I also learned to drive in my mid 20s and thus never knew a time without GPS. But one time not too long ago, maybe 2017, my partner and I were driving from her aunt’s in Stroud to her friend’s in Sussex – we live in Scotland and my English geography is not great – when my phone died unexpectedly, thus wiping out any sense of knowing where we were going. In those days she still didn’t have a smartphone, we didn’t have a road atlas, and neither of us had a battery pack… so our only hope was to keep going for a while until we found ourselves at an identifiable landmark (a Sainsburys near Oxford I believe), ring the friend we were heading towards, get her to look up the directions, write them down step by step on the back of an envelope and then anxiously try to follow them for several hours through Reading’s grey roundabout plains, hoping we were where we thought we were/following the right signs.

People gripe about reliance on google maps these days, but that day gave us a real taste of the before times and I don’t think it was better!