Why I hate being like a John Cleese character

5:32pm Friday 25th January 2008

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THE film I most loathe in all the world is Clockwise starring John Cleese.

It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, especially when a manic Cleese destroys a public telephone box in a fit of frustrated rage.

I'm not saying it's a bad film; it's just that Cleese's character reminds me too much of myself.

In Clockwise, he spends the entire film trying to get to a conference after a series of mishaps befall him and leave him stranded.

I knew exactly how he felt when I tried to get to Great Kingshill last Wednesday afternoon to give a talk to the village's Golden Link group.

I left with plenty of time to spare and took my laptop. My aim was to give the group of over-60-year-olds a talk on the latest technology, and show members how stories could be uploaded on to our website.

Now, my grasp of geography has never been that good. As soon as I stray outside the centre of High Wycombe, I get a nose-bleed.

However, I am fairly familiar with Great Kingshill so I was confident there would be no problem.

I checked at the time of the talk being booked where the village hall was, and I was told it was in Main Road'.

So when I arrived in Great Kingshill well in time for the meeting, I turned on my satellite navigation system and tapped in Main Road.

Turn left,' it ordered me, and I duly obliged. I was rather confused, though, because it appeared to be taking me away from Kingshill. But I trusted the technology and followed the instructions all the way down Cryers Hill.

I hadn't ever previously been to this village hall, so I assumed there was an anomaly and it was for some reason situated just outside Kingshill.

But I knew something was seriously wrong when I found myself heading towards Naphill.

The penny clicked and I realised it was taking me to Main Road in Walters Ash. In panic, I turned around and went back up the hill, only to find myself stuck behind the slowest refuse lorry in the history of the world.

I glanced at the clock and realised it was now 2.30pm, the time of the meeting, so desperate measures were needed.

I stopped at a pub and rushed inside. A group of drinkers told me to carry on for half a mile and look out for the pedestrian crossing.

I jumped back into the car and rode back up the hill. There was no sign of a village hall on the left and I found myself in Prestwood.

So I turned round again and found another pub where a group of respectable-looking late middle-aged customers were gathered in the car park. If anyone would know where a village hall was, it would be this lot.

Breathlessly, I clambered out and asked for directions, but they didn't know of any village hall, and said one might be around the other side of the green.

It was now 2.40, and if there was a public phone box in sight, I'm sure I would have done a Cleese and started smashing it up.

But suddenly, the pub chef appeared. Miraculously, he knew where the village hall was. It was two minutes away, past some houses on the right.

He looked a bit bewildered when I asked permission to leave my car in the pub car park, because I didn't want to risk driving past the location again. But he agreed, and I fled on foot with my laptop, stopping once to ask at a shop for more directions, before I finally arrived at the end of the trail.

I was sweating and panting by the time I lumbered into the village hall, and was greeted by a round of cheers from the 15 patient Golden Link members.

They thought it highly amusing that the man giving a talk on technology had got lost because of, er, technology.

In the immortal words of Cleese, "I think I got away with it" as I then showed the group how to upload the story of my disastrous trip to their meeting directly to our website for all the world to see.

They even invited me back again, although I promise I will set out at dawn next time.

When I got home that evening, I investigated what had gone wrong. Main Road did not appear to exist anywhere in Great Kingshill, and I finally realised the village hall was in Missenden Road.

It was a basic human error, not a technological one after all, made several months ago when I put the booking in my diary. I reckon I was told it was in the main road when I asked for a street name, and I had simply misunderstood.

The moral of this story is that over-reliance on gadgets is dangerous and that a map, common-sense and a good old sense of direction are probably more reliable than all the satellite systems in the world.