Autotuning radios

Grump, grump... grump.It was a late night appointment with a bottle of wine.This morning I flew from Welshpool to Sleap, manually tuning radio frequencies from Welshpool through Manchester Centre and [Oh God, I've forgotten already, was it Lydham?] Centre for traffic advisories 'cos my reaction times are a bit poor but when I started to descend to Sleap and cancelled the flight following service, I couldn't raise Sleap to ask for permission to land.I could set the correct frequency on the stack using the knobs but on pressing the ' accent key to make a call, all I got was the standard options of either 1. Retune to [Oh God I still can't remember] Centre 2. Find nearest airportboth of which dump me straight back into the autotune nonsense, which then prevents any further attempt at manual tuning. It happens whenever and wherever I try to get away from ATC and talk to an airport, under VFR. Why is that, and does anyone know how to get around the problem?I don't really fly and am very new to FS9 anyway. Is this behaviour accurate? Don't VFR flights interact with ATC before contacting a destination? Is it something to do with tower and ground sharing a frequency? And (yeah, yeah, don't start a sentence with a conjunction) does it irritate anyone else?I'm tempted to go back to bed and start again...