En Route Read online

  Erik the Good was spiritual, a Catholic in that rather miniature moment between Norse paganism and the heaven-on-Earth practicality of sturdy, do-good Lutheranism, which characterises the Danish way of being and thinking now. If you ask a modern Dane what’s good for you, they will tell you the inner hygge you seek can be obtained by gathering together in convivial, like-minded groups and burning as many candles as you can lay a hand on.

  For them, the pilgrim route incorporating Erik’s Viborg declaration point is merely an excuse to bring people together so that everyone can do the same thing in a hyggeily fashion, with as many coffee and aebleskivereating stops in blond-wood premises as you like. No point in torturing yourself.

  (Incidentally, hygge does not, as British and American commentators have decided, mean ‘cosy’. It has nothing to do with bucolic scenes and warm cocoa but is in fact an inner tranquillity obtained by a Zen-like meditation leading to the creation of an ambience of balance, harmony and gentleness—hence the candlelight. As compared with hyggeily, which is a bit more boisterous and leads to babies—often named Erik.)

  But I detour. A maverick move not at all indulged by my very first GPS companion, Roxanne, who was, I suspected—in the early 1990s, at the coalface of this new technology—sent to the satellite system from the LAPD traffic department, or perhaps the National Guard. Roxanne, of the drill sergeant commands, ‘Turn left, turn right, right turn now’, was a terrifying initiation into this new technology, which promised that you would be ‘never lost’. Despite her best efforts, the promise was not fulfilled as Roxanne and I meandered haplessly like tourists without a ‘map of the stars’ around the Hollywood Hills in search of the artist I was visiting.

  I have to admit Roxanne and I had several fallings-out. She was impatient and demanding and had a grating way of repeating herself more loudly, as if speaking to an elderly deaf person. Many were the times she demanded I return to the highlighted route (pronounced rout) only to be thwarted by my hesitation due to driving in a non-British-colonialcountry style, on the right. We eventually worked it out, and after a while travelling the itinerary repeatedly, I had a few tricks up my sleeve and knew the quicker way was around the Trader Joe’s car park, a shortcut Roxanne did not compute. Ha! One for the analogues!

  Which of course brings up the ever- perplexing enquiry: why do Americans and most of the world drive on the right and we, the remnants of the British colonies and members of the Commonwealth (except Canada), drive on the left?

  The answer, it seems, lies in ancient rituals of swordsmanship (the preference to hold a sword and joust with the right hand while riding on the left) and horse-drawn wagons upon which drivers used a whip with their right hand. Archeological evidence also points to the marching formation of Roman armies who kept to the left. Pilgrims were told to keep left in an edict sent down by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300, or thereabouts. I’m not sure if this is the reason Dante placed Boniface in the eighth circle of hell in The Divine Comedy (or, as we know it, the ring-road system).

  Over in France, things used to lean left. Members of the aristocracy were conveyed in their carriages on the left side of the road, while the peasant class had to tough it out on the right (something to do with splashing). But come the Revolution and in an effort to blend in and hide among the hoi polloi, the people of the upper crust ventured right. In solidarity with the Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité–inspired côté droit, eventually Napoleon, master of all he conquered, decreed that people should keep to the right. France and her enlightened, revolutionised or dominated friends and subjects—including the American independence fraternity—went right.

  No doubt, there is much more to be said on this fascinating subject, but I’m sure you can find an uncle or some such who will be able to inform you at length over the Christmas sherry.

  I’m not sure if Roxanne was left- or right-leaning, and with her abrasive twang, whether she made it into the next-gen team of the humanised GPS voice force. Since her time, the development of IVR (interactive voice response systems) has become pretty sophisticated. Hence the enlistment of the aforementioned enthusiastic, if confused, Marcella, the ever-patient, encouraging and so Britishly diplomatic Penelope, the rather more matter-of-fact, flatly Danish Bodil, and a cast of dozens in other parts of the globe.

  The type of voice employed in one’s GPS is not a matter of chance. From the early 2000s, as human voices were introduced to replace their robotic cousins, researchers have been studying the impact of tone, pitch and gender of voice on users’ experience and response. Human factors design is informed by a branch of psychology focused on assessing the impact of the type of vocal intonations that elicit the right reaction in a particular environment.

  According to the research of Rochelle E Evans, who investigated the impacts of IVR in medical surveying and motivational automated therapies, in general the female voice out-intones the male in good interaction. Her study concluded that male voices were considered more ‘usable’ but female voices were deemed the most ‘trustworthy’ and sympathetic, duplicating the actual human circumstances of confiding in someone like your female friends, a midwife, or sister, one assumes.

  Male voices were found to be more appropriate when domination was required (!), whereas female voices established a stronger bond and urged a confidence. Older men over sixty-five preferred to listen to older men (yes, I think all women in their sixties know this). It is, apparently, about communication skills. Duh! The conclusion: patient-centric communication is more naturally produced by the female voice.

  In the brave new world of IVR, tone of voice can be engineered. To convey professionalism, the voices behind our machines are asked to produce intonations that are described by Evans as ‘dispassionate, matter-of-fact, sombre, and trustworthy’, and if required to be more informal or ‘upbeat’ are asked to be ‘happy, outgoing, caring, interested, perky, optimistic and passionate about life’.

  Which frankly seems a bit hyperventilated for general road use. In particular ‘perky’, which would make you want to slap your GPS every time you made a collective malfunctioned manoeuvre. In summary, Evans reports that people want responsible- sounding voices that are calm, empathetic, caring and encouraging. In other words, Mother. Although this would not work for Norman Bates, I guess.

  I’m yet to find any research that links user reaction to voice and gender based upon their own historical experience, activating the triune principle of the tripartite cortex: limbic and reptilian brains that fight it out in the survival/emotion pit. But Ted, Barry, Dave and the lovely, Britishly polite Jeremy, are still to be avoided in my experience, primarily because they remind me of my annoying driving instructor, and of my father, who air-braked throughout the entire practice experience. For me, the sound of the male instructing voice, even Jeremy, who I’m sure is a very decent fellow, conjures up visions of a juicy-fruit-gum-chewing flincher wearing an unsartorial polyester short-sleeved shirt, shorts and long socks, with Brylcreemed hair and an unpleasant body odour.

  No doubt tone also has something to do with national attributes. Americans probably had no real issue with Roxanne and her abrupt, no-fuss demands. In the fast-food ‘to-go’ USA culture where words are lopped off like annoying overhangs, ‘Coffee, to go’ has replaced the dawdling ‘Yes, please may I have a caffe latte to take away’, which takes far too much time. Come to think of it, my Roxanne did sound sympatico with a wise-cracking diner waitress from a formula sitcom. The GPS tone of voice very probably exemplifies and reinforces the imprints of cadence that reside in the collective unconscious of a culture.

  The previously mentioned lovely Penelope has the inflection and tone of a public school character from a Richard Curtis movie. A bit posh, but used to mixing it with the oddballs of inner London. Pen, as I’m sure her Islington friends would call her, is ever-so-slightly apologetic to have to suggest that you might need to make a right-hand turn in a mile or so. She instructs with centuries of foreign diplomacy and faint condescension under her
digital belt to evoke a sense of calm authority with a firm understatement. Of course, the same can be said for Jeremy, but all of Pen’s attributes make him seem slightly prattish.

  At the end of the day, or at least while on the journey, and especially if you are driving solo in unfamiliar territory, the GPS assistant needs to be a companion. The reason, I guess, that I, like so many it seems, build a kind of personality around the voice is to create a bond and to feel less irritated at being told where to go and get off, by a machine no less.

  This is the great challenge for the robotic digital era. ‘We have the technology’, as we know from endless re-runs of The Six Million Dollar Man, but do we want smart machines, auto-driving cars, gadgets cleverer and more capable than their owners? For those of us whose first encounter with the thinking machine was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the haunting, murderous monotone of HAL 9000 lurks deep in our psyche. Imagine if all of a sudden our GPS companions converted into rebellious carjackers, responding with ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that’ when requested to take you to your destination; instead, leaving you stranded in the cosmic dust or, as we have established, on a mountain ledge!

  We’ve had the technology to relieve humans of thinking and dexterity for years, of course, and our resistance to smart machines had to be broken down gradually. The automatic car taking over from the manual drive; the little beeps first for seatbelt alarms, pings for being too close in back and front, now sides; petrol consumption monitors removing our need to think about when to refuel; power steering, auto parking, rear-vision imaging—our brains are being rewired to technical docility. Recently a friend using a rather standard hire car, who is accustomed to driving a fancy advanced-system Tesla, forgot to turn on the ignition, lock the car and reverse safely because her own car does all that for her. ‘I’m in fear of losing my brain!’ she lamented. In truth our brains are being reprogrammed. Our memories are now lodged in a cloud called i. I don’t know where that is, but purportedly it’s in a remote part of Denmark where clouds lie low.

  Even though our resistance to the robotic era is being eroded, our reptilian selves have a hard time transferring our survival instincts to machines. Moreover, we have ingrained collective consciousness and private, emotional primal instincts that harness us to our ancient psyches. Telling time is a good example. There is a reason, for instance, that the Swiss watch industry, besieged by a digital-led technical crisis and a massive market slump in the 1970s and ’80s, resurrected and rebranded itself, against the reliable LCD readout, battery-operated cheapie, by going all ultra-Jungian.

  The emergence of first the ubiquitous Swatch and then the bespoke, collectable (the size of a medieval sundial on the wrist) ‘timepiece’, promoted by uber athletes to those who wished to emulate them, is linked to our deep collective consciousness.

  Ancient humans that we are, we know the sequence of sun and moon, and like to watch time travel around the arc of the day (preferably in roundish format but, in a pinch, as a large square or rectangle shape) with clock ‘hands’ that emulate the original gnomon that cast its shadow on stone. Watches have been redesigned and recalibrated to tap into our earliest tribal mindset. They have become the new collectable jewellery of the evidently affluent, aspirational ‘made-it’ demographic who, let’s face it, have other gadgets to tell them the time if they really need to know.

  These crafted timepieces with umpteen doodads, dials, numbers and mechanical embellishments—chronographs, sunbursts, moon phases, calendars and more internal workings than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory or the Eise Eisinga Planetarium—are about wearing and controlling the universe of time and cosmos on your wrist. And about perpetuity. These individual trophy watches reach back and connect to millennia of initiations, golden handshakes, comings of age, and special occasions worthy of time marking and tribal accessorising. They are the bling thing disguised as utility.

  Warriors, chieftains and ‘masters of the universe’, like flamboyant displaying birds, always wear bling (or strange yellow bouffant hair), just in case their prowess is invisible in other ways (insert here winking smiley face emoji). The watch collectable says come hither, or don’t mess with me, in a Darwinian fight for natural selection or dominance of the ’hood. Fortunately for Swiss watchmakers, the reptilian survival brain overrides the cortex ‘just tell me the time’ brain, time after time.

  Hang on, let’s go back a paragraph or so. What’s the Eise Eisinga Planetarium? Well. Should you find yourself in the upper northwest corner of the Netherlands, just left of Leeuwarden and more or less above Sneek (great name!), you will come upon the little township of Franeker, and there you will find the contraption of all time—Mr Eise Eisinga’s awe-inspiring orrery. It’s beautiful! If they had a category listing the miniature wonders of the world, this would be one of them, most definitely.

  Being in this little Dutch brick house, a fraction higgledy-piggledy in its wooden interior bits, it is as if you are inside the clockwork of a bejewelled mechanism. You stand in the midst of blue painted walls, glinty spheres, and a chandelier of planets that rotate around a golden sunburst painted upon the ceiling, following cosmic trajectory lines plotted and painted in yellow. Around the periphery of the space are ever more dials—zodiac, moon phases, constellations. Eise Eisinga’s pain staking work, crafted between 1774 and 1781, outplays the Swiss trophy watch by a million light years.

  A total brainiac, little Eise was destined to be, like his father, a wool carder and comber but hankered to be more elevated than that. Not so much aspirationally, but astrologically. He was a stargazer, mathematician and amateur astrologer from an early age.

  If our lovely guide at Eise Eisinga’s Planetarium is to be believed (and why not, she was charming, funny and well informed), Eise was compelled to demonstrate that the predicted pile-up of the pagan god planets Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, scheduled for 1774 and causing some hysteria in end-ofthe-world-as-we-know-it congregations, was in fact a furphy. He diligently set to work and invented his clockwork orrery from tens of thousands of handmade nails, cogs and wheels hidden in a loft space to move the parts below, in order to demonstrate that while the planets might align, as such, they were cosmic years apart in actuality. No boom! Earth would be safe.

  The orrery is constructed at a ratio of 1 millimetre to 1 million kilometres and sends its planets in a real-time orbit. Eise Eisinga and his incredibly indulgent second wife, Trijntje, whose living rooms had been overtaken by his task, would have to patiently wait 29.4 Earth years from the time of the orrery’s first click to see his Saturn planet model complete its total rotation. I imagine there might have been a little malt wine and cheese celebration that night!

  The GPS is not only in your car, it is now in your hip pocket, and the intrepid solo-ped is perhaps even more common than those in the perpetual roundabout of life on the highways and freeways. Lone travellers are now so emboldened by owning a navigational device conveniently installed in the advanced generation of androids and iPhones that they feel equipped to boldly go where no traveller has trod before. Um, an increasingly shrinking surface, technologically speaking.

  The advent of the portable-phone-installed GPS has given rise to an amusing bit of urban choreography I call the ‘Google Maps Twist’. From Kalamazoo to central Paris, urban wanderers are swivelling and turning on street corners, along boulevards and up die Strasse as they attempt to reorient the disorientations of the little screen map that has an unnerving habit of encircling itself in search of some pre-programmed homing position.

  The tiny LCD screen has replaced the infuriating origami of the folded map but, it has to be admitted, the paper cartography at least remained stubbornly stable, pointed to the north, and once you got the hang of either reading upside down or simply turning it around, you were more or less on your way.

  In the backpacking days gone by, singles, duos and small groups of the discombobulated, in obvious confusion and struggling with their maps, were routinely
offered advice by comradely fellow travellers or unusually sympathetic locals (not in Paris, n’est-ce pas?). I still offer assistance to the Google Maps Twisters, but frequently they respond with ‘I’m on the phone!’, thinking perhaps I am seeking advice rather than dispensing it.

  Way back then it was something of a personal triumph to abandon the map entirely, secure in the habitually formed knowledge of the local markers—the man who sits at the café, the fountain, the old lady cracking walnuts, the corner devotional (again), the donkey—and to seem convincingly nonchalant enough to be asked for directions by the less well-adapted.

  You would think that such enquiries would have been rendered entirely redundant by the hand-held gadget, but, paradoxically, it appears to have increased the need for assistance. Perhaps if one is seen to be without a device it gives the impression of belonging, or at least knowing.

  It is, as might be expected by Men Are from Mars… readers, women who are more likely to enlist assistance from someone who looks amiable enough, whereas men continue to tough it out with the screen gyration, eventually to stride off at seemingly confident speed towards yet another corner challenge.

  There is still a little thrill to be had from being able to point in the right direction towards the canal, post office, drycleaner, coiffure de chien, musée, supermarché, Métro or ATM, and in general this is due to not having your face pressed up against a screen, but in fact looking around you and taking in the scenery. Following the pulsating blip along the blue highlighted line will get you there, but will you know where you went and what joys were along the way?