WITH THE GREAT STRIDES MADE IN TECHNOLOGY,GETTING TOTALLY LOST HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER.

Stunning and amazing as it may seem,your hero (thats me by the way!), had a caricature job the other week. I got an e-mail asking if i was still attending 'the wedding'. I thought as a guest .I couldn't remember the wedding or even the people. A few days later my dear beloved Lynne was plowing through our e-mail history and stumbled across a couple of e-mails to do with me doing some work at a wedding,'next year', in Lancashire ,near Wigan. This news which i'd totally forgot illicited two responses....(1) Whoops! Closely followed by (2) Oh shit!...... But 'your hero'(thats me ,by the way.) was not nonplussed for long .Soon the lightening smooth caricaturists reflexes 'kicked in',and,like a scene from an Indiana Jones film(Indiana Jones and the shit'ole of doom). i tore into the 'shit'ole',laughingly called my studio and fumbled ,stumbled ,grabbed and groped for any drawing equipment and paper with which to scribble n' caricature, stun and amaze the wedding guests with. Underneath a heap of dusty rubble in the corner was a bag,last used once long ago, on my last commission. In amongst the dust cobwebs and beetles was a heap o' drawing stuff. So, 'your hero'(thats still me) was ready for action.
My dearly beloved Lynne ,again leapt to the computer (she's a clever girl.) To find out where we where going. There was maps of various scales and even sattelite pictures of the actual building it was in.Getting there wasn't going to be too hard as it was just off the M6. The problem came when we asked the computer to show us how to go to some friends nearby,after 'the gig' was over. I left the wedding(the gig) flushed with success as the old Leatherbarrow magic was still there.Also flushed with a few pints of Guinness.(One of the benefits of having the lovely Lynne doing the driving .) The journey ,apparently, was only a very short easy trip .But computers havent been developed by clever boffin sorts through the years just to give short easy answers to problems. So it didn't. It gave us a wonderfully complicated route taking us 'all over the place.' When we found ourselves up to our motor's door panels in mud up some farm dirt track ,with a single lone light about 40 miles away the only 'thing 'we could see through the darkness',we came to the conclusion,we were just a teeny bit ,totally lost. Now i know how it must be for people with Sat-Navs .Those wonderous devices that take all the traffic off the M1 and puts it onto the B2n'i/2 sideroad ,or similar. So, the wondrous device (often with celebrity voices giving the directions for gawd's sake ,we truly live in strange times.) takes the mass of traffic thundering through tiny little hamlets ,villages and beauty spots ,farmers tracks,or basically anywhere the drivers don't want to go or,where the locals don't want them either. Very soon ,the motorways will be deserted ,except for the odd bit of wind blown vegetation or litter, while villages towns and sideroads will be solid gridlocked ,end to end lines of rusty steel.