Getting London wrong

I am in danger of becoming a shut-in. As the transport links improve, I'm finding London harder and harder to get around. It's my own stupid fault. In the old days, I'd have stuck post-its over my mini A-Z and then got on my bike.

But last night I tried to get to a pub using the new shiny Overground and my iphone. Google told me the pub was next door to an Overground station and there's one a short walk from my house - I should try it. What happened next is a bit of a blizzard. I think there was some engineering work and talk of a replacement bus that didn't exist, and then another bus and a man on the bus who stank like a corpse.

But it all just went so wrong and confusingly wrong. When I was a child I used to have a stammer. It was accompanied by a twitch. Both only nowadays appears at moments of stress. A rail replacement bus really shouldn't qualify.

The stammer is just there as a wall. It's my body's way of saying "Leave me alone, don't ask me questions." It used to be very handy at work, although as a management technique probably up there with electrifying keyboards.

Unfortunately, at this moment, my boyfriend was asking lots of questions. As in "Do you think that's the right bus?", "What does that sign say?" and "Is that tramp wearing someone else's skin?".

When I started jerking and spluttering like a broken Churchill dog, we gave up. It had taken us a bit over an hour to get to one of the Dalston stations. We went home to a warm fire and a film in which Doug McClure fought the warlords of Atlantis because reasons.

Annoying. I really wanted to go out last night. Although quite what social value someone constantly saluting the Fourth Reich would be, I dunno. And this morning, using a different app, I discover I could have WALKED to the pub in about forty minutes.

There's a lesson in here. Possibly about modern technology. Or the death of map-reading. Or that, if you are going to fit your slave workers with gills, remember to hire a really big squid.