Jane goes mad in France.

 

Got back yesterday evening from a very pleasant week at Dave and Sue’s in Burgundy. Click here to see a video of our time there. Normally we have no problem finding our way there: I print out basic motorway directions on a piece of A4: 

and we take a French road atlas with us.

This time I took Jane and, fatal mistake, forgot the French road atlas. While Jane is invaluable for finding your way around an unknown town she’s pretty redundant for getting from one town to another - indeed she will try to send you along much worse routes than you would have worked out for yourself. In the case of our trip, round the Milan ring-road which I’ve always avoided: it has a 90 km speed limit and is infested with speed cameras. Where she really excelled herself was in at one point sending us back up the A40 in the opposite direction to the one we were supposed to be going! It cost us a good half an hour in time and a bucket of goodwill towards each other and the world. On Monday Dave and Sue, Pat and I decided to go to Dijon. None of us had ever been there before, so although it’s easy to get to, I decided to programme Jane to find us a car-park in the centre of Dijon. Unfortunately, when I came to plug her in I discovered that the connection on her charger had broken and as her battery ran down she stopped speaking to us. Therefore instead of being directed by those commanding tones so reminiscent of Matron at one’s old school. I had to squint at her display and interpret it as best I could to Dave who was driving. And finally I had to buy her a new charger in order for us to get back to Il Bel Paese yesterday. So she’s bossy, expensive, useless at giving you directions and you can’t even have sex with her. Thank God I’m not married to her.

   However, I can’t blame her for our other disaster in France. On our way to Dijon I stopped to fill up with LPG. Although it is possible if unusual to put petrol in your car yourself, in Italy the LPG pump is always operated by a petrol pump attendant. Life in England has made me a dab hand at putting petrol in a car, but GPL is a different kettle of fish. It’s not a simple matter of shoving a nozzle in a hole - which most men seem quite comfortable with - but a much more subtle coupling, involving a precise aligning of parts before the connection is made. How sensible the Italians are to employ someone to do this.  It runs completely contrary, of course, to the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things which is to go for ‘cost-saving efficiency’ and bugger the consequences for everyone’s quality of life. Anyway, I obviously have the typical Englishman’s inability to couple subtly, and it took a service station employee with a monkey-wrench to separate my car from the pump to which I’d maladroitly  attached it. I suppose I could have tried throwing a bucket of cold water over them instead!