Breathe in

We have a Tom Tom. Excellent little device for getting you to somewhere and getting you away again. It does mean though that I have even less idea about where I'm going and where I've been. The machine just tells me to do this or that and I do.

One disadvantage of allowing the device to take you to a place in Spain is that lots of the streets in the old town centres look like the ones in the photos. Narrow and with difficult angles. Tom doesn't worry too much about road widths and it's possible to find yourself in a street with a nearly impossible right angled turn. Scrapes along the walls show that other people have found it tricky too.

Nowadays of course roads are built with modern traffic in mind and they are perfectly navigable. I have this theory though that to compensate the designers of underground car parks have mimicked the labyrinthine design of the old Spanish town centres. Many underground car parks have huge pillars in strange places, a bizarre layout and lots of protruding obstacles out of sight below the waistline of any car.