Okay… so Patrick isn’t actually a friend or a relative, but he feels like part of the family now. Patrick is the nice Irishman who tells us where to go when trying to navigate from point A to point B.

In purely technical terms, he’s a Tom Tom One (Europe) SatNav device that I bought for Bobbie as an emergency early Christmas present after she found herself heading north on the M6 while trying to drive from our house to the airport. Navigationally speaking, that’s about as wrong as it’s possible to get.

We are both directionally incompetent here in the UK. We think it has something to do with not being able to see the ocean from Birmingham. So Patrick’s job, now that we are car owners, is to save us from ourselves and make sure we can reliably return to where we left our child.

Both Bobbie and I talk to Patrick while driving. Occasionally we’ll argue with him and question his decisions, but mostly we’ll try and engage him: “Where are you taking us Patrick? I don’t recognise this area of town at all…”. However, he’s almost never actually wrong, and he even knows his way around the countries that drive on the other side of the road.

He’s a bit bossy, but we love him.