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A cabbie friend told me he'd been hailed in a central London street by a woman who was in a hurry to get to Heathrow. After five minutes she got a call on her mobile and then asked him to turn round and drop her back at home, because: "My minicab's turned up." He stopped the cab, ordered her out and gave her a dressing down - in my view, perfectly reasonably.
I concede that, in a world full of men obsessed by the minutiae of orientation, I may be in a class of my own; hell, I've even been known to question black-cab drivers on the routes they take. Nevertheless, I can't be alone in finding the brave new world of sat-nav-guided minicab drivers to be a mad one, making of our beautiful city a tediously virtualised realm.
Frankly, it's not the just-off-the-jet minicab drivers that really piss me off. I can understand that if you're more familiar with Lagos than London sat-nav is probably in the passenger's interest quite as much as the driver's. No, what I object to is those minicab - and private drivers - who really should know better.
Take the man who picked me up in Crouch End on Saturday night. He was driving an immaculate Mercedes, and there on his dash was the bright little box. As he plugged in my postcode I asked him if he knew the way to Vauxhall. He maintained that he did, that he didn't need the sat-nav, but that still it would take us by a better route.
It didn't. We crawled down Fortress Road and then the Kentish Town Road - two of the busiest streets in north London at any time of day or night. Then - folly of follies - we turned right at Euston and headed along Marylebone Road to the Edgware Road. Oddly, I could see that this route was what old-time black cabbies used to call "on the cotton": the shortest from A to B on arterial routes. However, as any proper Londoner knows, the shortest arterial route is seldom the quickest.
Having queried this man's competence once, I sensed that if I pushed him further he'd crack - he bristled with misplaced professional pride in his sat-nav. Personally, I wonder when the sat-nav craze will stop; after all, it can't be safe to have ignorant drivers staring at little TV screens instead of the road.
I hate to be a cynic, but I am, and I suspect that just as with mobile phones there'll be no real move to regulate sat-navs until there is 100 per cent market penetration.
Meanwhile, I'd far rather ride with the real thing. The same day I was picked up by Michael Dennis, the self-styled "Black Cab Poet".
Copies of his rather good poems were on the back seat and as he took me from Clapham to Stockwell he even gave me an impromptu performance of one of them; a timely rant on - you guessed it - White Van Men and their sat-navs.
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All I see from this article is that Will Self had a very boring day and all he could come to write about was some "thoughts aloud" describing lack of professionalism of one certain minicab driver.
Or I missed the point and there is a hidden moral that an "unprepared reader" is incapable to unwrap?
- Vlad Yanpolsky, London
