Direct-Me-Don't

Someone stopped me and asked for directions the other day.

This could turn out to be the biggest mistake he'll make all year, and I can't help but wonder if he isn't still wandering the various blind alleys I'd clearly sent him down, hungry and confused.

My orientation skills are rudimentary at best, and were probably not helped by having a geography teacher that wasn't even there about half the time. When he did bother to show up, he spent most of the lesson telling us about where he'd been on some jolly the previous week. I suppose it's a geography lesson of a sort.

Anyway, asking me for directions is like asking Tom Cruise to cure your schizophrenia - only without the absolute certainty that I'm actually helping, or indeed any kind of certainty whatsoever.

This gentleman even had a photocopy of a map with him, with his destination highlighted on it, and it still took me an inordinate amount of time to get my bearings and find any road that I recognised. I really don't know the names of any streets where I live, despite walking down them frequently - when I need to get somewhere I'd much rather someone said, "It's opposite Argos," or "It's near that part of town that stinks of cheese" - although admittedly that wouldn't narrow it down much round here.

I can't quite remember when it was exactly in the middle of the seemingly endless flood of useless information that came out of my mouth, but at one point he asked me if I was cold. I wasn't particularly, so I took that as some kind of coded message that translated roughly as, "OK, I've stopped listening about 15 minutes ago, and I think we should both write this off as a mistake. I'm going to go and find someone else who's likely to be more helpful - you know, like a small child who's just learned to talk, or a violent hallucinating tramp."

Eventually he moved off in the general direction I'd indicated, no doubt his mind bleeding from the sheer multitude of confusing and contradictory information I'd bamboozled him with.

The one and only occasion where I could be fully confident that my guidance was sound was a number of years ago when I was coming home from school. A car pulled up beside me, and, rather than the expected abduction/bumming scenario, the driver asked me where a particular road was. I announced that all he need do was simply to continue on down the road that he was already on.

After he'd thanked me for my time, I strode proudly onward, happy in the knowledge that I'd managed to selflessly aid my fellow man, only to glance behind me and see that he'd actually only driven on about 2 metres, before deciding to ask someone else.

He was either confused by my instruction to, "Keep going down this road," or more likely was reacting to the invisible waves of unreliability that I clearly generate when people get near; a bloke asked me for the time the other day, and upon telling him I half expected him to ask me if I wouldn't mind checking to be sure.