieces later, but being sure to avoid her routing you back to the problem road, or one can use her feature-set to the full, informing her on the fly that the desired route has been closed by His most Worshipful, the Mayor of Lisieux since 2007, due to on-going motorway building and would she select another? I prefer the latter approach, but needs must when the devil drives, and I sometimes nip up an empty lane if the village seems dead and the view ahead is good or perform an illegal u-turn in a small town when no one (who can catch me) is looking. The surveillance culture hasn’t made it to France, yet, where you can still surreptitiously scratch your upper thigh without a public servant-operative blogging about it the very same minute.