Deep inside a homing pigeon’s head is a detector cell that picks up the earth’s magnetic field and sends it straight to its destination. No hardware, no software – just a natural sense of position for thousands of kilometres. I know people who get lost in malls where they have lit up maps on eye level. Are pigeons smarter than us? I’m beginning to think so.

Isn’t it funny how the more serious someone is about their GPS, the higher they put it on the windscreen. I recently had the unfortunate privilege of traveling with an individual who has it halfway up, such is their enthusiasm for technology. I was staring the device square in the face.

It had us on a purple line travelling east. Luckily we were on the highway so the woman living inside it had nothing to say. As soon we approached suburbia she started speaking. And the guy behind the wheel started listening. She told him to turn left. We both looked left into a brick wall. The technoholic took it in his stride and went straight ahead. She tuned right. He turned right.

What made this torture is I knew exactly where we had to go. Right wasn’t it. I didn’t say anything. There was no telling how the gadget junkie would react should someone disturb his moment with the smoky-voiced maiden. We got to a gate where a friendly guy in uniform proceeded to open a gate for us.

Delivery trucks and a big fence between us and the parking lot told us that this was in actual fact the back of the mall.

Technobof turned around, sped out the gate and parked a kilometre from the entrance. I shook my head.

Look, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. We all need technology – I’m useless with matches for instance – but when it comes to direction we’ve got stuff to help us get around: the little voice inside your head, a map book, common sense for God’s sake. According to evolutionary principles and convenient factoids, we’re all blessed with at least a little of what a homing pigeon has in its brain.

Find it.

No, you’re not allowed to use a GPS to find your intuition, k?