Can I survive 24 hours without GPS navigation?

Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than other workers to die from Alzheimer’s disease a Harvard study published in the British Medical Journal.

On the one hand, it ensures that navigation and spatial memory belong entirely in the hippocampus, the first part of the brain to atrophy due to the disease. On the other hand, life expectancy in both jobs is significantly lower than average – 68 and 64 years respectively – and Alzheimer’s disease typically affects people over 65.

Nevertheless, there is a good argument for abandoning GPS simply because memory, especially spatially, is ‘use-it-or-lose-it’, because a study demonstrated in scientific reports in 2020. We have become increasingly dependent on Google Maps, even using it for trips we know well.

So could I survive 24 hours without GPS? That means no Google Maps, no Apple Maps, no Citymapper. And that means, as I discovered after one single expedition, leaving your phone at home. The temptation to use it when you’re lost is just too strong.

Tuesday night I was on my way to karaoke, at a bar I’d never been to, on a road I know like the back of my hand. It’s opposite my children’s school, it has a massive Sainsbury’s – honestly I could close my eyes and see this road naked.

Yes, there was a problem. I hadn’t even written down the bar’s house number, and the road is about as long as the path to enlightenment. After about 15 minutes, knowing that my comrades were singing a Hamilton duet somewhere near – or possibly far away – and I wouldn’t be there to help them, I started making bad choices: trying to find store signs from too far away reading; rush, change your mind, turn back. I had a flashback to the time my grandfather called me and my sister to his deathbed, and we hadn’t written the song down, so all we had was “Edgware Road.” That was a long night.

There are a lot of things you shouldn’t do to millennials. One of them is to ask for directions. It’s so unfathomable to them why anyone would have to do that, they assume you’re a scam. So I ended up back in Sainsbury’s for a regroup and maybe a meal deal – and the bar was right next to it.

Overconfidence, that was my problem. I’m 51 years old, a native Londoner and a lifelong cyclist, so sometimes I just assume I have the Knowledge by osmosis. But I did have a life before the smartphone – a good life – and I remember exactly how to do it: you need an AZ. I got another powerful wave of nostalgia in Brixton, all those times you’ve forgotten your AZ but don’t want to buy one so you have to pop into a WH Smith, look at the menu, memorize it and then buy some gum on the way outside. Therefore, spearmint is the taste of being lost.

News flash, GPS refuseniks: AZs are not the same anymore. You can get a little one, which will inform you of the location of Hyde Park; and a giant Ordnance Survey map with no street names on it, which – oh final irony – comes with a QR code where you can download it into an app. It’s a very beautiful thing, this card, but much worse than useless, like being able to smell food through an open window. Cycling to Blackheath in south-east London, along roads that all rang a bell, I ended up trying to navigate the way you know you’re near a hospital – all those creepy dead-end roads.

I returned to the main road in Camberwell, and from there it should just be one straight road, all the way to my stepmother’s, with a winding bit at the end that I could do in my sleep. Dogs get so much praise because they can always find their way home, no matter how lost they are. I’m as good as a dog, without their sense of smell – that is, much better than a dog.

You’d think central London would be easier, and yes, it has more landmarks, but it also has more developer-introduced strangeness: wide stretches of street that don’t really have names anymore, are sheathed in marble and force of will through the headquarters they flank, around which are a number of restaurants that must have addresses, but no one ever uses them. They use the blue dot on their phone.

It took me forever to find my office party, but at least I could walk in with the certainty that, so help me, I’ll be the last of us holding a marble.