Can I survive for 24 hours without GPS navigation? | Smartphones

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

On the one hand, it makes total sense, navigation and spatial memory belonging in the hippocampus, which is the first region of the brain the disease atrophies. On the other hand, life expectancy is significantly lower than average in both jobs – 68 and 64 respectively – and Alzheimer’s typically afflicts those over 65.

Nevertheless, there is a good argument to ditch the GPS simply because memory, particularly spatial, is use-it-or-lose-it, as a study in Scientific Reports demonstrated in 2020. We have become more and more reliant on Google Maps, even using it for journeys we know well.

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

On Tuesday evening, I was on my way to karaoke, at a bar where I had never been, in a road I know like the back of my hand. It is opposite my kids’ school, it has a giant Sainsbury’s – honestly, I could close my eyes and see this road naked.

Yes, there was a hitch. I hadn’t even written down the bar’s street number, and the road is roughly as long as the path to enlightenment. After about 15 minutes, knowing that somewhere close – or possibly far away – my compadres were singing a Hamilton duet and I would not be there to help them, I started making poor choices: trying to read shop signs from too far away; hurrying, changing my mind, doubling back. I had a flashback to the time my grandfather summoned me and my sister to his deathbed, and we hadn’t written down the number, so all we had was “Edgware Road”. That was a long night.

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

Hubris, that was my problem. I’m 51 years old, a born Londoner and a lifelong cyclist, so sometimes I just assume I have the Knowledge by osmosis. But I did have a life before a smartphone – a good life – and I remember exactly how this is done: you need an A-Z. I got another powerful wave of nostalgia in Brixton, all those times you’ve forgotten your A-Z but don’t want to buy one, so have to sidle into a WH Smith, check the map, memorise it, then buy some chewing gum on the way out. That’s why spearmint is the taste of being lost.

Newsflash, GPS-refuseniks: A-Zs aren’t the same any more. You can get a tiny one, which will inform you of the whereabouts of Hyde Park; and a giant Ordnance Survey map without any road names on it which – oh final irony – comes with a QR code where you can download those on an app. It’s quite a beautiful thing, this map, but so much worse than useless, like being able to smell food through an open window. Cycling to Blackheath in south-east London, through roads which all rang a bell, I ended up trying to navigate by the way you know you’re near a hospital – all those eerie dead ends.

I got back to the main drag in Camberwell, and from there it should just be one straight road all the way to my stepmother’s, with a wiggly bit at the end I could do in my sleep. Dogs get so much credit, the way they can always find their way home however lost they are. I am as good as a dog, without their sense of smell – which is to say, way better than a dog.

Central London, you’d think would be easier, and yes it has more landmarks, but it also has more developer-introduced weirdness: wide bits of street that don’t really have a name any more, have been subsumed with marble and force of will by the headquarters they flank, around which sit a bunch of restaurants that must have addresses but nobody ever uses them. They use the blue dot on their phone.

It took me an age to find my office party, but at least I could walk in satisfied that I, so help me, will be the last of us holding marbles.