Hitch Hiker

I’m a hitch-hiker in the nineteen-eighties, the very zenith of hitch-hiking in the western world. In these times it’s actually ‘cool’ to hitch-hike. Drivers pick up hitch-hikers just to boost their credibility.

The film The Hitcher starring Rutger Hauer hasn’t been made yet and no-one expects to be shot in the head or stalked by a psychopathic one.

Born-again Christians are prolific lift-givers. Captive audience for their gospellings, I guess. One chap took me fifty miles past his own destination because ‘Jesus told him to’. Thank you Jesus! Then he sang me some Christian songs before I got out. I hadn’t noticed the guitar on the back seat.

Another driver drove me across the border to England while extolling the pious virtues of evangelist Billy Graham, claiming to have met the man himself. I’ll always remember him as the spit of Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry (the driver, not Billy Graham, although….).

I fell in love while hitch-hiking. She was waiting for a lift just like me. Eleven at night, Charnock Richard services, both aiming for Glasgow (actually, I was going on to Kilmarnock but I didn’t tell her this. Something to do with camaraderie and cosy chumminess). She was wearing a very toasty looking Arran jumper under an open Parka. She had curly blonde hair like Marilyn Monroe. I thought her the loveliest vision I had ever seen. Her name was Lorna.

She knew within seconds that I was smitten: I suppose girls that look like that are used to being fallen in love with. I, usually so loquacious, stumbled over words like a new-born fawn trying to stand for the first time. I said I was sure she would get a lift soon but hoped with all my heart that she wouldn’t. I hated the creepy male driver who hadn’t stopped to pick her up yet. He’d have to take both of us and mind his manners.

Lovely Lorna. Never saw her again. She got a lift from some elderly gent in a Rover. Dirty old bugger.

People would give you lifts so they could tell you their life stories. Again, captive audience. Ex-army usually, telling you their service tales and how they miss ‘the camaraderie’.

Once got a two hundred mile lift from London to my destination, Liverpool from a bloke who drove at ninety in the fast lane and asked me to keep rolling spliffs for us both. By the time I got to my girlfriends I was both zonked and traumatised, having spent most of the journey convinced we were going to crash and die.

Not as scary as a lift in a lorry from Carlisle to Carmyle given me by a driver who took the concept of drink-driving a little too literally seeing as how he was determined to do both at once. With a half bottle of bells in one hand and the steering wheel in the other he rattled us down the A74 like the hammers of hell. He’d already told me to get out once on the hard shoulder for ‘being a Tim’ (he being a true blue-nose) but he relented saying it was his ‘good deed for the Queen’.

Hitch-hiking is not so prevalent now. Drivers are too aware and worried about the possibility of picking up a pyscho or a mobile mugger . This is a shame. It means me missing out on so many stories.