6
Time to turn our attention to the UK’s most popular form of transport: the car.
I know what you’re thinking: driving isn’t that great for the planet either though, right? Well, no – no it’s not. Even with technology improving all the time, the sheer number of cars on the road is cause for concern. Transport is responsible for nearly 30 per cent of the EU’s total CO2 emissions, of which 72 per cent comes from road transportation;1 in the car-mad UK, that second number is even higher, at an alarming 91 per cent.2 But – and this is a big ‘but’ – a car travelling the same distance as an aircraft is going to produce 90g fewer CO2 emissions per km, per passenger (provided you’re travelling with a full carload).3 And – and this is a big ‘and’ – life is all about compromise. If I’m shutting down options in one area, I want to open them up in another, to feel my horizons expanding even as people tell me going flight-free will never take off. So back off, yeah?
More importantly, the technology to decarbonise cars is already out there – thanks, electricity! And, especially during the pandemic, I felt a creeping envy of friends who could dash off for a weekend away when we were still being advised against getting on public transport for ‘non-essential’ journeys. There was a sense of wildest freedom – and, honestly, of being a proper grown-up – that I had come to associate with hopping in the car and driving off into the sunset wherever one damn well pleased. I thought back to those wonderful, endless car trips we’d taken when I was a kid as a means of getting on holiday – instead of jumping on a plane – and realised that, in fact, the journey was the only bit of the holiday I could still recall with any clarity, all of us singing along to those same three car tapes on repeat and having the time of our lives.
And so, I decided now would be the ideal opportunity to get to grips with motorised transport in two guises: learning how to drive myself, and learning how to convince someone else to drive for me (otherwise known as hitchhiking).
My experience of learning to drive was supposed to be quick, easy and painless. That’s the whole point of doing an intensive driving course. Instead, it’s not until six months after my five-day course that I am even able to book a test; by which time I have, of course, completely forgotten how to drive. This is what getting behind the wheel for the first time in fifteen years looks like during a pandemic.
I had always assumed I would be able to drive at some point in my life. I did have a stab at it in my late teens – countless lessons with a middle-aged man who bragged about the cost of his koi carp and refused to teach me the parking manoeuvres. Although I wasn’t a natural by any stretch, looking back at that year, when I must have had upwards of thirty sessions, I do feel a little like he wasn’t all that keen for me to pass, thereby soaking up a steady income stream. That’s the tricky thing with driving instructors. There’s very little incentive for them to be any good.
I left for university without having taken the theory or the practical test – the only upside being that I still had the potential to achieve the holy grail and ‘pass first time’ – and spent the next decade thinking little of it. No one had a car at university; not unless they were incredibly minted. The years that followed saw me move to London where, again, driving always seemed a rather foolhardy pursuit, what with the congestion charge and the low-emissions-zone tax and nowhere to park.
I happily got myself around the place via public transport and, later, by bike. But staring down the barrel of a year without flying, I decided that now might be the time to finally get behind the wheel. I would be joining the majority of British holidaymakers; a 2021 RAC survey found that, of the 48 per cent of respondents who said they would try to take a summer holiday in the UK, nearly three-quarters (71 per cent) planned on driving.4 Although, as we’ll see in future chapters, getting people out of cars and onto public transport is the ultimate goal, encouraging people off planes as much as possible in the meantime is a priority. For example, a family of four travelling from London to Cornwall by car instead of flying into Newquay will emit around 258kg less CO2 in total.5
And, with the best will in the world, public transport isn’t always a viable option as it stands. I’d love to go to, say, Wales, on a whim. I’m always getting invited to Wales for work. All the trips sound brilliant. But every time I ask, ‘Could I do it by public transport?’ I’m met with an awkward silence.
‘I mean, I’m sure we can … there must be a way to … Let me check with … Um … No, no not really.’
(Trains in Wales are insane, by the way. Take a look at a map and you’ll immediately see what I mean. You can’t even travel from the top to the bottom of the country along the west coast – instead, you have to catch a train into England and then head back out again. Utter madness.)
So, back to learning to drive. First things first, the theory test: it’s really hard. No one tells you this. No one. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it calls it a ‘piece of piss’ and says there’s nothing to worry about. They’re right in some respects. About 80 per cent of it is common sense (what should you do if a driver cuts in front of you? a) stay calm, b) honk at him and shout expletives, c) flip him the bird, d) follow him home and murder his wife and child), but the other 20 per cent is the kind of very specific knowledge that can only come from spending quality time with the Highway Code. The minimum tread depth for tyres, for instance (1.6mm). The precise braking distance if you’re travelling at 50mph (38m). These cannot be common sense-d their way out of, friend.
Then there’s the hazard perception test, which seems to be less about perceiving hazards and more about perceiving them at the exact moment the test creator deems appropriate.
All in all, for someone who hasn’t taken an exam in close to ten years, it is an anxiety-inducing nightmare of an experience – and anyone who tells you it’s ‘no big thing’ is lying.
The stakes were particularly high when I did mine as, in classic journalist fashion, I left it till the very last minute – the Friday before I was due to start my intensive driving course. You can’t even book your practical test until you’ve passed your theory. If I failed the theory, I could do the practical lessons – but there’s no way I could finish the week with a licence, somewhat defeating the point of the whole palaver.
After a week of stressed-out studying and paying for extra mock hazard perception tests online, you’ll be pleased to hear that I did pass it – but I promise to never make you feel bad if you failed yours. Or say it’s a ‘piece of piss’.
The first time I meet Neil, my instructor for the week, I’m reassured that it’s all going to be OK. Not just driving – life, the universe, Brexit, all of it. He’s everything you could wish for in a driving instructor: jovial and calm in a crisis, with a roguish east London accent. Still, twenty-five hours is a lot of time to spend in a car with a man you just met. In classic millennial style, I’d decided to ‘throw some money at the problem’ and cram in a five-day course, five hours a day, with a test at the end.
I think it’s hard for people who have been driving for years to recollect just how scary it is when you don’t really know what you’re doing. There you are, in a puny metal box, hurtling along at speeds that could literally kill someone – quite possibly you – just acting as if it is all totally normal. Everyone else in their metal box hates you, because of the big learner sign and your adherence to the national speed limit. People not in metal boxes simply stroll out into the road at will, far from any kind of official crossing; bus drivers brazenly pull out when you have right of way.
Despite all this, by day three I find I’m actually … enjoying it, maybe? Or it could be I’ve just got a handle on my fear. Either way, I am doing less stalling in the middle of exceptionally busy junctions and clipping fewer wing mirrors as I go, although I still find it nigh on impossible to change lanes on a fast-moving dual carriageway without making little whining noises like a distressed baby animal who’s lost its mother. And I still can’t visualise passing my test – it seems like an impossible feat.
The really great thing about an intensive course, though, is that you make a crazy amount of improvement in a short space of time. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken me fifteen weeks – over three months – to achieve the progress I’ve made by 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Probably more, because each lesson you have to re-remember what you’re doing all over again. I’ve heard some say it doesn’t sound safe, but I genuinely disagree: having that much time in the car massively increases your confidence and skill level.
The downside is that, by the end of five hours, you feel that your brain is dribbling out of your ears like soup. The journey back from residential east London is spent staring into space, lightly drooling.
Day four feels critical. In real terms, there would still be ten weeks of lessons to go. In intensive terms, my test is tomorrow, and I still can’t quite get the hang of turning right at traffic lights without hyperventilating and waiting for five minutes until there is not a single car on the road while Neil says – calmly and patiently, but with a slight edge to his voice – ‘You can go. You can go now. Helen, why aren’t you going?’
Today’s the day I need to get past that. And the lane-changing thing. And roundabouts. And manoeuvres. At the moment, 50 per cent of the time, they work every time. I think the odds on that might need to improve slightly.
But on day five I get in the car feeling more at home than ever. Everything is second nature now – adjusting mirrors, getting in gear, pulling out and trundling along. I chat happily as we go, and realise that, yes, it is undeniable: I am having a nice time. It hits me that I really can drive – that I could pass this thing! – and it shouldn’t be such a revelation, but it is.
We do a mock test and, I’ll toot my own horn, I am nailing it. Every instruction is heeded, my hill start is perfection, my parallel park can’t be beaten. But then. Then, the roundabout. I’m driving along thinking what a prodigy I am when we approach it – a big, uncontrolled one, with three lanes of cars hurtling around at speed. I always feel like I’m taking my life in my hands at this one. And so, perhaps trying to overcome my natural hesitancy, I do take my life in my hands: I completely lose my head and just keep driving. I’m about to go when my brain finally cranks into gear and communicates that there are a s***-ton of cars coming my way, and at the last moment I pull off something that’s not quite an emergency stop but is definitely in the same neighbourhood.
I know immediately that I’ve failed but carry on with all the grace and dignity I can muster. At least it wasn’t the real thing. The bad news is I did, indeed, fail. The good news is, it’s the only thing I got wrong in forty minutes of driving.
It weirdly puts me in an extremely confident place to take my test. Which is … when, you ask? On the Friday it transpires there is no test. All the available slots were booked up.
‘Oh yeah, it’s the busiest test centre in the country,’ Neil tells me.
Then why am I taking my test here??? I want to shriek, but I bite my tongue.
‘Something should come up next week.’
I’m still vaguely optimistic at this point. Maybe it’s a good thing – time for my new skills to bed in. But nothing comes up the next week. It doesn’t come the week after, nor the week after that. In fact, it’s a full five weeks before I get the call to arms. Not ideal, but I’ll have a three-hour catch-up lesson with Neil beforehand; I can totally still make this thing work.
And then … coronavirus happens. From one week to the next, everything changes and all driving tests are cancelled for four months. Driving should be the least of my worries, and it is. But I feel like I’m back to where I started; I feel like this thing that so many people do so easily is always going to be just out of reach.
I did my course in February; in August I finally get a test.
Attempting to recreate the fluid feeling of the first time around, I book two three-hour lessons beforehand. What a difference six months makes – not in terms of driving, but in terms of Neil’s physique.
‘I’ve lost three stone!’ he says proudly, and I congratulate him, realising sadly that I have lost nothing during lockdown other than my joie de vivre and a £50-a-month brunch habit. We pootle around the streets of Wanstead, and I’m pleased to note that, in the words of Celine Dion, It’s all coming back, it’s all coming back to me no-o-owww. Sure, I stall. I hit a wing mirror. But these are minor considerations compared to the fact I can remember where the clutch is.
Lesson two dawns a couple of days before the test and I’m feeling good. But what happens next convinces me that, rather than a random string of unfortunate events that have so far thwarted me, someone or something is actively conspiring against me. We set off, and I am smooth as silk. You would probably look at me and think, hey, that person is driving a car like a person who knows how to drive a car. Neil makes me pull over to try a hill start. I stall it. I stall it again, though it doesn’t feel like it should stall. The engine completely fails to switch back on.
We swap sides and I sit there thinking how you have to see the funny side of life as Neil frantically tries the old classic, turning it off and on again, for a very long-feeling fifteen minutes. It eventually works, and we set off, although the car does a strange bunny hop down the road like a drunken kangaroo. It’s making noises like it is very sick and wants me to know it would like to go home now, please. I stop at a traffic light. Attempt to start again. Nada. It is not an ideal place for this to happen, if we’re being completely honest; unflappable Neil looks the tiniest bit flapped. Somehow, I know not how, he gets it working and drives me grimly back to the station, managing to deftly navigate the route without ever fully coming to a stop and thus avoiding total breakdown. The lesson is brought to an abrupt end, and I’m convinced the car is busted for good and that I’ll never, ever get to take a driving test.
It’s hot the day I take my first-ever driving test. And when I say hot, I mean ‘hottest day of the year’-type hot. It is not the kind of day you want to be stuck in a sweltering tin can, forced to wear a mask while your face is pouring with sweat.
The AA managed to fix Neil’s car without much of an issue. (Something to do with some kind of fluid? I wasn’t really listening; I’m never going to be a person who knows a lot about cars, and I’ve just got to accept that about myself.) Neil even had my trusty steed cleaned for the big day, like a proud dad. It felt like an auspicious start.
Well, driving around in 37°C heat for three hours immediately before the test with no water – I forgot to bring any because, as we’ve already established, I am not a proper person – might have seemed like a good idea in theory, but in practice it had its flaws. By the end of it I was so hot, cross and dehydrated I was doing some pretty crazy s***: switching into fourth gear when I meant second; following a bus on a right-hand turn at a junction even though the lights had already changed and forcing oncoming traffic to stop and wait for me; almost bursting into tears when having to change lanes on the dual carriageway.
The closer we got to the test, the worse my driving got. ‘I’ll just be pleased if I don’t kill someone,’ I quip as we pull up at the test centre, only half joking. A nice man comes out to do my test, introducing himself as Wes. He is instantly very reassuring – not the uptight faceless clipboard guy who lives to crush people’s dreams that I had imagined – even asking me what I do for a living. He wants to put me at ease! He wants me to pass!, I think triumphantly. Well, let’s give him what he came for, baby. I pull off one of the smoothest starts I’ve ever accomplished, mirror-mirror-signalling as if my life depends on it. We pull up to some traffic lights. I am told to turn left. The lights go green. A man is ambling across the road I am supposed to be turning into, so I stop until he has finished crossing. I start to turn. Another man, unbeknown to me, has started ambling across the road I am turning out of. Clearly, this should have been beknown to me. Wes slams on the brakes, enquiring in a strained voice, ‘Didn’t you see him?’ OBVIOUSLY NOT, WES!
He tells me to take the next left, then left again, and we pull over outside the test centre. And that’s it: my first-ever driving test lasts approximately ninety seconds. After six months of waiting; after more than thirty hours of lessons. In the era of Covid, instead of letting you finish, they make you stop as soon as you have failed so that you spend less time with a potentially contagious person in the car.
I am a full-grown woman, and yet I find myself crying while Wes, immune to girls’ tears (well, you have to be in his profession), discreetly lets himself out of the car. All that preparation, waiting, build-up, money, adrenaline – all over before you’ve even gone anywhere. I’m sure there’s an excellent word for that feeling in German; I’ll settle for ‘deflated’. Neil rails against the unfairness of life but we both know I messed up.
‘Book another test, maybe we just had to get one out of the way,’ he says with his typical positive attitude. But the cheeky universe is back to its old tricks – no new driving tests are being booked because of Covid. Back to waiting. Back to the drawing board. Back to the longest intensive driving course in human history.
A final word on this – eighteen months after my first lesson, I am no closer to booking another test. Pent-up demand along with various lockdowns has scuppered my every attempt. As far as I can tell, at the time of writing, there is not a single slot available in the entirety of the UK. It’s been so long, in fact, that trusty Neil isn’t even a driving instructor anymore. That’s right – he had an entire career change in the time I’ve been waiting for just one more shot at the big time.
There was a point at which I was angry about all this, but I have now reached a place of deepest zen. Maybe I will be able to drive at some point; maybe I won’t. In all honesty, the part of me that is becoming increasingly desperate to champion sustainable travel is kind of OK with it. I’ve always been happiest when not in the driver’s seat. Perhaps it’s the perfect incentive, then, to get to grips with becoming the ideal passenger – the kind you’d feel comfortable picking up at the side of the road …
Sun’s out, thumb’s out – it’s time to get hitching.
The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy (well, the A40)
‘Might I just offer a brief critique of your thumb technique?’
It’s not a question I’ve ever been asked before, but I nod meekly.
‘It’s a bit … reticent.’
We both look down at my hand. If it’s possible for a digit to look embarrassed, my thumb looks embarrassed. It’s exuding an air of ‘who, me?’
I try to bolster it a bit; raise my hand a bit higher, make the angle a bit jauntier. It’s not a vast improvement, but my companion nods reassuringly.
In my thumb’s defence, it’s never carried this level of responsibility before. Normally when pointed skywards, it’s to indicate someone’s done a good job or that all is well with the world. It’s all fun and sunshine, a cheesy gesture of ‘A-OK’. Today, my entire journey rests heavily on its diminutive shoulders (or should that be knuckles?).
Yes, this is baby’s first hitchhike. How I got to my mid-thirties without ever having hitched a lift is easy enough to explain – almost no one I know has ever hitchhiked. Well, almost none of the women I know. My generation was raised under the influence of myriad urban legends and horror stories involving axe-wielding nutjobs.
When I told people I would be spending my morning thumbing from London to Oxford – a distance of some 88km, providing very little scope to perform a murder undetected – the identikit response was: ‘That sounds dangerous! Are you sure?’
Where do these stories come from? They seem to spring straight up from the soil of storytelling itself and weave themselves perniciously around our collective consciousness, distorting the entire narrative like a weed choking a flower. But at least part of the perception can be attributed to intentional propaganda. In the US, some states started passing laws to prevent hitchhiking in the 1960s and ’70s; alongside this, law enforcement agencies used scare tactics, according to a Vox article on the lost art of hitching.6 A 1973 FBI poster warned drivers of the dangers of giving a lift to a hitchhiker, declaring they might turn out to be a ‘sex maniac’ or a ‘vicious murderer’.
Elsewhere, ‘police officers at Rutgers University handed out cards to hitchhiking women that read, “If I were a rapist, you’d be in trouble”,’ Ginger Strand, author of Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, wrote in a 2012 New York Times piece.7
And then, of course, horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher that make use of the ever-popular ‘hitchhiker being a murderer/murdered’ trope probably haven’t done much to clean up the practice’s reputation.
None of this was connected to a real statistical increased likelihood of either hitchers or drivers encountering violence, by the way – according to Strand, there’s never been strong evidence to suggest this. In a 1974 study by the California Highway Patrol on incidents of violence on the state’s roads, the conclusion was that ‘the results … do not show that hitchhikers are over represented’.8
I was able to reassure worried friends and family members that I would not be alone, having roped in my colleague Simon Calder – The Independent’s illustrious travel correspondent and a hitching veteran with decades of experience under his belt – to act as my mentor. I never would have considered hitchhiking as a green travel option without his timely – and quite accurate – assertion that it’s ‘the most sustainable form of motorised transport’. The idea being that the vehicle will be making the journey regardless – as an extra passenger, other than the minuscule amount of extra fuel being burned due to your additional weight, you aren’t contributing any further emissions through your travels. Your carbon footprint stays close to zero.
Rather than safety concerns, it was my complete lack of knowledge of car travel that prompted me to enlist Simon as my guide. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have no idea where any of the roads go. Whenever people talk about their car journeys, rattling off meaningless collections of letters and numbers – the A30, the M4, the B2116 – they may as well be talking in enigma-level code. My brain switches off and my eyes glaze over and I just nod and smile, as if I know exactly what they’re talking about. But the names mean nothing to me; they are as intangible as a dream wreathed in smoke. This is a consequence of not being able to drive, yes, but also of finding the minutiae of someone’s car journey – which they will often share in painstaking detail, for no reason I’ve ever been able to discern – excruciatingly boring.
The upshot is that, when I decide I will hitchhike part of the way to visit a friend in Hereford, I draw a total blank when it comes to the logistics. Should I just … walk out of my front door and stand on the street? Which side of the road would I even stand on? I mention my plans (or lack thereof) to Simon, and, like the unbelievably good Samaritan he is, he swoops in to save the day.
‘Why don’t I come with you?’ he says kindly, as if dealing with a simpleton. Which, let’s be real, he is.
We meet at Hanger Lane tube station in the darkest recesses of north-west London at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, with the city still bathed in the magic of mist and sunrise. It’s a stop I’ve never alighted at before, probably for the exact same reason we’re starting off here today – it’s best known for the Hanger Lane gyratory system (which has the dubious honour of being voted Britain’s scariest road junction in a 2007 survey by the Highway Insurance Company).9 It’s right on the A40 – which, as people who aren’t me may already know, is the road you want if you’re going to Oxford. We set up shop at the side of the road and Simon gives me my first lesson in hitching, schooling me in the psychology behind attracting a lift. ‘You’re trying to meet the eyes of the driver,’ he says. ‘You only have a moment to make a connection with them – so try to catch their eye and look friendly and nice. Smile at them!’
We both stand there for fifteen minutes, him looking confident and happy with a boldly elevated thumb, me radiating British awkwardness with a smile that is more apologetic grimace than inviting beam. Lesson number two is about the practicalities, as Simon decides we must move further down the road.
‘It’s too busy here,’ he clarifies, as cars come whizzing past at speed with no real time to slow down, let alone stop. There preferably needs to be a sedate enough flow of traffic that a driver has time to see you and make the split-second decision to pick you up, along with somewhere they can pull in safely should they decide to help you out. We move up to a busy junction and I’m instructed to construct a quick sign. I pull out my pre-packed rectangle of cardboard, writing ‘OXFORD’ on it, pause, and then add a ‘(PLEASE!)’ underneath (the brackets designed to project an ingratiating sense of deference and humility).
I feel happier with a prop in my hand than I did with my lacklustre thumb, and focus all my energy on grinning like a loon at every driver who passes. This is a much better spot – we are opposite some lights, enabling drivers coming in our direction to see us and weigh us up, an essential component in the process, according to Simon. There’s also a driveway behind us where a kind-hearted soul could potentially pull in.
One of the things that has always put me off hitching – other than the general murder-y associations – is the worry that, perhaps, no one will stop. What if you’re just standing there waiting … forever? I’m used to having so much control over my life but, in this endeavour, you are completely reliant on the unknown.
After another ten minutes, I ask Simon what the longest time he’s ever had to wait for a lift when hitching is.
‘Hmm … I think seven hours,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘But that was in the middle of nowhere, with no cars,’ he quickly adds, seeing the anxiety writ large across my face. For him, part of the joy of this way of travel lies in the uncertainty – the reliance on the kindness of strangers, the meeting of people you’d never have come across otherwise. He hands me a worn book called the Hitch-Hikers Manual: Britain – a book I only discover later that he, in fact, authored – originally published in 1979. I’m not sure how accurate the road information is more than forty years on (the description of the M25 as the ‘new’ orbital motorway around the capital certainly dates it), but the principles remain unchanged.
‘There are two things which set hitchhiking apart from any other mechanised transport. Most important is that it is free, but it also enables you – in fact compels you – to meet and converse with complete strangers,’ reads the intro:
In this ever more paranoid world there are still many good people who will stop their cars and give complete strangers free transport and their company … If your faith in human nature ever needs restoring, just head out on to the open road on a sunny day.
Chuh, I think. Maybe that was true in the free-loving ’70s. But this is 2021, mate.
Perhaps my ‘faith in human nature’ isn’t sufficient, but I simply cannot believe that someone will stop. Why on earth would they? What’s in it for them? It is this lack of belief, more than anything, that led to my lukewarm thumbing technique; it is this that means my smile has an undercurrent of incredulity.
But whaddaya know – fifteen minutes after we move locations, a car indicates and pulls in (‘keep looking behind you to see if anyone’s stopped’ is another of the practical lessons from the Calder school of hitching). Surely there must be some mistake? But no, it is legitimate. Even more implausibly, the timing of our lift perfectly matches the predictions outlined in the decades-old hitching manual. It asserts that one man and one woman hitching will get picked up in ‘thirty minutes’ – the exact amount of time we’ve been on the roadside.
‘I’m going past Oxford,’ says our new-found saviour, a young man with an open, friendly face, and we jump aboard. He seems absolutely nothing like an axe murderer, and I feel the rush of gratitude and adrenaline that comes with losing your hitchhiking virginity.
Whatever happened to the art of hitchhiking though, aside from the aforementioned scare tactics? For people like Simon, the answer is ‘nothing’ – he started at the age of 13 and hasn’t stopped since. Elsewhere, it’s a more complicated story. My parents’ generation were voracious hitchers – it’s how all my uncles and aunts went travelling around the UK, Europe and beyond. I vividly remember being told a family story about Uncle Stephen deciding he wanted to get to France, packing a bag and simply standing at the end of his quiet residential street in Torquay, Devon, until someone picked him up (this took somewhere in the region of twenty-four hours). From the 1950s through to the 1980s, it was a completely legitimate and common way to get around, both at home and abroad.
Simon puts the demise of hitching down, in part, to public transport becoming cheaper. ‘Back then, trains were extortionately expensive,’ he says, as we settle into our new friend Jared’s car (you could argue that they still are now, of course – the difference being that it is possible to access very affordable fares when booking well in advance). ‘Hitchhiking was the only affordable way of getting around.’ Cars themselves becoming cheaper and more commonplace was also a leading factor, according to David Smith, a British academic who wrote a 2001 paper entitled ‘The Neglected Art of Hitch-Hiking: Risk, Trust and Sustainability’.10 ‘Probably the most important thing is the huge growth we’ve seen in car ownership,’ he says. ‘People who don’t have cars and are trying to hitchhike might be perceived as weirder, more deviant, or more dangerous.’
These factors undoubtedly played a major part in the decline of hitchhiking, but I can’t help but think that a spiralling lack of trust in strangers in general must have also contributed. Although 24-year-old Jared is challenging that assumption. With nothing to do until we get to Oxford except chat, we all get to know each other a little better. We discover Jared’s a design manager for a construction company, and Simon deftly demonstrates another of the key tenets of hitchhiking – namely, be a charming and curious passenger. (There’s even a chapter dedicated to this in the book, which includes the immortal words: ‘The only thing you have to offer is your dazzling wit and sparkling conversation … Many people on long journeys pick you up not from altruism but just for company. Don’t let them down.’) He asks question after question of our driver with genuine interest, and we learn that Jared coordinates big residential building projects – more than 500 flats in Stevenage is the latest job – recently moved to London with his partner and is heading home to Wantage for the weekend to see his parents and play golf. He couldn’t be a lovelier host and, after explaining that I’m writing a book about sustainable travel, I discover that Jared has quite a bit to say on the subject of climate change. Before you know it, he’s recommending I read Bill Gates’ book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and outlining his company’s plans to include electric car-charging points for every parking space in all their upcoming developments.
Why did he decide to pick us up? ‘I was hitching myself not long ago with my girlfriend in Scotland,’ he says – perhaps indicating that a person’s propensity to pick up a hitcher directly correlates to whether or not they’ve ever hitchhiked themselves.
After we’ve lamented the state of the world but agreed on the need for hope if we’re to keep fighting the good fight, Simon more than pays off our debt for the lift by regaling us with some of his best hitchhiking anecdotes. They often open with sentences like, ‘I was hitchhiking across the Jordanian border in the back of an army van when [insert story here]’ and are reliably, gloriously bonkers. He has hitched all over the world, and the experience sounds an overwhelmingly positive one – although there have been some, ahem, sticky moments:
I was in Greece this summer, and a nice-seeming man called Nikos pulled up. We’d been driving for a few minutes when he put his hand on my knee and asked if I wanted sex. I politely declined and told him I was married.
After what sounded like a very awkward few minutes, tenacious Nikos asked, ‘Why not? Your wife’s not here’, at which point Simon made a swift exit. ‘You’d have to be pretty desperate to pick up a middle-aged Englishman in hopes of that,’ he says ruefully.
We have a very jolly time indeed, and it is with a tinge of regret that I see we’re almost on the outskirts of Oxford. We shower Jared with a flurry of ‘thank yous’ as we jump out at a red light – being prepared for a swift exit being yet another fundamental tool in the hitcher’s arsenal – and shuffle along a grass verge to catch a bus into town. I feel strangely elated; I can see how Simon has become addicted to this feeling over the years. He explains, as we take a seat on the top deck:
It is a unique experience, because it’s one of the only situations in which you spend time with a stranger where you’ve both chosen to be there. Unlike the doctor’s waiting room, you’ve intentionally decided to accompany one another on the road.
I nod enthusiastically, the newly converted zealot to this strange religion. It occurs to me that hitching may be one of the exceptionally few circumstances in modern life that falls outside the iron-hard grip of capitalism. No money is changing hands. There is nothing in it for the driver other than some company and the benevolent glow that comes from offering a small kindness to a stranger. Although the benefits go both ways, according to Simon: ‘You often act as a free therapist,’ he says. ‘A woman in the States who was just going to take me down the road ended up driving me five hours out of her way because she just needed to download emotionally.’ (I can’t help but feel she might have got the better end of the bargain.)
It’s a beautiful thing when you think about it: a pure exchange of resource and need. We got to Oxford for free; Jared got an interesting conversation and an amusing story to share with his parents when he arrived home. I feel giddy, not because I saved a few quid, but because I had a moment of unexpected human connection in an increasingly disconnected and fragmented world. Not to sound like a total freewheeling hippy, but my life was enriched just that little bit by sticking my thumb out on the Hanger Lane gyratory system (a sentence that has quite possibly never been uttered before).
Maybe it’s time to shake off the prejudices of the past and rediscover this, the greenest form of motorised transport. As Simon says in his veteran hitchhiking tome: ‘If you’re prepared to invest the energy required for a successful hitching trip, there’s no better way to travel.’