I interrupt this series on Shetland to bring some sad news: the family Nissan Micra was put down on Monday. Here’s a brief eulogy and an argument for why it is/was a genuinely unique vehicle.

There were two reasons why Richard Hammond had never reviewed a Nissan Micra before doing so with a paper bag over his head.

One was that he wouldn’t be seen dead in one.

The other was they’re only driven by “old people with straw hats and golf umbrellas velcroed onto the parcel shelf.”

Which, in 1999 at least, he was not.

The seats were a bit firm, he described when he at last got in, but not uncomfortable. Brakes a bit numb on the open road and a bit of body roll through the bends.

Though it drove fine, generally speaking, he concluded the car was too cute for real use. It was too “worryingly Noddy Land.”

He was wrong, of course.

Driving a Micra is like sitting in the lantern of a lighthouse. It’s all glass around you, light pouring in. All the better to see the vast hunks of metal that come looming like container ships over your dingy.

There are often pseudo-communities on the roads, like vintage car owners who nod or flash as they pass each other.

But Micra owners are few and far between. Young Micra drivers even more so. There are so few in fact, that I only ever saw one other Micra being driven by someone under the age of about 70.

It was in Buckinghamshire. Theirs was red too, though it had gold hub caps. Spotting each other from a distance, there was a moment of surprise before a volley of honking and cheering and fist bumping. Then they were gone.

In the world of automobility, the Micra had once been a disruptor. Part of a new generation of young cars, upsetting the old hierarchy.

The first model came out in 1983, at the same time as the Corsa and Fiesta. They were marketed at the young and old. Cheap and easy to drive. Low powered.

Unlike the others, which could claim association with a wily fox, squirrel or hare perhaps, if the Micra was an animal, it would be a turtle.

There’s its obvious lack of speed, but its shape is also evocative of one too. The high cab and low, poking bonnet which makes you wonder how an engine could fit inside, an engine capable of moving several adults at almost sixty miles an hour.

It seems befitting that one of the world’s best-known artists chose a Micra as the setting for one of his animals in London series.

In the piece, which appeared in Greenwich in 2024, Banksy stencilled a rhino mounting a discarded Micra.

Some say this was a piece about urban decay, but perhaps it had another meaning.

There’s a Bemba folktale in Zambia about a rhino and a turtle.

Much like Aesop’s hare and tortoise, this tale involves an arrogant rhino who challenges the turtle to a race to put him in his place.

The turtle knows it can not outrun the rhino, but it also knows the rhino is stupid. It sends four turtle friends ahead to each of the four river crossings on the course.

The race begins and the rhino steams ahead. But each time he reaches a river crossing, he finds the turtle has already beaten him to it. Furious, he eventually concedes.

In Banksy’s version, they have clearly made up.

Our Micra came to us by fate.

Built in Sunderland in 2002, Dad’s godmother, Anne, gave it to him seventeen years later when she decided she was too old to use it any more.

It was a beautiful reminder that in automobility terms, as elsewhere in life, there is a brief moment when old and young cross as they head in their opposite directions.

Nevertheless, the new arrival was originally met with quiet revulsion. It was used only for errands that guaranteed not being seen by anyone you knew.

But slowly its previously ugly curves became graceful. Its ridiculous size rebellious. Its motorway whine melodic.

As many people do with older cars, I also began to appreciate its character. Worked out and took pleasure in pausing momentarily before slipping into third, or letting off the clutch ever so slightly before putting it into reverse to avoid a yelp from the gears.

Not having aircon didn’t matter. Neither did only being able to find one radio station—if you were lucky.

In fact, I found its lack of comfort served a purpose.

Roads and cars are remarkable things. They connect us all in a great big web. We can get in a car and drive anywhere on this island. With a short ferry we could drive in an unbroken line to Beijing, Beirut or Cape Town.

That freedom is extraordinary.

However, when cruising silently between the massaging white lines of a motorway, listening to Spotify or a podcast in a carefully managed temperate cab of a modern car, somehow the wonders of automobility are forgotten.

Not so in the Micra.

Zimming this way and that, nipping between lorries and Land Rovers and chunky SUVs, you’re reminded of the thrill of driving. Not in a macho, show-off kind of way as you would in a sports car, but in a childish way.

Children, however, grow up.

The Micra’s final trip last month was to the south of France. Although the wide, straight payage roads were somewhat wasted on the Micra, it was great to be buzzing along as ever.

But perhaps it was ominous that on our return, as we waited at the Calais tunnel terminal, one of our party was quite suddenly sick in a bin.

Two weeks later, the mechanic’s gavel came down.

It had failed its MOT. The chassis was completely rusted and rotten. No welder would touch it. In fact, we were told, it was a miracle we’d made it to France and back.

And so the Micra is finished. Never to be driven again. But as with all great things, it lives on, in my newfound appreciation of automobility, and in that old rhyme:

Roses are red.

Violets are blue.

NJ52 YUU.

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It stands alone in a pebble-dash, sheet-roofed block on an exposed sweep of land. Beyond it the hill runs to the sea. It looks more like somewhere you’d put your sheep for the night.

Dad and I did not know it was there until we walked past. It had a sign on the container out back that said “Public Bar”. They can’t get many walk-ins, to be fair.

A few other people were also heading inside at the same time. They were coming out of campers. We all moved in together, quietly and a little awkwardly.

It looked more like a village hall inside. The long plasticky wooden floorboards squeaked as we lined up at the bar. Everyone spoke quietly. Even the bar lady.

Dad and I sat in one of the booths, which were lined up as in a diner. A Lancastrian woman asked if she and her friends could join us, which they could of course.

The leader of their party was confident and talkative. She told us she had moved up here the year before, onto Mainland. Her friends, much quieter than she, were also Lancastrians.

Funny, I said. I’d hitched up to Unst (the island we were on) from Lerwick (the capital) the day before. One of the men who picked me up was also from Lancashire. That man, Dave, had said all you need to do to crack Shetland when you move is survive two winters. If you can get through those, you’ll be fine. Philippa wondered if she’d be able to.

Philipa was a paramedic. She told us she was about to spend three weeks on Banksy’s boat in the Mediterranean. The MV Louise Michel.

The boat, we learned, was a former French naval vessel. Banksy bought it in 2020, painting it a bright pink with a fire extinguisher. It skims the Mediterranean, the most dangerous border crossing in the world, rescuing distressed migrants.

She was a little nervous. In part because she was sure she would get seasick.

Funny, I said again. The day before leaving for Shetland, I’d been on Waterloo Place in Piccadilly. A new Banksy had just been appeared. It was a statue of a man holding a flag stepping off the pedestal he was on. The flag wrapped around his face, blinding him.

It had been put up the night before. How he’d done it without being seen—the reporters asked their cameras—was a mystery.

As I looked at it, I overheard a cameraman saying they knew who Banksy was. He often saw him lurking incognito when his art first appeared.

The person he was talking to wondered if it was the man in the orange bowler hat. He wore a yellow waistcoat and a handlebar moustache. I thought it a strange guess. The man confirmed it wasn’t. But it got me wondering too.

I drifted through the crowd, peering at the faces peering up at the statue. Could that be him? Or him? What about that guy, standing quietly at the back?

Then I overheard a man talking on the phone. He had a blonde mullet and bulging eyes. He was pacing about frantically a few meters away from the onlookers. He seemed to be talking about an upcoming installation. That’s him, surely!

I stood nearby. He continued pacing, skinny and slightly stooped. He looked to have the manic-ness you might associate with a great artist.

When the call was over, someone came up to him and said hello. “You probably don’t remember me,” he said. “But my ex is your ex.”

“Excuse me mate?” An Irish accent broke my eavesdrop. “Could I ask you a few questions about what you think about the piece? It’s for French news.”

“Err,” I thought. “Sorry, no.”

He continued on and asked a lady next to me instead. She wore colourful clothes and had lots of bangles. She agreed.

“…Do you think the piece is political?” The reporter asked. I looked up at the great big flag and suit and the blind step off the cliff and thought that was a silly question…

“No. It’s not political at all,” the woman replied, which took me by surprise.

Suddenly the man, we’ll call him Banksy, saw the reporter and came to say hello. They were obviously old acquaintances. Damn, I thought, should have said yes.

The lady was now speaking at great length to Banksy about something or other, clearly oblivious to the fact she was talking to one of the greatest artists of our time.

Anyway, after a while Banksy said he had to shoot. He picked up his rucksack and bike and off he fled.

I made my way back to the library and spent the next hour sleuthing. There is a picture of Banksy online it turns out. In it, he has brown hair and is reasonably old, fifteen years ago when the picture was taken.

It was obviously not my man.

Well, I thought, that was a waste of time.

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On Unst, under a hook-billed headland on the eastern side, is a bay called Haroldswick—Harald’s Bay. It’s named, as its name suggests, because it’s a bay…

And for Harald.

Shetland is proud of its Norse identity. The flag, blue and white with an off-centre cross, is Norwegian in shape, Scottish in colour. But in many ways, Shetland feels the other way round: Scottish in shape, Norwegian in colour.

It is well remembered here that the islands were part of the Scandinavian kingdom until 1469, the year King Christian of Norway pawned them to James III of Scotland.

He couldn’t afford the dowry he’d promised for his daughter, so gave Shetland and Orkney instead. He never found the funds to buy it back. It’s been part of Scotland ever since.

But like many exiles or expats, Shetland has preserved its Norse heritage proudly. You’d only need to come for Up Helly Aa, the fire festival, to see what I mean—or just see the pictures of it as we did.

Cafes, pubs, hotels and homes all display them, as well as the round painted shields the revellers carry, dressed as Vikings, to watch longships being burned.

Haroldswick, far from the mainland and the capital of Lerwick, is a quiet place. It’s a Shetland kind of settlement. More letters in its name than actual buildings. You have to scan the wide open hillside carefully to find them.

You’d be doing well to spot the replica longhouse with its turf roof, too, built as it is to be almost part of the ground.

The wooden door tapped bluntly on the stone wall as we pulled it open, stooping into the dark.

Inside it was bare. Wooden beams and cold stone seats. It was nice to be out of the wind, though it certainly didn’t feel homely.

We tried to imagine the seats layered with warm furs. A hot fire in the hearth, sour peat smoke. Someone had left an unopened can of Tennant’s.

Back in the wind, we looked around the other of Haroldswick’s attractions, one of the largest replica longboats ever made.

The Skidbladner was built in Sweden by researchers who wanted to trace the journey their Viking ancestors made to America. But they fell out on the way, somewhere near Unst.

The ship has remained here ever since, propped up on dry land for the occasional tourist to peer into and wonder how the Vikings got to where they did in such things.

Of course, they got to where they did purely because of such things. The keel—which they invented—the tarred, clinker wood hull, the shallow draft, which let them penetrate far up rivers, from the Dnieper, Don and Volga, to the Rhine, Seine and Thames, to surprise the unsuspecting folk on its banks.

Still, it would have been cold and exposed on board. It’s extraordinary to think they took these things to America, which, as the researchers found, is no mean feat.

The land around her is barren and rocky. There are no trees. The wind is ferocious but not seen, except in the trembling grass, inches from the ground.

The ship is a reminder though that while we southerners used to modern comforts can awe at how “remote” it is up here, in the days of the Vikings, this was not remote, relatively speaking.

In fact, Shetland was an important stop on the Atlantic trade routes, a service station, as the locals like to say.

The first Viking settlers here in the 9th century were not raiders who fell in love, they were refugees.

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Harald Fairhair is remembered in Norway as their first king. The first to unite the disparate local kingdoms into something resembling the modern country.

As with most nation-building, it was an immensely violent process. But then it was an immensely violent time, and we might say today that Fairhair was somewhat “damaged” by his upbringing.

One ancestor was drowned in a vat of mead, another was offered as a human sacrifice. One was burned alive and another was suffocated by demons. His father’s death was the most peaceful of the lot. His sledge fell through thin ice.

Harold was only ten. But by ten he knew what he wanted. He wanted all Norway. He swore never to cut his hair until its many kingdoms were under his axe.

It grew exceedingly long. But he did cut it eventually.

The result of his rampage was a firework of fleeing Norse. Beaten jarls fled to the highlands and islands of the Atlantic to hold out their resistance from afar.

Shetland is still a place of escape for many, but in those days, as we’ve said, it was not at all remote. Harold tracked down its new residents, landing, allegedly, in this very bay. Then, as he had all Norway, he subjugated Shetland.

The islands remained Norse for over five hundred years. Which to give some perspective, is about the same amount of time it’s been Scottish.

We rounded the Skidbladner and continued up the track.

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I’m sorry I’ve been quiet so long, I’ve been living a monkish life over a (seemingly never-ending) manuscript. But having just returned from several weeks walking across the Shetlands with my old fella, I thought no better subject to get back into it with. I hope you enjoy.

A quick update on the hitchhiking book, too. The manuscript is very nearly there and I’m working with my agent to polish up the proposal and pitch in the next few weeks. So keep your thumbs crossed and your ears open. Hopefully more to come soon!

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Hermaness is the very top. Where the last of the Atlantic archipelago is finally swallowed by the sea. No land north of here until Russia, the other side of the globe. Except that is for Muckle Flugga.

They say the rock was formed when two giants, Herman and Saxa, fell in love with the same mermaid. They hurled great rocks at each other to win her affection but the mermaid said she’d only marry the giant who could follow her to the North Pole.

Neither could swim. They both drowned.

Standing atop Hermaness, at the very top of Unst, at the very top of Shetland, at the very top of Britain, was something of an achievement in itself. Giants aside, perhaps part of the headland’s aura comes from the challenge of reaching it. From London—halfway to Montpellier from here—it took a flight, a night ferry, thumbed rides, more ferries and half a day’s walk to make it. Through hail and headwinds no less.

But here we were, my Dad and I. Looking out at the Muckle Flugga and beyond to the drowned giants of the sea. One, the Atlantic, gushing up from the south. The other, the North Sea, heaving from the east. Their restless fists were white crests, far out.

It seemed Hermaness was as good a place as any to begin. Apart from its geographical significance, there can’t be many more dramatic places in Britain. None that I’ve seen.

The cliffs, gneiss and schist, are 170 meters high, hacked and sucked and jabbed to bits. The ruins are laced with minerals, pressed into being beneath a mountain range hundreds of millions of years ago.

The sea besieged them that day. The cliffs rallied and thrashed their assailant. Booms of white spray on the gale. It seemed the giants would never end their fight.

We stepped back from the sheer edge and found a hollow to sit out of the wind. “To keep you going on your walk.” Dad read the inscription on his hip flask as he pulled it out. From his best man. We passed it between cold fingers. The whiskey was warm.

It was a significant moment for Dad. He had retired precisely fifteen hours before our flight—forty years of work finished forever with a pub crawl, a pair of silly glasses, tankards and plenty of backslapping.

Now he planned to walk from here to the Scilly Isles off Cornwall. 1400 miles by foot. And occasional ferry, of course. I’d join him til the mainland, then we’d make our own ways from there. He by foot, I by thumb. But first, we had Shetland to traverse. A hundred miles top to bottom. Through hail and headwinds no less.

“We’d be quicker going by sea,” I said, looking down the coast. The line of land faded into the south. I’d heard that sailors here used to navigate by sensing tremors of the underlying swell, the “Midder Dye”, through the soles of their bare feet. We’d make it to Sumburgh Head in no time like that.

But Dad was incapable of such feats, he reminded me. Walking it was.

As we sat and watched the waves, it occurred to me that Dad’s journey was something of a causeway. A long, narrow path to link the mountains of corporate life to the gentler plains of retirement.

I’ve never retired, so don’t know much about it. But I have walked out of mountains before. Like the sailors and the Midder Dye, you feel the topography change beneath your feet. Suddenly, the mountains are gone completely and a new land is beneath you. Perhaps it would be the same for Dad.

Either way, we reasoned we shouldn’t linger in the hollow long. The weather changes quick up here. We got up and began.

It wasn’t long before we passed two figures on the clifftop. They stood by tripods. Their black hoods were drawn tight around their faces, flecked with droplets. They said hello as we passed.

They were birders, English, and they appeared to be in heaven. Which is fair. Hermaness is a heaven, if birds are your cup of tea.

Indeed, you smell the gannets before you see them. A colony the size of Durham have made their rock a moving white cathedral. Its edges dissolve into the air. Their squarks as loud as the wind.

We spotted all kinds of others too. Guillemots like butlers in black and white. The fulmars were fighter jets. Kittiwakes and shags.

The dark shadows of skuas, bonxies, prowled the clouds too. The pirates of the air they call them, but there’s little romance about bonxies. They hammer the rarer birds, and nearly wiped out the gannets not long ago. Luckily, bird flu swept in just in time and hammered the bonxies back. The spread was helped by their willingness to eat anything, including each other.

The flu helped save the gannets, but also the puffins—“tammie norries” as they’re called in Shetland. I’d never seen a puffin before, but we must have seen fifty that afternoon. It’s not hard to see why they’re loved.

They wobbled playfully between the rocks, then soared to land like pleasure planes, hopping onto the quivering grass, smiling. You couldn’t help but smile with them.

We watched them for a long while. Then when the flask of whiskey was empty, we turned and began.

It’s great to be back, feeling refreshed after my short break. Since it’s cold and dark, I thought I’d bring you a piece from a warmer time and a sunnier clime—the Italian city of Alessandria, in eastern Piedmont. I hope you enjoy it.

Somewhere up a track by a vineyard, in the first murmurings of the Apennines, was the cheapest Airbnb I could find in all Italy.

It was a great find, all things considered. Secluded and beautiful. Part of a farmhouse, owned by an elderly, bow-legged woman who let one part to an Italian couple and the other to an animal behaviourist and her russet Nova Scotia Tolling Retriever, Yana, whom I had fallen in love with.

Near the end of my stay, I was sitting under the mulberry tree in the crook of the building’s L. I heard the now familiar call of Yannaa and the twinkle of a collar. A wet pink nose found its way to my hand.

Eliza was close behind to tell me she was going to the nearby city of Alessandria the following day. Her sister lived there, and it was Pride. Would I like to join?

I bristled at the thought of an excursion. I had spent a month writing, a long time to be reclusive. I was itching to get out and see something beyond vineyards and the local village.

I agreed, and the plan was made.

In truth, there are many Italian towns you might choose over Alessandria. Much of Italy’s charm is in the curve of its landscape. But Alessandria has no such charm. Sitting on the wide alluvial plains of the Po Valley, it’s all straight lines. Entirely flat.

But it has plenty else going for it, as I discovered quite by chance.

There was a quiet buzz about it that morning. We parked and gathered in the piazza. Glitter sparkled in the shade of the plane trees. People carried placards. Some were strutting in drag, towering wigs and stilettos.

There were rainbows everywhere. On earrings and socks, painted on cheeks, sprayed in hair.

Shortly after midday, the parade flexed to life. Music blared off the floats. Flares hissed. People whooped. We joined the snake and wound through the narrow streets.

I was struck by a sense that this could be taking place anywhere in Europe. Or the West for that matter. People chanting about the same issues, identifying with the same groups. The only difference was the Italian poses of the onlookers.

Eliza introduced me to her nephew, Lorenzo. He had a film camera around his neck, glasses, and a T-shirt tucked in. He was a keen history student.

Alessandria, he shouted over the noise, had been kicked back and forth between sweeping kingdoms and empires. The Lombard League, Frederick Barbarossa, the Sforzas, Habsburgs and the dukes of Savoy had all held it for a time.

Napoleon fought and won one of his favourite victories here, too. Marengo. Lorenzo said I could visit the battlefield, though I’d have to be careful on the main road. It wasn’t walkable. That’s no problem, I said, hatching a plan in my mind.

The parade continued. Lorenzo made a good guide. He pointed to the doorless houses of the Jewish ghetto and gave the precise number taken under Mussolini. He showed me the Borsalino store and told me the hat company had once employed a quarter of the town.

Then he nodded towards a man on a bike holding a toy white tiger. He was mad, Lorenzo said, and was often seen around town. It was said he was a millionaire.

Lorenzo said I must see Alessandria’s Citadel. I told him I’d never heard of it. “Ahh,” he cried. “You will love it!”

According to both Lorenzo, and UNESCO, it is the best-preserved Napoleonic fort in the world. That was enough for me. Without further ado, I cut away from the parade to the north where it lay. I’d hitch to Marengo after, I thought as I strode, and be back for a lift home with Eliza.

It didn’t take long to reach the Citadel. To the approaching eye, it is almost invisible. Camouflage in the suburbs. A heavy star clamped to the ground.

It was built by the king of Sardinia in the 1730s in the anxious peace that followed the Treaty of Utrecht. Then Napoleon expanded it after Marengo and made it the eastern gateway to France. It’s been used by many armies since but it’s largely abandoned now.

The red brick bridge to the gate had a secretive, protective air. I felt watched by the shrouded walls as I crossed, as if I might hear a shout at any moment, see the puff of a cannon, feel the whizz of a ball.

But there was not a soul in sight.

The gate tower smelled of old, damp mortar. A swastika was sprayed on a side wall. I climbed the stairs inside. Squinting in the sun on the ramparts, the sheer scale of the interior became apparent.

The fort is 180 acres in all. A third of the size of Monaco.

Since I first saw King Louis’ ruined temple in The Jungle Book as a child, I’ve always dreamed of stumbling across something like it. Ancient grandeur, abandoned and engulfed by time and nature.

I followed the urge to Asia as a teenager and found it in the more remote temples of Bagan or Angkor Thom. Completely unexpectedly, the Citadel of Alessandria awakened that same Romantic awe. I felt it in my chest.

Perhaps it was the silence, or the encroaching nature, or just the feeling that this once mighty structure, a pinnacle of military engineering, a key stud in the shield of the most formidable general Europe has ever known, was now crumbling.

I wandered off the ramparts. The flicker of lizards the only movement. I passed a vast hospital with empty black windows, a barracks, an arsenal, a gunpowder keg. Bullet holes picked at the walls. Brick fragmented.

It felt like a Western movie set, except these were not facades. I opened the heavy door to the armoury. The echo of my footsteps were ghosts in the cool cavern behind.

Outside, the parade square was silent in the sun. I imagined it ranked with Napoleon’s weary troops. Their tunics battered and dirty. If you wrung them out, you’d find dust from all over the world. From Haiti to Egypt to Moscow.

I realised as I watched that I’d better get on. The battlefield was the other side of town and the afternoon was running away.

I left through the red brick gate and crossed the bridge to town. I could hear the parade as I went, smell the cordite of a flare.

I reached the main road and held my thumb out. A huge man in a high-vis vest cycled past slowly. His legs rotated languidly. I nodded. He didn’t nod back.

Shortly after, a car pulled up. I leapt in the back next to a child in a carseat. The parents turned and met me with smiles. They were from Argentina and Colombia but lived here now. We didn’t have long to chat, it was only a couple of minutes. They dropped me outside a white statue of Napoleon.

I saw the bike approaching again. The man’s legs still rotating languidly. This time, he nodded back. In fact, he stopped.

His name was Ibrahim, I learned. He was from Togo. He shook my hand with a huge rock-like hand of his own. He’d been here a year and six months. He said he didn’t work. We didn’t speak much. We just stood there quietly nodding.

Behind him was the crenellated roof of Napoleon’s villa, commissioned after his victory. I said goodbye and crossed, squeezing into the museum behind the Genoese chapter of Harley-Davidson owners. They were being shown around the display cases.

The museum wasn’t especially interesting, the description of the battle was complicated and flat landscapes are seldom evocative.

Either way, some 13,000 souls died here on a single day in 1800. Napoleon rode away a hero, with the support and admiration of all France.

He was so proud of the victory, he named his favourite horse Marengo. I’ve held his hoof in my hand and taken a pinch of snuff from its cavity. It lives today in the officers’ mess in St James’ Palace. A reminder, perhaps, that no victory lasts forever.

The museum was closing. I left behind the bikers in their jeans and leathers. I made my way back into town to meet Eliza. The parade was over now. People were milling between stalls in another square across town.

I wondered what would have happened to Europe if the battle had gone differently. Would we still have the same values? Would there still have been a Pride parade?

There’s not much use in playing the counterfactual game, but there’s plenty of use in wondering. After all, history is all in the imagination. Feeling is everything. Without it, the facts don’t stick.

I met Eliza, and we drove back across the plain, back into the first murmurings of the Apennines. It had been a good escape.

Yana tinkled down the track to greet our return.

I’ll be publishing once a month so I’ll see you again in February. Please do subscribe if you haven’t and share far and wide.

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The world can feel overwhelming, particularly for the young. Governments giving up, the rich getting richer, anger on the right, nothing on the left, all while the pall of climate catastrophe gathers.

You don’t need me to tell you all that.

But what I could tell you is that despite it, hitchhiking has a place in the modern world, a positive place.

It may not make much difference to the great events of our time, but it might make a difference for you.

Here’s why.

Adventure in an Empty Seat

I’ll begin with the simplest reason. Hitchhiking is pretty environmentally friendly. In 2021, there were on average 47 million empty seats driving around Britain during rush hour. Need I say more?

Then there’s the fact that it’s an adventure, an exhilarating one, and it requires no long-haul flights.

Many young people nowadays get their kicks in faraway places where the weather’s nice, booze is cheap and crucially it’s different.

As a teenager, I went ‘travelling’ in Southeast Asia and had a lot of fun. At the time, it felt like I was growing up and working out who I was, or to use Rinvolucri’s term from the previous chapter, ‘severing the umbilical cord’.

But in hindsight, the moment all that really happened was not falling off a scooter and dying my hair. It was when I first hitchhiked. Admittedly, that was on the West Coast of America, a long-haul flight away, but it needn’t have been.

Indeed perhaps even more formative was my trip around Britain, which spawned this newsletter. That required no flights at all.

An Education

One of the reasons it was so formative is that hitchhiking is a (free) education.

S.D. Zeidman wrote in the 30s: “The road develops characteristics in you… If you are impatient, it teaches you to wait. If you have a temper, it gives you a placid nature. If you are selfish, it teaches you to be generous. If you are impetuous, it forces you to think.”

What’s more, it offers a unique insight into a society and culture.

When Al-Jazeera columnist Belén Fernández hitched through the Middle East, she reflected:

“I quickly confirmed that my elite education had not been an education at all – at least in terms of, you know, understanding how the world works. The ground-level view I gleaned of sociopolitical human reality…did far more to enlighten my thinking than did my Ivy League studies.”

I can’t pretend to have any understanding of how the world, or the sociopolitical human reality, works. But many years of hitchhiking have taught me one thing: that it takes all sorts to make that sociopolitical human reality go round.

On a single trip to Aberdeen last month, I met a former bomb disposal soldier turned heart mechanic, Palestinian refugees, a lorry driver who’d been a modern slave, a recovering drug addict, two academics who’d spent the day in a septic tank… and too many others to list.

What makes hitchhiking so unique is that you sit and talk to people with whom you have no connection, besides the fact they happened to drive past you.

Most of the time, people are inspiring, kind and full of wisdom; often I virulently disagreed with them, and occasionally they are despicable. But that’s the world.

When you chat to a stranger in a car, experience and perspective are shared, stories told, and each conversation leaves you with something, however small or imperceptible.

I often think it’s a bit like reading a novel, or a good short story perhaps. It makes you, realise—indeed experience—that everyone else also has a rich, complex inner life just like you.

Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll

Maybe, the real reason I love hitchhiking is the kick. It is like a drug, but more long-lasting, and unless you get murdered or mutilated, not bad for the rest of your body.

As I’m sure you know, taking drugs, having sex, or anything else pleasurable activates the reward circuits in the brain. When being kind, selfless or engaging in pro-social behaviour—like hitchhiking—these are activated too, hence the hit.

But other areas associated with empathy and social cognition are also activated, and it’s this overlap that leaves such a powerful afterglow, which lingers long after you get out of the car, and may well get you hooked.

Farewell Stranger Danger

Perhaps most powerful of all, though, is its ability to open you up to strangers.

As we’ve seen previously, strangers have a duality. They represent both fear and opportunity, making us approach them with caution, but also curiosity.

Most of us have grown up in the shadow of government ‘stranger danger’ campaigns from the 70s and 80s. Elsewhere, Hollywood and the press leveraged those fears too, further cultivating this darker half of the stranger image.

The precise impact of this is hard to measure, but undoubtedly, we live in a world that’s generally mistrusting of strangers—the fact the hitchhikers have disappeared is indicative of that.

Whenever I tell someone I do it, the response is usually horror followed by ‘how do you trust anyone?’

Humans are wired to maintain roughly 150 social relationships. However, in the modern world, in cities or just about anywhere on our crowded isle, we are faced with innumerable unfamiliar faces every day, not to mention the infinitely more we see on the internet.

Our relationship with strangers, therefore, is incredibly important to our understanding of and interaction with the world.

If our default position is fear, what implications does that have for our lives and our society more widely?

No Angels On The Plane

Focusing only on this fear neglects the other half of the coin: the curiosity inspired by strangers.

The Greeks called this desire to connect with outsiders ‘philoxenia’, and the concept crops up in the Bible. ‘Do not be forgetful of philoxenia,’ Hebrews 13:2 says, ‘for through this, some have entertained angels unawares.’

One recent study showed that when people were encouraged to talk to fellow commuters on their way to work, they felt much happier and more fulfilled.

Another observed the simple act of ordering coffee, instructing one group to focus on making the transaction as efficient as possible, while the other was told to chat to the barista. I’ll let you guess which felt more satisfied at the end.

This study struck me as particularly relevant. In a world where the value of efficiency is rarely questioned, hitchhiking’s inefficiency is its great strength.

I could have got to Aberdeen in an hour on the plane, instead of two days. But it’s harder to entertain angels on the plane.

The Gossamer Bridge

Trusting strangers can be hard, particularly if you’ve been burned before.

In Hello, Stranger, Will Buckingham likens the first blind step of trust to crossing a gossamer bridge. In medieval legends—and Indiana Jones—these bridges are invisible and require faith alone to cross. You have to take the step to realise the bridge is really there.

It’s the same with hitchhiking. Once you have a couple of successful rides, you realise it’s not so bad and that most people aren’t out to murder you.

For me, that happened in America. I began to be more trusting and immediately noticed my sense of love for the world and fellow humans beginning to grow.

No one could put it better than bell hooks: “When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear - against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect - to find ourselves in the other.”

Everywhere Every Day

The world is dangerous. I am not denying that. There are bad people and there is a chance that something bad could happen. Just because I’ve had several hundred good experiences doesn’t erase that fact.

But you’re much more likely to be a victim of the crimes associated with hitchhiking walking down the street in London. Indeed, statistically, they’ll most likely be perpetrated by someone you know.

I recently spoke to a woman who’d hitched the length of Africa. She received plenty of inappropriate comments but only felt physically in danger once—when she was in a taxi.

Her conclusion, the same as most other hitchhikers, was that there is a risk everywhere, every day, no matter what you’re doing.

“You can’t let them get the better of you,” she told me.

For her, both in terms of travelling and her outlook on life, the benefits of connecting with people and looking for the best in them far outweighed those risks.

Social Inefficiency

I hope this brief paean will inspire you to go and dig out a lay-by somewhere, or perhaps sometimes just be a little less efficient.

Take the slow road, or best of all, the social road. You never know where it’ll lead, but it might just make you feel good.

It has for me. At difficult times in life, I’ve found deep solace on the road, talking to people and realising that we are not alone in this world, and that ultimately there is very little that separates us.

Often just a car door.

I want to thank you for reading along. It’s a great privilege to have you get this far.

This is almost my 150th chapter, so I’m going to take a short break and return with monthly pieces. Hitchhiking will no doubt be very much involved, but I’ll be writing on some broader topics too, which I’m very excited about, so do stay tuned.

If you are interested too, I’ve been making videos of my journeys, which you can see on my new Instagram page @_lifes_a_hitch.

Most importantly though, I’m inching towards getting Britain By Thumb published as a book. So stay tuned on that front too.

Lots of love,

Nico

👍

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In my life, I’ve seen three hitchhikers in Britain. Sadly I was unable to pick up any of them. The third I met earlier this year while hitchhiking myself in the Peterborough services. She told me not to get my hopes up. She’d been waiting there for three days.

The empty roadsides are a far cry from the days of my parents’ youth. In those days it wasn’t uncommon to see queues on the slip road. Indeed the 1985 edition of the Hitchhiker’s Manual even has an entire section on queuing etiquette.

But hitchhiking has been dying a steady death since those heady days. The Lonely Planet officially disowned it in the 90s: ‘These are not the Kerouac days of old. The culture of hitchhiking has changed dramatically and we feel it is so dangerous we would rather people didn’t take the risk.’

By the 2000s, hardly anyone hitchhiked. In the words of Joe Moran in a 2009 Guardian article, the hitchhiker is almost as endangered as the snow leopard.

So what happened? Where did all the hitchhikers go?

The Pessimistic Argument

There are, as you’d expect, several schools of thought. They can be broadly split between pessimism and optimism.

We’ll begin with the pessimistic and when feeling pessimistic, it’s never a bad idea to blame Thatcher.

‘Who is society? There is no such thing,’ she famously said. ‘There are individual men and women and there are families.’ The years of her premiership, as individualism and neoliberalism took hold across the West, saw the ‘no such thing as society’ philosophy percolate, with all its many repercussions.

The infamous Battle of the Beanfields is often held up as evidence of the shift. The police’s battering of unarmed New Age Travellers at Stone Henge in 1985 became a symbol of the new intolerance of hippies, freeloaders and people who were unwilling to conform. Hitchhiking was never directly targeted as such, but it didn’t fit the mould.

However there were also other things going on in the 80s and 90s too, and blaming Thatcher alone for hitchhiking’s demise would be a little rash.

There was a string of high-profile murders, covered by the newly aggressive tabloids. The Hitcher, the 1986 psychological thriller about a serial killer, did little to help the image and neither did The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Hitchhiking’s association with horror films, creeps and murderers solidified, even if there was little or no grounding for this in fact.

Today, there seems to be a nebulous sense among people I meet that you can’t trust strangers anymore, that the world is too dangerous. People often tell me they hitched back in the day, but they wouldn’t want their grandkids doing it. An old boy in Kent told me that there are simply ‘more nutters’ about today. People could be on drugs.

But I don’t buy any of that, nor Thatcher’s famous quip. There is of course a fear of strangers, but for as long as people have existed, there has always been a fear of strangers. I don’t believe it is any more intense now than in the past - three years hitchhiking here have taught me that - it just manifests in different ways.

The Age Old Fears

‘Then there is the fragile old lady from beneath whose petticoat peeped the cuffs of a man’s trousers or from whose knitting bag protruded the muzzle of a machine gun… She flits in the dusk on the outskirts of Chicago and appears in the dawn southwest of Denver. She proves that “you never can tell.” … “Don’t pick ‘em up! Don’t pick any of ‘em up!’

That was written in 1939 and is one of countless such examples from the history of hitchhiking.

The truth is, hitchhiking has always battled a bad reputation and the reason is quite simple, and far older than hitchhiking.

At its heart, hitchhiking involves a relationship between strangers, and humans have always had a complex relationship with strangers. There is a tension between the joys of meeting, connecting and learning about someone new, and a fear of the unknown, of who they might be or what they might do to us.

Such tensions can be seen in hospitality rituals, art and stories from across the world, like the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Odyssey. Odysseus is hosted by many strangers on his journey, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse but the fear that it could go either way runs through all the encounters.

Hitchhikers also evoke another deep-seated societal fear: vagrancy. In our settled world, the footloose and the drifters are often regarded with suspicion. Take any of the Vagrancy Acts that have been passed in the last 500 years.

1572’s for instance was particularly brutal. It said that any able-bodied vagrants would have their ears burned through with a hot iron. If caught twice they would be executed. As with many similar acts, it was passed at a time of great societal change. Urbanisation and poverty were on the rise, so too was a fear of strangers.

Indeed, how we perceive strangers waxes and wanes. During wars, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, that fear all but disappears. It may have waned recently but I’ll bet it’ll change again one day.

But that still doesn’t quite explain where all the hitchhikers have gone.

The Optimistic Argument

For all the arguments about the deterioration of trust and the rise of individualism, there are as many straightforward, rather less glamorous explanations.

Take transport. Nowadays, more young people have cars. Student car parks are full where once only a handful drove. Public transport is relatively cheap too. Railcards make trains cheaper and it’s possible to get a bus almost anywhere in the country for a few quid. I once went from London to Manchester for less than the tube fare to the bus station.

Then there’s the fact that young people simply get their kicks in other ways. The sociologist Mario Rinvolucri wrote about how hitchhiking ‘severed the umbilical cord’ for young adults. Of course, young adults still sever their umbilical cords but they do it elsewhere and in different ways, like Magaluf or Thailand. Flights are cheap, it’s warm and generally more exciting than being splashed by lorries or given the middle finger on the outskirts of Birmingham.

Then there’s technology.

This is somewhat counterintuitive because, thanks to technology (mainly the smartphone) hitchhiking is safer than it ever was. My parents usually track me as I go, I could send them a picture of the driver and number plate before getting in and could call the police from the car if I needed. None of those security measures existed when hitchhiking was popular.

But precisely because we have smartphones, how we trust people has changed. I don’t believe that we necessarily trust people any less, we just trust in different ways.

We get in strangers’ cars all the time, we just arrange it on Uber, or perhaps Bla Bla Car (a popular ride-sharing app in Europe). We are happy to stay in strangers’ homes too, so long as we book it through apps like Airbnb or Couchsurfing.

Technology has also removed one of the key motives for people picking up hitchhikers: company. Joe Moran observed in 2009: ‘Now cars have ergonomic driving seats, remote-controlled iPods and automatic temperature controls. Why would we invite a sweaty stranger into this snug haven?…In the soothing micro-environment of a modern car, there really is no such thing as society.’

Perhaps more significantly, all this technology has changed our relationship with time and travel itself. Google Maps and the blue dot have altered our perception dramatically. We know our exact location, the exact minute of arrival, the exact route, even the traffic we’ll hit on the way. Uncertainty has been completely erased. We want our journeys between places to be minimised. If we could, we would make them disappear altogether.

In that context, it’s little wonder hitchhiking is unpopular. It is, at its core, uncertain. It requires a plunge into the unknown. You don’t know how long you’ll wait, who will pick you up, where you’ll be dropped, what time you’ll get there, if you get there at all, or if you’ll spend three days in Peterborough services.

Ultimately, hitchhiking is heavily at odds with our society. It’s difficult, slow and uncertain, things which most people nowadays aren’t into.

You don’t need me to tell you the world has changed a great deal since the final edition of The Hitchhiker’s Manual was published. Cracks have appeared as great plates have shifted, risen and fallen and hitchhiking, for better or worse, has slipped through several of them. Whether this is temporary, who knows.

But as we’ll see next time, I believe the case for it now is stronger than ever.

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‘Suddenly you could go anywhere.’

That was the sentiment in the years after the war, expressed here by Ian Rodger, a demobilised soldier and student at Durham.

‘The frontiers were open and the armies had gone home… There was dust everywhere, but slowly it was beginning to settle.’

He’d race his fellow students to London and from there the continent, among the first of the ‘peaceful invaders’ who began flooding across the channel.

Back home, there had been a revolution, said sociologist Mario Rinvolucri. A revolution in ‘the minds of the hundreds of thousands who had hitched during the six years of war.’

They became the lift givers, the lifeblood of the healthy and sustained hitchhiking boom that followed. Numbers were lower than the boom induced by ‘Hitler and co’, but it was part of the consciousness now.

We’re in living memory now. My grandfather remembers thumbing through Kent to and from national service in the early 50s, and that same decade saw hitchhiking make its most influential stroke across the Atlantic.

The Beat poets, led by Jack Kerouac but propped up by a host of far more accomplished hitchhikers, gave travelling a religious, spiritual quality, much of which rested on and was inspired by hitchhiking.

‘We gotta go and never stop going till we get there.’

‘Where we going, man?’

‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’

Contrary to popular belief, Kerouac wasn’t much of a hitchhiker himself and there isn’t much hitching in On The Road, but many of his inspirations were.

Neal Cassady—whom Sal Paradise is based on—grew up trainhopping and hitchhiking, and Gary Snyder—Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums—was the most accomplished of all.

His poem ‘Night Highway 99’ helped give hitchhiking an air of self-discovery, romance and adventure, as well as showing that it could be a looking glass into the socio-economic belly of America.

Today, the Beat poets are often criticised for their unacknowledged privilege and cultural appropriation—the very term ‘Beat’ was African American slang for being exhausted, beaten down and defeated by oppression—but their impact was undeniable.

‘It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s,’ said Bob Dylan of On The Road. The movement inspired ‘the mad’ and the youth, disaffected with society and capitalism, to escape, to travel and to hitchhike.

‘The road is life’ after all.

Then the sixties saw hitchhiking at its most political, especially in America.

Many ‘Freedom riders’, hitching to Civil Rights rallies from the North, never made it, picked up and picked off by KKK sympathisers. Some became the subject of songs like Dylan’s ‘The lonesome death of Hattie Carol’ or Paul Simon’s ‘He’s my brother’.

In Britain, meanwhile, as a newly conscious youth was flexing its muscles, hitchhiking came to represent a revolt against the older generation.

Rinvolucri interviewed many young hitchhikers near his university town of Cambridge. Their reasons varied, but he concluded, the act was usually an attempt to ‘sever the umbilical cord.’

‘This is one thing [my parents] said I must never do,’ one interviewee told him. ‘They would let me have freedom in every way, in every respect, but I must never hitch-hike.

‘My father is the managing director of a firm,’ she went on, ‘and it’s always represented a great freedom for me to be able to hitch-hike—freedom in a sense—a kind of, well, independence …'

Elsewhere Paul McCartney and George Harrison could be found thumbing their way down the Wirral to South Wales and Devon.

‘If we ever get a car,’ they said to each other, as another ‘rich bastard’ whizzed by, ‘we’ll always pick up hitchhikers.’

As well as rebellion against parents, hitchhiking was also a rebellion against consumerism, which by now had taken irreversible hold in the West.

Hitchhiking was, still is, anarchic in nature, eschewing timetables and ticket collectors, and relying on collective goodwill and voluntary aid. There’s no exchange of money.

For the many subcultures that grew up in the sixties’ society, hitchhiking was popular among a great deal of them.

Rinvolucri talks about a young man he once picked up called George. He was part of what Rinvolucri termed an ‘anti-community’ of drug addicts in Picadilly.

‘For him hitchhiking is… much more a way of ensuring mobility with almost no money, it is an essential part of the mechanics of this anti-community’s life.’

In the summer, George would hitch down to Torquay in Devon but interactions with the dominant society en route often led to clashes.

An Aston Martin owner near Exeter wrote this about hitchers: ‘I certainly would not stop for them. I don’t want those smelly, lousy, hermaphrodite beatniks in my car.’

It was a similar anti-capitalist impulse that was pushing young middle-class Brits towards an obscure African American music genre: blues.

Though not popular with whites in America, the likes of the Rolling Stones, the Animals and Eric Clapton took to the music with a fierce passion, idolising, and slightly fetishising, bluesmen as paragons of anti-capitalism.

Chief among those bluesmen was Robert Johnson, who we met hitchhiking at the crossroads in the previous chapter.

People saw in him an authenticity lacking in the sterile, money-driven music industry. As Clapton said, ‘He sounded like he was naked.’

Johnson became a mythical cult figure and his vagrant life was heavily romanticised as a noble contrast to the consumerism of sixties Britain. His legacy helped fuel the explosion of British rock music and all that came from it.

Hitchhiking maintained its anarchic undertones through the seventies and many of the most famous songs about it came from this time, ‘Take it easy,’ by the Eagles (1972), possibly the best known.

It was in this decade that another influential hitchhiking journey took place, this time around Europe. Douglas Adams said he had the idea for A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while lying in a field in Austria, looking at the stars, holding the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe.

Perhaps one of its most relevant legacies is its influence on Elon Musk. It’s his favourite book and he says it helped him out of his teenage existential depression, and inspired his fascination with Mars and the skies beyond our own.

‘I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness,’ he said, ‘so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.’

However, the seventies also saw some of the biggest hitchhiking murders. High-profile serial killers like Edmund Kemper and William Bonin in the US raped and killed multiple hitchhikers.

Fred and Rose West did the same in the UK (although they weren’t caught til much later) and hitchhikers Jacqueline Ansell-Lamb and Barbara Mayo were eventually found having been strangled and raped, though they never caught the perpetrators.

Paul McCartney was true to his word and continued picking up hitchhikers for many decades. However, there came a time when, in his words, ‘it got dangerous.’ He no longer does.

Next time, we’ll look at what happened, where it went and why it ‘got dangerous’.

If it did at all.

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‘In no other way could I have gained such a knowledge of the country and the people who made it, and are making it,’ wrote Charles Brown Jr in 1916, ‘Best of all, it gave me a deeper understanding of human nature.’

Perhaps the first intentional hitchhiker (see the last chapter), he was certainly one of the first to wax lyrical about it, but over the next few decades, so did many others. By the end of the Second World War, hitchhiking appeared much as it does today, with the same fervent support from those who enjoy it, and the same fears, tropes and horror stories from just about everyone else.

As with many acts of benevolence, crisis led to a boom, and the early 20th century had no shortage of crises. One by one, they all served to bake hitchhiking into the fabric of the times.

Unbuttoning by the Roadside

While Brown was proselytising his new method of transport, soldiers and nurses both sides of the Atlantic were hailing rides to and from the military camps of the First World War. American soldiers found it relieved the boredom of life in camp, thousands of miles from the conflict. British nurses found a sense of freedom in it.

The poet Robert Graves wrote that the practice lingered after the war, along with other ‘loose habits’ like ‘talking to fellow travellers in railway carriages without embarrassment,’ and ‘unbuttoning by the roadside without shame’.

Once again, hitchhiking’s rise tracked that of the car. By 1920, there were some 10 million in the US, by 1925, double that, and by 1930, nearly triple.

As automobiles sped forward, roads rose up to meet them. Long tongues of fresh tarmac licked the landscape, girdling North America and Britain alike, black ribbons of the future, carrying men, women, families, salesmen, soldiers and anyone else to wherever they pleased to go.

‘Gradually the possibilities of the open road are being recognised’, wrote Country Life in an article titled ‘Hitch and Hike’ in 1926.

‘For those of a roving disposition, there are few things more satisfying than the United States’ entertainment of hitch and hike… ‘Vile parasite I could not do such a thing’ growls the prosaic one. But, of course, the prosaic one has no desire to see the world. He is too busy building a fortune for someone else to trouble about such selfish considerations as his own enlightenment….’

The 20s saw hitchhiking clarify into what we know it as today, finding a name and its symbol—the thumb. Quite where either came from is unclear, though the title of the Country Life article is as good an etymology as any.

Watch Clark Gable attempting to catch a ride in the 1934 movie It Happened One Night.

A Strike and the Dust Bowl

Still, for all its growing prevalence, hitchhiking was generally the preserve of the adventurous. It was only during times of crisis that it took on a wider appeal.

Such a crisis first came in Britain. The General Strike of 1926 only lasted two weeks and saw all public transport halted as trade unions demanded higher wages. The country ground to a halt.

The car-owning upper classes quickly found a way of doing their bit to undermine it. They thoroughly enjoyed picking up workers, filling their empty seats with as many as possible to derail the strikes.

‘Civilisation must, if it has any reality, any value, make us ready to give anyone a lift in any way possible, not only at moments of crisis, but in ordinary humdrum times,’ trumpeted the Daily Herald as the strike came to an end.

But without their ulterior motive, many car owners were suddenly less willing to share their vehicles. Punch joked that drivers should employ inflatable passengers to deter ‘importunate lift cadgers’.

In America, meanwhile, the crisis, when it came, hit harder and longer.

‘Probably only in the United States could one see the phenomenon of beggars in automobiles,” wrote The Manchester Guardian’s New York correspondent in 1932, in the bitter wake of the Wall Street Crash.

Strange hordes of vagrant men, women and children were seen drifting along the highways, sure that fortune lay just beyond the brow. Many drove their own cars, which were often all they had. Those who couldn’t afford them hitchhiked.

A year later, the same paper said there were 140,000 women tramping across the continent. ‘You will usually hear much the same story,’ the piece records, ‘She comes from a town where times are bad, but she had heard that things were better in some other city a couple of thousand miles away. So she set out to "hitch hike" to the promised land.

‘When she got there things were just as bad as at home, but there were rumours about a third city, so she set off again… In any case, organised charity appears far more humiliating than the casual sort the women wanderers receive on their travels. In the end, the wandering life gets them in a strange sort of way. Even if they are grey haired, they prefer its hardships to semi-starvation in some garret.’

There were still many not hitching out of necessity though. Writers and journalists extolled its virtues, feeling that its prevalence demonstrated the health of American democracy and the innate kindness of its people. Others saw it as an excellent way of training yourself for business, like S.D. Zeidman:

‘The road develops characteristics in you which are requisites for entrance into business and professional life. If you are impatient, it teaches you to wait. If you have a temper, it gives you a placid nature. If you are selfish, it teaches you to be generous. If you are impetuous, it forces you to think.’

Hitchhiking Makes Waves

Unsurprisingly, given its proliferation, this was also the period when hitchhiking found its way into mainstream culture, causing ripples that can be traced right to the present day.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, thought by many as one of the greatest works of American literature, opens with Tom Joad hitchhiking through the Dust Bowl.

Then there was Woody Guthrie, whose influential Dust Bowl Ballads was written from the roadside in the late 30s and early 40s. Bob Dylan worshipped Guthrie and even made a hitchhiking pilgrimage to see him in New York.

And of course, there was Robert Johnson, whose impact on music was possibly even larger than Guthrie’s:

A Deal With the Devil

Hitchhiking in America, particularly the South, was likely not an enjoyable adventure if you were black. Still, with no car of his own, Johnson was trying to catch a ride up Highway 61 from Clarksdale, Mississippi, one afternoon in 1936. It was a common route for musicians heading north to escape the prejudices of the South but the journey was perilous. Lynchings were widespread, and Jim Crow was in full, brutal force.

Nightfall was approaching, a prospect Johnson rightly feared. Any blacks found breaking the Jim Crow curfew would face consequences, which weren’t worth contemplating.

So the legend goes, Johnson waited at the crossroads. Unable to get a ride, he met the devil himself. They struck a deal and Johnson sold his soul in return for musical greatness. What followed were the foundations of rock n roll.

Who knows what would have happened if the first car had picked him up…

War Once More

The relationship between driver and hitchhiker has perhaps never been stronger than during the Second World War. In both Britain and America, the common enemy galvanised society and turned strangers into comrades.

In Britain, people oftwn hitched out of necessity and fear. During the German bombing campaigns cities were often turned into hellscapes, pushing people to either hide in shelters or escape to the country. One eyewitness said the roads out of Bristol on one such night were like ‘Picadilly Circus.’

Not all hitchhikers were encouraged. A heartbreaking piece in the Manchester Guardian in 1941 urged drivers not to pick up children hitchhiking as many had been found hitching home to the cities, where often they found their homes destroyed and their parents moved.

Nevertheless, governments did their best to encourage lift sharing where possible, for the simple reason of resource efficiency. ‘When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!’ urged one carpool club in the States.

The historian Schlebecker wrote that in 1940 the number of hitchhikers in America was low, the economy having largely recovered from the Depression. By 1945, numbers were at an all time high, propped up by men in uniform.

And that just about brings our history to living memory.

Onwards to the counter culture…

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Where did hitchhiking begin and where did it go? Why are people so scared of it? We’ll be having a look over the next few weeks, beginning, well, at the beginning…

Two thousand years ago, a man called Philip tramped along a hot desert road. A chariot approached from behind, and Philip heard a voice, not from the chariot, but from above. “Go near that chariot,” God commanded, and Philip did as he was told.

The driver, an Ethiopian eunuch, offered him a lift. Philip climbed in, and so hitchhiking was born. Or at least, received its divine ordination. Either way, as shown by Rembrandt, the Ethiopian was quickly converted to the hitchhiking cause.

There are a few similar ancient accounts. Odysseus hailed a ride or two in various forms, as did Sinbad. Some even suggest Jonah hitched a ride in the whale—tenuous, admittedly.

Finding the ‘first hitchhiker’ is a fraught exercise. Debates rage about its true nature. What even constitutes ‘hitchhiking’ after all?

Is it simply riding a passing vehicle for free, as the dictionary says? Or is there some level of intentionality required, some negotiation between driver and traveller, some necessary sign or signal?

Regardless, neither Philip, Odysseus, and definitely not Jonah can lay a true claim. Hitchhiking was born long after all of them. Like hip hop and the turntable, its birth was dependent on a certain technology: the automobile.

The car changed everything. Quickly in America, more slowly in Britain, but when Henry Ford adapted meatpacking disassembly lines to mass produce the Model T, people could go where they wanted, when they wanted, transforming the landscape, society and how we saw and experienced the world.

Jonathan Purkis, (whose book Driving With Strangers all interested in the subject should read), plants the flag in 1916.

Charles Brown Jr hitched 800-miles along the Lincoln Highway, making the papers for the sheer originality of his method. ‘Vagabonding by motorcar’, the piece led. ‘The originator of automobile panhandling, the newest game for brake beam tourists.’

Others begin four years earlier with the poet Vachel Lindsay. Despite thinking cars were ‘carnal institutions to be shunned by the truly spiritual’, Lindsay’s walk across America was hard work, and he soon began accepting lifts from passing cars. ‘I for one get tired of being spiritual,’ he admitted.

You could look, this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps the crown belongs to Toad of Toad Hall, who flagged a passing car before stealing it in Wind in the Willows (published in 1908).

Or more plausibly, to Tickner Edwardes, who caught 59 lifts across the West Country in 1909. His book Lift-luck on Southern Roads sounds like it could be a great-grandfather of this very blog, although I can’t get hold of it to verify.

But I believe it was earlier still.

If I can make any contribution to this field, it’s that the first official account was in fact in 1904, under bizarre circumstances—at the Olympic Games. And, since hitchhiking is all about stories, this one makes a perfect beginning:

The Marathon of St. Louis

The marathon at the 1904 Olympics had a motley crew of contestants. 32 in all.

Cuba’s Félix Carvajal was late to the line, arriving just in the nick of time. Sorry, he said, he’d lost all his money in a game of dice in New Orleans and had walked, run and hitchhiked 600 miles up the Mississippi to get to the starting line (boats don’t count in our story, unfortunately).

Still wearing street boots and trousers, his fellow contestants sportingly cut them at the knee and the gun was fired at last at three minutes past three.

The runners paced out of the arena and into the noise and chaos of rush hour St Louis in 90-degree heat.

Off they wove between horses and swinging carts along what an official called “the most difficult [course] a human being was ever asked to run over”—25 miles of steep hills, broken dust tracks and only a single source of water, a roadside well at mile eight.

The dust, thrown up by every foot, hoof and wheel, was suffocating and nearly fatal for a Californian who suddenly collapsed from haemorrhaging caused by a ripped stomach lining.

Shortly after, the promising run of a South African was ended when he was chased a mile off track by a wild dog.

Carvajal, used to the bonhomie of the open road, reportedly made several friends en route. He paused to chat with spectators and pinched two peaches from a passing car. Then he nicked some apples from an orchard, but these gave him stomach cramps, so he stopped for a snooze.

He wasn’t the only one to suffer from cramps. A bricklayer called Fred Lorz bent double at mile 9, and Sam Mellor relinquished the lead in dyspeptic pain.

That left Thomas Hicks in charge. He maintained a good lead from there, helped by his support car, which threw dust in the faces of his competitors, and provided him with a cocktail of egg whites and strychnine—a stimulant also used to poison rats. His team withheld the brandy for the final straight.

But as he approached victory, draining his flask, he discovered he was too late. The bricklayer, Fred Lorz, was already there, a smug look on his face.

Hicks slowed to a near walk, pale from his brandy and rat poison. But his efforts were not in vain.

Annie Roosevelt, daughter of the president, cried foul play, claiming that Lorz had, in fact, hitchhiked nearly half the race (though she wouldn’t have used the term as it wasn’t coined until 1923).

Lorz was disqualified on the spot.

Hicks staggered home to victory. In the words of an official, “His eyes were dull, lusterless; the ashen colour of his face and skin had deepened; his arms appeared as weights well tied down; he could scarcely lift his legs, while his knees were almost stiff.”

Lorz was impressed by his competitor’s effort and joined in the applause. In fact, he was surprised and a little hurt by the harsh reaction he’d received. He’d never intended to take the prize he claimed, and only finished as a joke.

Sadly, no one else found it funny. Lorz was banned for life. Hitchhiking may be a rewarding way to travel, just not in an Olympic final.

Either way, it had spawned and was already proving itself to be an effective means of travel, and one that raised the eyebrows of the powers that were.

And so began a long and entertaining century of hitchhiking…

To be continued…

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Evening was coming in. A van stopped and the door swung back. It was full. Seven lads. All excited. Go on! Go on!

I was headed for Newcastle and was still an hour or two away, but I held back a second. Was this sensible? Seven blokes. One of me.

“Where are you going?” I asked, stalling for time.

They said somewhere I’d not heard of. “It’s right by a train. Goes straight to Newcastle!” They sounded Geordie at least. They didn’t look like bad people either, nor dangerous.

I got in.

A loud cheer. The accelerator went down. “Ah mint like! We’ve picked up a hitchhiker!”

“What, so you hitchhike everywhere?” asked another. “I’m deleting Uber right now! Four minutes? That’s all you were waiting?”

The men were on their way home from work. It was a couple hours' drive. They’d be down on the job on a Monday morning, stay there during the week, then drive back on a Friday for the weekend.

“But it’s Thursday today?”

“Yeah the crane was broke,” Matt shouted over the racket. He was sitting next to me and was my guide to the chaos. “So boss man sent us home. Did nothing today and all. Got on the piss.”

There were three of us in the middle, two in the front and three in the back, hanging over the middle seats, elbows between the headrests. Jokes flew about like birds trapped indoors. I didn’t understand any of them, though was the subject of most.

“Do you like coke?” The driver asked over his shoulder. Looking at me for a worryingly long time, a crazed look in his eye. “Coz if you do, we’re gunna have plenty to talk about!”

The other lads howled. “Turn the music up would ya?”

“You’ve gotta come to the club,” another suggested. “Shall we get him to the club?” Let’s get him to the club! “Ahh Tony’s gunna love it!”

Matt told me ‘the club’ was their social club. It was where they went on Fridays and Saturdays and they were right, it was right opposite the station. After a pint I could go straight to Newcastle. I agreed to join them.

“Shit, flat tire!” The driver shouted. The passenger sat up like a meerkat. “Ah, damn, yeah.”

“Wait, we’ve got a flat tire?” came a tentative voice from the back.

“No, not us, you doughnut!” replied the driver. “We’re going 95 miles an hour, we’d be dead if that were us.”

I became aware of the speed. We were flying. Swerving between traffic, up backsides and the outside, skimming past cars as if they were slalom poles.

“How many beers have I had then?” The driver asked, taking a swig from a bottle in the door. Aidan, the passenger wasn’t sure. Four at least.

“I need a piss,” Aidan said. “We’re not stopping again,” came a groan from everyone else. “We literally just stopped!”

Aidan looked around and fished out an empty beer bottle from the footwell. He drew himself up to almost standing. He looked to the roof and shut his eyes. I got more than I bargained for in the wing mirror.

“Not bad, that,” he said proudly, holding it up. “Here give us that,” said the driver, grabbing the bottle. He put it to his lips and took a swig. “Lovely!”

Revulsion from some in the back, glee from others. “Go on then,” said Aidan, taking it back. He took a swig, unwilling to watch anyone else drink his piss and not partake himself. “To be fair, it’s not that bad,” they agreed. Tasted like water, or weak beer. “Anyone else want to try? Nico?”

Martin, the third in the middle with me and Matt, was torn between the club or home. For all his talk earlier, he had Uber up on his phone. £30 for a taxi back. But we’ve got a hitchhiker, the others implored. Alas, sense won out. Martin wanted to be dropped back instead. That meant another 20 minutes past the club, 20 minutes back.

By now, we were off the A1, away from the simple routes to Newcastle, and it was getting dark—I don’t hitchhike in the dark as a general rule. I’d made my bed. Get to the club, then the train. That was my only option.

The final lane to Martin’s house was narrow. “Gets longer every time,” they moaned. “Longer than the A1, I swear.” The fields either side were hung with an orange mist. The sun was shrouded in it, sinking onto the blur of the hedgerows.

We dropped Martin then turned around. As we did so, the driver pulled out a bag of coke. In plunged his key. It came out heavily laden. The yellowish powder ran halfway along the blade. Peaks and troughs like a tiny mountain range. It was enormous. It took two or three fierce snorts to get it all up, but all up it went.

Back down the lane, even faster this time. Sun still sinking into the hedgerows. I tried to concentrate on the fields. They looked beautiful. Just had to get there. 20 minutes. They do this all the time, I told myself. I’ll get there fine.

Back on the dual carriageway, fast as ever. At least at this pace, we’d be there quicker… Just sit tight. Just sit tight.

I spotted a 40 mile an hour sign up ahead. I felt a wave of relief; it was like a white flag of truce, the speed over at last. But relief turned to dread. We sped through at 70.

But then, at last, we were there. We hurled round one final corner, then the van stopped. The engine chugged like a panting dog. I stepped onto solid, unmoving ground. I’ve never needed a pint so bad.

“It’s that old church there,” someone pointed out. “No kidding.”

We went around the side of the tall, dark-brick building. A classic late Victorian establishment. Austere, uninviting. ‘Men’s institute and social club,’ it said inlaid in the glass on the pointed porch.

Inside was institutional. A quiet descended as we entered. There were two or three older men who eyed me suspiciously. “We picked up a hitchhiker,” said one of our party, a little sheepishly. The excitement suddenly gone.

There were two snooker tables under covers. Empty dark wood tables and chairs dotted about. The light was greenish, the walls were yellow wood panelled. It was very cold and strangely quiet. The bar lady squinted at me and reminded everyone that only members could play snooker.

We played darts instead. I was squarely beaten. No one talked much.

Matt said he’d take me to the train. I finished my pint and said goodbye. They were engrossed in their darts and bid me off with uninterested nods.

We walked into the early night. Matt told me he wanted to move to London when he could get enough money together. There was more going on. He was worried there were too many foreigners down there though. He’d heard there were just gangs of black people roaming around.

I told him he’d be fine. Driving 95 with a drunk driver on coke is more dangerous than just about anything.

“Ahh don’t even,” Matt replied. “He was off his head.”

We reached the station. It was dark and empty, but the train was coming soon. It was still nearly an hour to Newcastle. I’d make it for 8 o’clock. 10 hours exactly from London, twice what it said on Google Maps—excusing the slight cheat. Not too bad I reckoned.

Matt and I shook hands and said goodbye.

“It was a great day with the crane being down and that,” he said. “The lads said that was the best drive back we ever had.”

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“Sorry man,” the driver said as I got in. We were a mile north of Peterborough services, in a petrol station latched onto the A1 like a tick. “I just farted.”

“Nice to meet you too.”

“I didn’t think anyone else would be getting in.”

Fair enough, I replied. I could hardly blame him. He had every right to fart as much as he liked, I suppose. You take what you get when hitchhiking.

Still, it made me wonder how many lifts I’d missed because the driver had just farted and felt too ashamed. Not Fred. I thanked him doubly for stopping.

The windows went down. A blast on the accelerator, onto the A1, and all hint was gone.

Fred said he’d just come back from Helsinki. He lived there, in a little place east along the Gulf of Finland. Not far from the Russian border.

“What do you think about immigrants?” He asked abruptly, as if it had been on his mind. Maybe when he farted. He grumbled something to my answer and said he didn’t think their culture was compatible with ours. “…I’m talking about muslims,” he added.

In Fred’s mind, we let too many unsavoury characters in. There weren’t stringent enough checks. Too many bad eggs and no regard for the safety of the inhabitants.

He told me his mate went to Frankfurt recently to get a working visa. He had to get a whole bunch of biometric tests, fingerprints and eye scans etc. Why don’t they do that here? He asked.

Fred went to Sweden recently and thought there were parts that hardly looked like Sweden anymore. He wasn’t the last to moan about immigrants that day. All seemed to be saying the same thing. Perhaps Farage is tightening his messaging.

Fred grew up in Dartford. A “shithole” by his own admission. But he moved to Yorkshire as a late teen, dragged up by his mother. She was a dominant woman, Fred said, and he couldn’t handle dominant women. He’d tried. His ex was one. She’d really wanted kids, so they had two together. Otherwise, he wasn’t sure he would have had them.

She was his soulmate, he told me, but they couldn’t stand each other any more, so Fred had a girlfriend in Finland.

He didn’t think he’d move back to theUK any time soon. He liked the Finnish way of life. It was a shame booze was so expensive, but that was about it for issues. He said they all drink Long Gins. Gin and juice. But it cost seven or eight quid, so everyone would pre-drink.

He worked as an electrician in Google’s data centres. As AI steadily spreads, there’ll be more popping up so it was good work. They invested $1bn in new centres in Finland alone last year, drawn to the country’s cool climate and renewable energy sources.

It was the right industry to be in. About two weeks before, I’d lost my job to AI. In a roundabout way, the data centre electricians, and the tech companies of course, are the beneficiaries. There’ll be steady work for Fred for a long time. Until they find a way to automate him.

Fred dropped me just south of Doncaster. I’d made good progress, but pinching the map, I realised I was only about halfway to Newcastle.

You get a real sense of the size of the country when you’ve got to work for every mile. Not quite like walking, when every hill and valley is sketched into you, nor cycling, which I imagine is the same. But it’s less passive than driving or the train. You form a kind of relationship with the distances you travel.

Keiran took me on. He had spiky hair and a faun-like aura. There were tiny teddies with big beadie eyes huddled in the crevices of the car, peering up at me. We passed a lorry parked in a field that said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

Keiran had a portable mechanics business. He was the cheapest in the Leeds area, he said, and made good trade, driving around to people’s homes, fixing cars, usually by plugging them in and running the diagnostics.

He said he couldn’t fix cars made in the last few years though. Companies don’t release the software so they have to be sent back to the manufacturer. I suppose, in a way, AI was coming for Keiran’s job too.

He worked hard for now, though. He was out at 6:30 this morning and he wouldn’t be back until 10. It was harder than his old job in an actual garage but at least he was his own boss.

It was a good distraction too, working hard. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend of six years. She’d wanted kids, he didn’t, and that was that. It was rough he said and I consoled him as best I could.

We’d come off the A1 to avoid traffic, beetling through the hills somewhere near Leeds. Keiran’s van was running low on battery. It wasn’t clear we’d make it to the service station. It was at 1%. He’d look down at the dashboard nervously from time to time.

On our left, set into the hill as you might scrape a place to perch on a steep bank, was perhaps the most vulgar house I’d ever seen. It’s hard to explain how exactly, but it was gopping, and enormous, imposing itself on the unfortunate valley below. It seemed to be raised up on a giant plateau, with huge shiny windows, sharp walls painted a bright and ugly colour.

The road bent round behind it, under its high walls, stuck with signs saying “24hr surveillance” with a graphic of an angry dog.

We made the service station in time. Keiran was relieved. He still had three jobs to get to that evening.

It was 4 o’clock by now. I was over halfway distance-wise wise too. The final stretch, through the Dales, moors, and Pennines, looked intimidatingly long.

Luckily I didn’t wait 5 minutes. Maybe people in the north are just friendlier. The south had felt like an armwrestle.

I got in the car quietly as the driver signalled he was on the phone. “How did the shoot go?” He asked. “I’ve just picked up a hitchhiker so if he tries anything I may have to shoot him!”

He laughed loudly and ended the call, introducing himself as Mike.

He lived in Cambridge for three days a week for work. It was a chore, but for the fact his daughter was studying physics there.

“Wow, she must be clever,” I said.

“Errr,” he pondered, “She’s alright. No…I suppose she is clever, you’re right.”

Mike took me to Wetherby. Funny, I replied, last time I was at Wetherby, I was picked up by someone on their way there.

“Oh, another one for the ride share!” he laughed again and left me on the roadside.

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1985 - the key date for this trip. The year of the last Hitchhiker’s Manual, the last year my dad hitchhiked to Newcastle. Forty years this year. I was recreating the journey to see my brother there before he left uni.

Well, Julio stopped in a baby blue Nissan saloon from 1986. Close enough. It was a beautiful thing. Boxy and neat, like those Mercedes rappers liked in the 90s. I learnt it was a Nissan Bluebird—a sedan. I thought of the Pink Floyd song ‘San Tropez’, Breaking a stick on a brick on the sand, riding a wave in the wake of an old sedan… It looked like that kind of sedan.

Julio was a cool guy. He seemed to fit into the car as if he were a part of it. Shining black wayfarer sunglasses, baby blue lambswool sweater, same colour as the plating. Claret chinos that matched the faint lights behind the steering wheel.

This was the Nissan’s first outing of the year, though Julio was only on his way to work. He didn’t drive it in winter because the salt on the roads corroded the undercarriage.

Julio said he had several classic cars. Five in total. Three classic Mercs: one from 1968 and two from the 80s. He also had a Mazda but he was selling it, hence why he was commuting in this. It was a 70-mile round trip and the Nissan would drink a quarter of a tank each way.

Julio was a political analyst for East Africa. His company would research a topic in depth, like the state of telecommunications across the region, and then sell that to their partners, mostly the British government. He was off to D.C. soon for three weeks, then Africa after that.

I told him about the political campaign I once followed in Zambia. My cousin was standing for parliament in the far west of the country, in a part where there were no roads. In the rainy season campaigning was done by boats. When I was there, it was 4x4s on deep sandy tracks. I joined her for a week before it became obvious that having a young white man on the trail was too contentious. I was packed off.

It was a tough campaign. She’d been running for the party in power, the party everyone wanted out. But the region she was in had been run by the opposition for decades. The minister visited once every five years for the campaign. Gave everyone 50 Kwacha (£1.60) and then disappeared, elected. He did the same that year, though everyone was glad the old president was gone.

Julio couldn’t take me far. His office was just a junction or two up the A1, so he could drop me at the Peterborough services. It was progress at least and I was there by 2. I’d been on the road for four hours now and had only advanced a fifth of the way to Newcastle.

I thanked Julio and waved him off round the roundabout. I looked about. I know Peterborough services well. It was where we used to come when term ended at school. I’d had many a McDonald’s burger from here. No time to be spared this time though. Still four hours straight drive to Newcastle. Cars rolled in and out of spaces, concertinaing between the shrubs.

As I paced out, I suddenly spotted an extraordinary sight. One I’ve never seen before, not in three years of hitchhiking. It stopped me in my tracks.

There, sitting on the verge, backpack beside her, thumb to the road, was a hitchhiker.

She was middle aged, wavy hair, squinting into the sun. I rushed over the tarmac, excited to say hello. Her greeting was dejected. “I’ve never seen another hitchhiker in the wild,” I beamed. “It’s great to meet you.”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” she replied.

“Why, how long have you been here?”

“Three days…”

The lady’s name was Phillipa. There were two empty cans of soup beside her, lids bent open. Red smudges around her mouth. She apologised for not being very friendly. She had mental health issues and wanted to be alone.

Everyone was very nice here though, she told me. They let her sit in the petrol station last night to keep warm. They let her use the shower too. The night before had been spent in this spot trying to get a ride. The night before that was spent in the trees in her tent. It sat beside her packed away in a neat red disk. People had bought her food too.

She told me she loved the outdoors. She’d been homeless for 10 years and was on her way north to the town she was from. She could access a foodbank there and stock up on some vouchers to last her a month or two.

She hadn’t seen a hitcher for a year and told me to be careful.

“If you get a lift in less than an hour, I’ll take it personally,” she said. “You see, I’ve been here for three days. I wouldn’t be too hopeful.”

Quietly, I was quite confident that I would get a lift in less than an hour, though I realised I’d have to go round a corner, out of sight.

Plus it was fairly obvious why she was struggling catch a ride. She was sitting by the exit to the lorry petrol station. Only lorries passed this spot and lorries don’t pick you up. Their insurance doesn’t allow it.

Still she seemed fairly content and I didn’t want to teach her to suck eggs. She’d been in this game longer than I.

I offered her some food and she said she’d love some chicken nuggets if I didn’t mind. I was off to McDonald’s after all. In return for a box of 20, she offered me a tin of salmon from Lidl. I turned it down. I’d mistakenly bought a tin a few weeks before and the mangled spine and dry, sawdust texture had put me off the stuff forever. She insisted though, saying I could give it to my brother. Besides she didn’t have a tin opener so couldn’t eat it anyway.

I left the service station, giving Phillipa plenty of space. I went down to the slip road and found an unsatisfactory place near the confluence.

It only took forty minutes to catch a ride.

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40 years ago exactly, my dad used to stand here. Where precisely he wasn’t sure, but somewhere around here, at the bottom of the A1. Where it connects to London’s web. Apex Corner.

He was a student at Newcastle. He would hitch the long road there before graduating in 1985. He didn’t hitch much in Britain after that. Hung up his thumb as it were. In truth, he couldn’t remember why he hitched to uni. He had a VW Campervan of his own.

“There are two things which set hitch-hiking apart from any other mechanised transport,” the final edition of the Hitch-hiker’s Manual, Britain says, published that very same year. “Most important is that it is free, but it also enables you—in fact compels you—to meet and converse with complete strangers.”

I suppose that was the reason.

Dad says he swore by a student scarf. That way drivers knew who you were. In those days, you often had to stand out from a crowd of competitor hitchhikers. The Manual had an entire section on queuing etiquette.

Needless to say, times have changed. I didn’t have a student scarf, not least because I wasn’t a student. I was hitching to see my younger brother who was though. In his final year in Newcastle. Recreating the very journey Dad made.

The journey up to Apex Corner was long. The tube followed by two rattling bus rides up the hills of North London.

I met a young man called Andres at the final stop. He read out the name of the book in my hand in a thick Hispanic accent. He was Colombian, 17 years old, at college. He said he’d come to the UK because - he clenched both fists and knocked them together, but couldn’t find the word. Something to do with drugs and fighting.

The roundabout at Apex Corner is large, its centre sunken into the ground in a perfect circle, like a button that’s been pressed and got stuck. The footpath runs down through this arena. The backs of lorries revolving above, round and round. Spinning off onto the A1 or A41, or dissolving into London.

There used to be a service station here, owned by a Major of the Royal Flying Corps, a veteran of the First War. His name was John Drysdale and he was wounded flying behind enemy lines, back when the life expectancy for pilots was weeks, counted on one hand.

After the war he bought a small plot on the edge of the new roundabout at the bottom of the new A1. He set up a car service station and named it Apex Garage. The roundabout has been Apex Corner ever since.

I was there by 10 am. Google said you could drive to Newcastle in 5 hours. By my reckoning, hitchhiking takes twice as long. ETA 8 pm.

It took nearly two hours to get a lift. A bad start. It was a white Tesla that pulled in. Both the driver and the passenger were wearing big headphones. They still heard me alright. The driver told me they were going to Hamerton Zoo, a way up the A1.

The driver was Jeremy, a carer by work. He looked after the man in the passenger seat, Neil. A colleague was supposed to take him today but she couldn’t drive and the public transport was difficult. Jeremy decided it would be easier to take him up in the Tesla—an excuse to get on the road.

Jeremy bought the Tesla two years ago but he’d only passed his test in October. He’d spent 18 months just watching Netflix in it. “Yes, that was stupid,” he reflected. He drove it quickly, onto the dual carriageway, the houses thinning into scrubby bushes and then fields at last.

Neil hadn’t spoken much by this point. His headphones still on, a pair of Oakleys too. He was holding his phone about two inches from his nose. Penny-sized explosions flashed across the screen, tiny people streaming this way and that. He didn’t appear to be playing, just watching.

I asked what he was looking forward to seeing at the zoo.

Cheetahs, he replied. He had a deep, anunciated voice, as if he was hosting some mythical gameshow.

“My love for them is a closely guarded secret,” he explained. “I have a cheetah mother spirit. It wants to break free from its human shell.” He said that what they lack in strength they make up for in speed.

“I also love the Snow Leopard because of two words. Masked. Singer.”

I learned that Masked Singer is a show on Saturday nights. One of the singer’s masks was a snow leopard.

We were out of London by now. It was a clear morning. The fields were neatly furrowed, bright and light brown. I saw a man walking alone up an empty white track. He wore a double-breasted suit and black sunglasses, hair slicked, carrying a briefcase. I wondered why.

Neil was warming up, and soon we were chatting freely. He told me he’d invented an island. Barbossa Island. “Three guesses where the name came from?”

I guessed right—Pirates of the Caribbean.

“Oh aye,” he said, “If you understand the meaning of aye.”

Barbossa Island was in the far west, near Antarctica. It had been discovered by the pirate Barbossa. “He saw a rocky outcrop and said, Arrrr, here’s a rocky outcrop! and he settled there because it was even. During the day, it is minus 20 degrees and at night, it’s a punishing minus 40. In fact the only reason it’s inhabitable is two words.

“Hot.

“Springs.”

The island had tongal forest, beaches and a cave system, and there was an array of wildlife, including seagul-pigeon-vultures. Piranha anglers dwelt in the sewers, angling for piranhas whose exodermis was venous.

“I just saw roadkill,” Neil interrupted his description to inform us. “Deceased avian origin.”

Barbossa’s residents lived on the eastern seaboard. They were a motley crew. Warrio from Mario Cart, Homer Simpson, Wallace and Gromit, and Luigi. “Quite a rowdy bunch,” Neil acknowledged.

“Yoshi and Patrick Star are also on the island. They live further from the other dwellings and are united by a common love—consumption. Because you can never go wrong with that.”

Neil informed us we’d passed another deceased avian.

We found a service station just south of their junction. Jeremy pulled in and we went into Starbucks, Neil’s favourite cafe. He ordered a darkberry Frappuccino. The lady looked confused until Jeremy told her he meant blackberry.

Neil never said the word black. He thought it was racist and didn’t want to offend Jeremy. He’d say Dark Panther and Darkfriars, anything with ‘black’ was replaced with ‘dark’. Jeremy thought it was very funny and assured me that he didn’t find the word black offensive.

I asked Jeremy if he enjoyed his work. He’d done it for six years now and was a senior carer. He did, it was rewarding, but it was tough at times. I’d seen the best bits, he said.

It had felt like good progress but I’d only knocked an hour or so off. Still over four to go. I wished Jeremy and Neil a good day with the cheetahs and waved them goodbye.

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We were now beyond the wall. Beyond Rome’s furthest reach. The flattened Swan Hunter behind us, we continued east to the sea. On through Wallsend.

This part of the story begins long before Swan Hunter. Long before Hadrian even.

300 million years ago, this was a tropical swamp, an equatorial delta. Over millions of years, the sediment compressed and heated and sank deep into the Earth’s crust. Some parts, by pure fortune, were left exposed at the surface. Glistening black. Alluring to the humans, and, conveniently, by a river.

It was the monks of Durham and Tynemouth who first exploited the coal up here at any scale. By the 1700s, private interests were taking over. By the 1800s, coal had changed the world. Newcastle was the black heart, the Tyne the chief vein.

We came to a church on the edge of Wallsend. It was enclosed by a stone wall and watched over by tall ancient trees. It felt refreshingly pre-industrial, the tracery soothingly curvaceous.

The church warden, Mel, was locking the vestry door. He seemed pleased to tell us about St Peter’s and its history. He said it was very peaceful here and he liked to sit on the bench for inspiration.

“This was the only church between Newcastle and North Shields,” he told us. “You have to imagine none of this was here,” he motioned to the school and the houses. “Just this church in the middle of nowhere.”

He said that ships would put in at Willington Gut after months at sea. They’d come to church and bring the unburied dead up.

“There are many mariners and ship captains here,” he said. “Their names will be wearing off now.”

We’d heard there was a mass grave of coal miners here too.“Ah, there are two.” Mel lead us round and pointed to a couple of plaques. “Were you at the commemoration yesterday? It was the anniversary of a collapse the other side of town. 36 men and boys in that one.”

The largest here was 102, in 1835. “The youngest was 5,” Mel told us, “His grandfather was the eldest. They think there was a methane leak and someone struck a match.”

It happened in the largest pit near here, sold by Durham Cathedral to a banker named William Russell in 1787. He amassed a fortune, bought Brancepeth Castle, and his son became the richest commoner in the country.

After the disaster, Russell benevolently paid for the funerals. He didn’t evict the wives from their homes either, which was uncommon. Neither did he pay for headstones. The plaques on the wall had been put there for the 200th anniversary—the miners were not forgotten.

Mel pointed to the far corner where the mass grave was, conspicuous for its emptiness. Just a patch of boggy land. We should be careful going over there, Mel said, graves were known to sink.

For decades, it was presumed that coal powered the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire, but recently historians have begun to question it, demoting it to a mere bit player in the bigger story. Damning for the countless horrors endured if so. On average, 1000 people died for every year coal was mined in England.

Its role in railway history is undeniable though. Some of the first mechanised rail locomotives crawled out of the throats of the mines here, transporting coal long before people. The first railway, pulled by Stephenson’s Rocket, connected pitheads south of the river. It opened 200 years ago this year.

We asked Mel how long it would take to get to the coast, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never thought to walk it before. We must stop, however, at the Low Lights pub in North Shields.

“I used to call it the Low Life, because it really was,” he chuckled, “But now it’s up and coming. I think the whole of North Shields is—it’ll be very trendy soon.” He said there were lots of restaurants and bars popping up there. We would like it for sure.

The road east curved down the hill, following alongside the graveyard to the bottom of the valley. It was easy to imagine the isolation Mel evoked.

There were no buildings, save for an old terracotta pub and a concrete road bridge further up the valley. To our right, the Wallsend stream trickled towards Willington Gut and the river. We imagined the mariners paddling up to church.

There were many parts of Tyneside that J.B. Priestley did not like when he visited in the 30s. This part—between Wallsend and North Shields—was chief among them. He said that if T. S. Eliot wanted to write about a real wasteland, he should come here.

In Priestley’s mind, Tyneside had received nothing for its achievements and bitter toils. As he stood shivering, he wondered if it had been worth it.

Here was the pleasant green estuary, blackened and ruined, it seemed, forever. Here was a warren of people living in wretched conditions, in a parody of either rural or urban life, many of them now without work or wages or hope, not half the men their peasant ancestors were. They seemed to have gained as little as the befouled river itself. And the fortunes, the piles of gold that the alchemy of industry had conjured from this steam and filth and din, where were they?

Brancepeth Castle wasn’t on our route.

Up the opposite hill, we came into Howdon. There wasn’t much to observe. It was for all intents and purposes, a suburb. Like any in the country. The industrial mess that Priestley saw has long since been cleared. Partly by German bombs, partly by slum clearances.

We noticed one resident had done their best to cheer the scene. Their front garden was arranged with trellises, statues and balls of round green shrubs. Some were in flower, just about the only colour in the area. A sign read, Garden Tours 50 cents. My Happy Place est 2023.

On the edge of Howdon, the houses gave way to a large roundabout. The sunken A19 invisible as yet but audible. The rain intensified as we crossed it. The traffic splashed noisily. We turned our collars up and ploughed on.

Playing fields lay empty to our left, under a string of huge pylons. The pitches didn’t appear to have lines, just netless goals facing each other from afar. We wondered when they played if not on Saturday. It felt for the first time like the suburbs of Newcastle were thinning. The gaps between the puddles growing.

Which brought us to North Shields. The end was nearly in sight. Posters in a doorway advertised funfairs and wrestling shows and a tribute band called Scam Fender. This was his home town after all. These suburbs felt a little more distinct than Howdon’s, less part of Newcastle somehow.

We followed Mel’s advice and made for the Fish Quay in the east of the town.

Like Newcastle, North Shields has medieval roots, set up by the monk Germanus to trade coal in the 1200s. It might have grown to the size of Newcastle had the larger neighbour not become jealous.

Newcastle townsfolk attacked it and stole a ship in 1267. But the real blow came from the king. Edward I owned a share of Newcastle’s port and none of North Shields’. He ordered its jetties to be destroyed. It never recovered as a trading port.

Instead, it focused on fishing. “Our harvest is from the deep,” says the town motto. Fishermen would sail as far as Iceland for ling and cod, which was salted and sold in the city.

By the 20th century, the catch was skate, coley, haddock, dogfish and cod. Herring was smoked on the quayside, carried from the boats in baskets woven by the blind on Howard Street. Unsold stock was tinned for Tyne Brand and shipped across the world. The surplus was mashed to make guano for the fields until complaints about the smell sent the factory to Hull, then Aberdeen.

We looked across the Quay from above, then dropped down steep, slippery steps to the water level. The part of town on the plateau was built in the 1800s, but the old town and the Fish Quay go right back to Germanus.

There used to be 100 inns and taverns between the Low Lights and the Bull Ring in the West. A stretch famed in the 1700s for its vice and depravity but also for its skilled sailors. Press gangs were drawn to the scent like orcas. Once, they cordoned off the town and took 250 men and boys on a single night, sent to fight Napoleon.

The quayside was largely empty that evening. We looked out across the Tyne. It was gloomy and brooding. We imagined the mighty ships of Swan Hunter, The Mauritania or Geordie Pride, hundreds of meters long, chugging away for their maiden voyages, cheered by crowds. Or colliery rigs and steamers, heavily laden, bound for the fires of London.

North Shields witnessed all come sliding out the shute.

We found the Low Lights pub. There were several derelict buildings around it. Hollowed out windows, crumbling roofs. A cold wind was blowing off the sea. The pub was small, the ceiling low. It was full, loud and warm.

We got to the bar and ordered a pint. Well earned, we reckoned. We were nearly there.

In the next-door room, people sat huddled, singing merrily, swaying side to side. A man in the middle was playing the guitar.

Play Delilah! came a shout from the corner. A man with a handful of pints sloshed through a gap. A woman in the corner was breastfeeding. The guitar obliged. Why, why, why… Delilah! the room returned. Sweet Caroline came next, with the expected reception. We sang along too, hands in the air.

We considered a second pint, maybe settling there. But we still had a mile or two to the coast. We’d better finish it.

The lady by the door clutched my sleeve as we left. She said they were pleased to have us. They’d come over on the ferry from South Shields for the man with the guitar’s 61st birthday.

“He’s a musician, see,” she said, slightly slurred, “The guitar was on the wall and we just took it off. Don’t know if we were allowed…” she cackled. “This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Spontaneous moments like this. You and me, British people.”

Back into the cold and the rain. Up the barren slope under the railway. Leaning into the weather for the last stretch. A pub had a plaque to say it served the guards in the prison. We spent a long time wondering if the concrete building opposite was the prison. It wasn’t. It was housing. Which says all you need to know.

Then at last, we reached Tynemouth. We’d shaken the shackles of the city for good now. It felt like a regional town, totally apart. Georgian architecture and a town square. A plaque told us Garibaldi had stayed here and another said Jimi Hendrix ate fish and chips on this very bench.

We didn’t see much of it besides that. We stayed long enough for a pint and a look out over the surf into the grey beyond of the North Sea. It was dark by now.

Then we were rattling back on the Metro. A distant descendant of the old railed mine carts that once crawled this very same way. The Newcastle Roads they were called. We couldn’t see anything outside. Just rain and our own reflections.

We went to the Crown Pasada when we got back to the city. It was a favourite pub of my brother’s. We settled onto the green leather benches, legs weary, but we were excited, in the way you are after a day of stimulation, going over all we’d seen.

Soon we were chatting with the punters on the table over. “Ahh you went to the Low Lights,” said Aileen, “That’s a lovely pub. Sam Fender used to work there. Did you see the beer tap?” We hadn’t, no. “Ahh, it’s his first ever BRIT award! He donated it.”

We told them about our walk. They told us about growing up in Byker and the old haunted Simpson Hotel. Life on the rigs in the Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Claire had been a punk in the 80s on the King’s Road in Chelsea and knew Vivienne Westwood for a time.

We stayed til close. Roaring steadily louder. Realising that for all its history, this is why you come to the Northeast. The welcome, the friendliness.

It may be cold, wet and grim outside, but it’s always warm in a pub.

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I owe Chris Killip. As a teenager, in the brilliant white of the Getty in Los Angeles, I first encountered two of his photography collections. In Flagrante and Seacoal. The images transfixed me.

I visited the collection twice, then bought a camera, and have aspired to be a photographer ever since.

Eight years later, I stood in front of another collection of Killip’s, this time in the Laing in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The Last Ships recorded everyday life in the final years of Swan Hunter, the largest shipyard on a river famous for building ships.

My brother and I planned to walk the eight miles from the Laing along the river to the coast. It would take us through the former industrial heartlands of the city. Ouseburn, Byker and Wallsend out to North Shields and Tynemouth, passing on our way, what was once the mighty Swan Hunter.

J.B. Priestley made the same journey 90 years ago, albeit in a car. He knew the importance of the region even if few others did: ‘England would not be the England we know,’ he wrote, ‘if Tyneside were not the Tyneside we know.’

It was a sultry grey day. Drizzle came and went with no warning, sweating out of the low, heavy sky. We left the Laing and headed east through the edges of Newcastle’s centre, crossing the tangle of dual carriageways that wrap its eastern side. Then we turned down towards the river, to Ouseburn.

Ouseburn was busy that day, even if the weather wasn’t much. The renovated warehouses huddled tightly in the valley of the tributary. Glassy fronts and coffee shops. Families pottered. Kids with ice cream clung to the painted railing that runs along the stream. It was pleasant.

For most of Ouseburn’s life, it was the opposite.

It was here, far enough downstream from the town proper, that the city’s most polluting workshops were found. Tanneries and dye works, chemical plants, paintworks and factories. There were potteries and brickyards. Steam-powered flax mills made sail cloth for the ships. Lead works synthesised toxic white paint. Its poisoned workers developed blue lines around their gums. Many became colic, blind or partially paralysed.

Just beside the stream, livestock would be led down the steep hill to the slaughterhouses, their leather to the tanneries, then boots and ships. Their bones were crushed for manure. Their blood was left to congeal and then mixed with oil to create blue paint. The smell was rancid and unbearable, mingling with the piles of manure dumped near the glassworks.

Fortunately, that kind of industry has long since leached away. Renovation came in the early 2000s. Many old buildings were demolished, replaced by cheerful artistic places and cool bars. It’s the arty area now. The Shoreditch of Newcastle. The lead works were covered in sterile earth to become the Ouseburn Farm. The Biscuit Factory houses seven floors of artists.

Evidence of art is all over the area, from the bold, colourful street paintings to the quirky boats that sit half beached on the banks of the stream. In 2022, Timeout named it one of the ‘coolest neighbourhoods’ in the UK.

We reach the Tyne. It looked moody in the drizzle. It meandered and we followed the embankment up to the Free Trade Inn. Its name was no doubt a dig at Maggie Thatcher. In truth Thatcher had little direct impact on Ouseburn. Its workshops were already mostly abandoned by her time. But she did have an impact indirectly.

I met a man while hitchhiking a couple of years ago. He had been an old school raver, recovered at last. He told me about the raves that rippled through Ouseburn in the ‘90s. How they gave creative expression to a disenfranchised youth left nothing by the departing Thatcher.

They broke into old paintworks and flax mills and filled the decrepit rooms with smoke, lasers and music that lasted for days. The music was dark and heavy, reflective of the mood and the situation. The drugs by contrast were clean and happy, psychedelics and MDMA. People felt together. My friend told me about a rave the police shut down, how people had gone wading across the Ouse to avoid the riot shields.

The raves petered out in the 2000s as Ouseburn gentrified. For my mate, the raving lingered. He continued for 20 more years. All over the country. Eventually, his drug addiction became too severe. He finally gave up crack in his 50s. He didn’t regret it, though. Those moments in Ouseburn he’d never forget.

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The great bridges of Newcastle are perhaps the city’s most visceral feature. You can look ahead at the curving facades, shops and life as usual, but glance upwards and you’ll see, far above the chimneys, their fierce tract, throbbing through the sky.

The juxtaposition between the shipyards and life that Killip captured may have gone. But under Newcastle’s bridges, you can get a similar sense of your own smallness in the face of modern industry. Ouseburn has three such bridges, scratching across it like the marks of a teacher erasing a paragraph that should be ignored.

The largest is the Byker Bridge, connecting Newcastle to Byker. The name of the suburb is evocatively short and gruff. Danish in origin. Viking. It tells of longboats drifting up the river and of the Great Heathen Army that arrived under a banner of a raven, led by Halfdan, son of Lothbrok.

Indeed, Byker’s had a dynamic history. It was a village until 150 years ago but after the bridge was built, its population exploded. By 1911, some 50,000 people had crammed themselves into dense rows of brick terraces. Then in the 60s and 70s, it changed dramatically again. The terraces were replaced by modern social housing in what many saw as an unusually successful example of urban renewal.

We passed through it along the Walker Road, long and straight and made of red asphalt. It looked eerie in the mist. To one side were warehouses, followed by scraggy shrubs that insulated the park to the north. On the other side, tied limply to the wooden fence was a memorial. “Gone too soon. Forever 16,” it said.

We learned the kid had been killed a few months before. A driver going more than 70 in a 30, high on cocaine and cannabis. He got an 8-year sentence and a 15-and-a-half-year driving ban. There were folded, soggy camp chairs and a ‘Merry Christmas’ banner tangled in the bush behind. People had left notes saying ‘Miss you cuz’.

Beyond the park, as we reached Walker, the houses began again. We counted them. Modern unassuming places, built to replace the terraces. They numbered right up to 1478.

The drizzle had intensified so we stopped in a corner shop. The newspaper stands still had images of Newcastle’s historic cup win the week before. The largest one-club town in Britain, they’d been stuck in a 70 year trophy drought until the previous Sunday. The excitement in the city was still palpable, though perhaps not in Walker that day. We barely saw a soul.

Unlike much of Tyneside, Walker’s bank maintains some semblance of industrial grandeur. We wove through Hyperion Way and Cicero Court to get a closer look at the looming cranes, wide and yellow. They belong to Shepherd Offshore, an oil and gas company, on the site of the old Neptune shipyard. We met some folks in the pub that evening who told us that many of the old shipbuilding families went into oil and gas. Many, including their son, now live in the Gulf.

Beyond, the empty road ran above the steady curve of the river. To our right lay fenced-off, empty brownfield, to our left, delapidated piles of brick from an old works of some description. There were junkyards too, containers stacked high to keep onlookers out, wire tangled, angry and protective. These were true industrial suburbs. The vacuum between places. Metal fences, plain walls. The earth bitten and polluted.

We came onto the old railway line, now a cycle path. It was thick with wet bushes. We spotted a gap between them and climbed the muddy bank off the line. It opened up to a scrap of hopeless land with a view down over the silver river. Piles of bricks and overgrown weeds. Litter liberally dispersed, evidence of a camp fire or two.

But there, in the middle, was a sculpture. It was a magnificent thing. Four shopping trollies, showing the first rouge of rust, mangled together. Contorted into poignancy, it mocked the cranes on the distant bank, imitated the gasping weeds. Twists of metal, protruding wheels. It was perhaps one of the finest sculptures I’ve ever seen. Hidden from passersby, overlooking the slippery, sluggish estuary, it somehow captured both the past of this place and its frustrated present.

We admired it, contemplating for a time, wondering who had built it.

Just a few hundred meters downstream, we came to the old Swan Hunter. Once one of the greatest shipyards the world had ever seen, it built 1600 ships in its time, at a time when Britain ruled a global empire built on shipping.

More than a kilometre of the riverbank was harnessed, from the Neptune works to Wallsend. Out of these berths came the Mauritania, at the time the largest moving structure ever made, the ship that rescued the survivors of the Titanic and the vessels that sank the Bismarck. Liners, icebreakers, tankers and aircraft carriers all crashed slowly into the Tyne from here before turning and sailing across the world.

But after the war, as Britain’s position faltered, so too did Swan Hunter’s. The largest tanker the Tyne ever built, Tyne Pride, was finished in 1976, but by then the game was up. It could carry 250,000 tonnes and was 350 meters long, but it was sold for less than it cost.

Swan Hunter declared bankruptcy in 2007. The cranes and floating dock were sold to Bharati, an Indian company. In Goa they remain, building tankers, deep-sea vessels and high-speed interceptors for the Indian Coast Guard.

The old site of Swan Hunter meanwhile, protected by the same metal fencing as everywhere else, lies flat. A concrete floor plan. The berth where the Tyne Pride was assembled is an empty cleft. The distant cranes of Shepherd Oil and Gas were visible in the gloom. Shepherd has bought this plot too. It promises big things.

We walked down to the old front gates. Killip photographed workers heading home from here. My brother was sure there was a plaque somewhere that had poignant words about Ozymandias and the crumbling of empires, but we couldn’t find it. We reckoned it was a poetic figment of his imagination. Unsurprising really. This place is rich with symbols of crumbled empires.

The name Wallsend refers to Hadrian’s Wall which began its long journey across the Roman frontier here. The fort, Segendeum, was just behind us. It was only discovered recently. For decades, the Simpson Hotel, where vagrant workers were holed up, stood above it.

We heard it said that people staying there were kept up in the night by the noise of marching feet. Being mostly down-and-outs and lowlifes, they were dismissed, but when they knocked the hotel down, they discovered the fort beneath. The down-and-outs were vindicated.

The fort was closed that day. We peered at it through the fence. Like Swan Hunter’s, it’s just a wide open space with a floor plan of stone foundations. Most of the terraces depicted in Killip’s photographs have been levelled too. You could see the outline of where some of them once stood.

There we met a passing lady. She stopped to answer our question about the lines. She told us her name was Alwin, after Alwin’s Dream, a popular film the year she was born.

Alwin remembered the shipyards well. “You’d hear them apart from anything,” she recalled fondly. “All sorts of noises. You just got used to it. It was part of the background.”

She remembered the huge ships too, and the workers coming out in their droves in the evening. We asked about the houses but she couldn’t remember the exact location of them, or how they fit together. Neither was she sure exactly when they were knocked down.

“I grew up in Heaton,” she said, pointing along the way, “But it’s all the same. It’s a nice place here now, it’s quiet. I like it. Apart from the rain of course!”

The house she lived in now had once belonged to the managers at Swan Hunter. It was only a small place, two rooms either side of the staircase, up and down. “I bought it because it was a good price,” she smiled again, “Ahh, it’s nice here.”

To be continued…

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Why Hitchhiking?

For most people, hitchhiking is the thing their parents told them never to do.

It’s a relic from a safer past, an outdated mode of transport reserved for creeps, clowns and escaping convicts. The thing in horror movies that ends in murder and mutilation.

But most people haven’t hitchhiked.

In reality, it’s (usually) none of those things. Jumping in a car with a total stranger is exhilarating, rewarding and affirming, unmatched elsewhere in modern life.

But what makes it special is the stories.

Ask anyone who’s done it and they’ll tell you a great tale. I met a guy the other day who said his last driver was drunk and had a boot full of snakes.

Of course, it’s not all roses.

There is a reason people don’t do it anymore. It is risky and it’s slow. It involves hours of anxiety and uncertainty as you stand in the rain, wondering why you didn’t just get the train like everyone else your generation.

But that’s what Britain by Thumb is for. You don’t have to do any of the hard work.

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I’m Nico. I’m a writer and photographer and I first hitchhiked aged 5.

My brother and I got lost in the woods and were saved hours later by a passing car.

After a 14-year break, I next thumbed a ride in 2017 while backpacking in the States. Too young to rent a car, too poor to buy one, I hitched up the West Coast. It changed my life.

Not only did it show me a whole new way of seeing the world, but it taught me a valuable lesson: that most people are not mass murderers. Most people are pretty nice.

I came home to Britain and went to university and never once thought about doing it here. It may have worked in America, but Brits were obviously too miserable to pick anyone up.

The Guardian had declared hitchhiking dead as long ago as 2009 and concluded that we were all too afraid of each other for it to work anymore. I didn’t know anyone who had done it this side of the millennium.

Rather than take my chances, I booked a one-way trip back to the States; this time I’d thumb from Chicago to New Orleans…

But then Covid hit.

I spent the next two years locked down at my parents’, dreaming of getting back on the road even if America was off the cards.

It was then I realised that Britain by thumb was the answer.

I could see the country I grew up in and meet the people in it. What’s more, the trip would be something of an experiment—a chance to find out what happens when you throw yourself at the mercy of the Great British Public.

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So late one Sunday afternoon, I got myself to a lay-by on the edge of Edinburgh.

Within 3 minutes, it was raining.

Within 5, I’d been given the middle finger.

Within 10, I was on the backseat of a Mercedes-Benz.

I haven’t stopped since.

And—touch wood—I haven’t been murdered.

I’ve recorded my experiences here on Substack and I’m writing a book. My journey has been on the news and in the press and I’ve spoken at the Royal Geographical Society, all in an attempt to revive the dying art of hitchhiking.

In those three years, I’ve found that British people are far from the sour, miserable bunch we like to make out. Generally, the country is full of decent people, people with fascinating lives and remarkable stories.

I’ve met anarcho-feminists and drug dealers, slaughtermen and war veterans, refugees, a Tory MP and even a couple having an affair. Their stories enrich the places I pass through, splash colour onto the landscape and breathe life into towns and villages.

Together they weave a unique textile of the UK as it is today.

So join me as I traverse the country, and sometimes beyond, seeing the world from the passenger seat of strangers’ cars.

You never know where you’ll end up, nor who you’ll meet.

But you can be sure it’ll be entertaining.

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Windsor. A grand old place to be. Within the course of a short ride, I had traversed the entire length of the British scale. From the grot of Heathrow to the castle of the King himself. Well, at least, I could see the castle over the hedges. I was in a lay-by on the M4 slip road. But as far as hitchhiking goes, this was a grand old place to be.

An enormous American pickup swung onto the slip road. Instantly outstanding, as American things tend to be. Right-hand drive. The driver was bald and stern, wearing a sky blue polo. I dropped my thumb as it surged past. It was probably a CIA agent, or some security detail, maybe for an Etonian—term would be starting any minute now. Not worth the thumb energy.

Not many cars went by after that. It was a grey and cold day. I watched the backs of the lorries skimming along the motorway. Westward bound.

Ten minutes later another huge GMC pickup cruised round again. Another driver in blue, same stern look, bald head too. Must be something really important, I thought again, dropping my thumb.

The pickup pulled right over.

“Hello mate,” the driver said cheerfully. His accent wasn’t American. It was Australian or Kiwi. “I just went past ya and thought paaaa I’ll go round and pick ‘im up!”

I scampered round to the other side to climb into the armchair of a passenger seat.

“I remember doing it as a kid,” he continued, “Couldn’t just leave ya there!” His syllables were short and sharp. Kiwi, it transpired.

Bill was not a CIA agent. Nor a bodyguard or an Etonian parent. He drove cars to film sets. It was a great gig, he explained. He just drove the car there and sat around all day, chatting with the folks on set. “Ahhh I’m too old to work hard, mate.”

He was coming that day from Slough, where he lived. Heathrow to Windsor may have been a metaphorically long journey; Slough to Windsor is even more so and far closer. It’s an unfortunate place, Slough. Rather like an average tennis player made to look terrible by a seasoned pro, it’s measured entirely in comparison to the sweeping lawns of Windsor. The M4 is the net.

I asked Bill what it was like, interested to hear what it was like from someone who lived there, not just peered down at it over the motorway.

“Ahhh fuck me mate!” He replied emphatically, “It’s an absolute shithole!”

Clearly more like a bad tennis player against a seasoned pro then.

Bill had lived there for two of his 22 years in Britain. He’d worked in the Mars factory there for a time, a historic place if you’re into confectionery. In 1932, the American Forrest Mars Senior set up the first British branch of his business there. On the August bank holiday, in the tiny second-hand kitchen with four employees, he invented the very first Mars bar. They make 3 million a day now. Nice to hear Slough was good for something.

Bill was at a junction in life, unsure if it was time to move. His partner was Mexican which added another layer but he wasn’t so into New Zealand. I was surprised, I’ve always heard good things about the country. Bill grimaced and shook his head.

“Economy’s gone to shit mate. And there are so many gangs. Gangs absolutely everywhere mate.”

I learned that there is one particularly big gang called the Mongrel Mob. They got their name from a judge who called them a bunch of mongrels. Their insignia is a bulldog wearing a Nazi helmet. Swastikas play a big part in their branding apparently.

“Nasty fuckers,” Bill surmised, “Just love violence. When they see each other they go Seig Heil Mongrel Mob and waggle their hand like this.” He shook his thumb and pinky.

Bill said the gangs across New Zealand are showy. Jackets, insignia, tattoos across faces, badges on leather. “I guess it’s brotherhood or some bullshit.” (Check out these portraits by the photographer Jono Rotman to get an idea.)

If you were too violent for the Mongrel Mob, chances are you’d join the Nomads. They were the nastiest of the lot. Total crack pots, crazed and depraved. You’d see them chopping around from time to time.

Bill had a good anecdote to illustrate:

“So me and my mate were just leaving a heavy metal festival in New Zealand right. And as we went out we saw like 200 bikers by their choppers, all the leathers on, long beards, the lot. Proper biker gang.

“Anyway we carried on walking and round the corner we saw about a dozen Nomads. Scary as hell. A few of the bikers had wandered up their way to get summin to eat. Me and my mate, we’re like ‘we better get on that hill out the way, shit’s about to go down!’ Coz you know, these bikers hadn’t seen the Nomads and they were wearing their biker badges and you don’t do that anywhere near the Nomads!

“Sure enough, the Nomads spot the bikers and go and beat the living shit out of them, being like ‘You wear your badge round here you’re gunna get fucked up!’ Me and my mate are watching this whole thing and let me tell ya, they were smashin them. One guy got his head put against the door of a van and SMASH bloke kicked his head in. Another geezer got a bottle of Jack Daniels, broke it, then just slashed the guy’s throat!

“The bikers then crawl back to their mates who are round the corner, battered and covered in blood. Their mates are like, Who did this man! Let’s go fuck em up! So they come round the corner, like 200 bikers, to fuck up these 12 or 13 Nomads. And the Nomads are pullin out fence posts and that, you know getting ready.

“And as the bikers are approaching, this one massive Mauri fella—big mohican, tattoos all over— high fives his mates and just steps out in front of them, holding this iron fence post and he’s like Come on then! Fuckin come on!

“And I kid you not, the bikers look at each other and the whole lot of them just turn around and leg it! Fuck this man these guys are crazy! They got back on their choppers and rode out. Craziest thing I ever saw…”

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Bill liked a heavy metal festival and he’d seen some pretty gnarly things. At Download Festival in Leicestershire, the front man of a band came on stage and told everyone he was going to break a world record. As he said it, the screens behind showed clips of him having his back pierced with big hooks.

Then down came two wires from the roof of the stage. He clipped himself on, was pulled up and sang the whole gig swinging above the crowd, suspended by his back, his band mates pushing him out over the crowd. “He was sweating and everything. Must have been agony! Good show though. Can’t even remember their name now I think about it.”

Shortly after, Bill found himself dancing to an Abba covers band with a load of metal heads in their leathers, belting out Dancing Queen.

After a metal gig in Finland recently, with a night to spare, he and four mates went to see P!nk. “I like all kinds a music mate. I’ve seen Michael Jackson, BB King, Bob Marley—all the greats. Got bags of respect for Taylor Swift!”

I liked Bill a lot. He sure could tell a story and had no shortage of them. The M4 to Bristol was gone in no time.

“I’ll drop you in the middle if you like,” he said, “But I’ll have to be quick or my boss will get pissed!”

We came into the city and we said goodbye. It had been a successful journey, only taken a couple of hours more than the train and saved me £30. Not bad I reckoned.

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The Elizabeth Line skimmed quietly west. The newest of London’s tubes, it’s the capital’s latest—reasonably successful—attempt to show that it can operate in the 21st century. There’s something of a Tesla about it, before Musk trashed the image. Clean, sleek, quiet. Perfected aesthetically. Apple-ified.

I was heading to Bristol for a festival. For once I’d decided to hitchhike purely on financial grounds. The train, only a few hours, was expensive and I reasoned I could reallocate my savings to a few rounds at the bar.

My fellow Elizabeth Liners were a motley crew. Most sat with arms over huge suitcases, families burrowed among them. Heading for Heathrow and the rest of the world. Anywhere in the world. Everywhere. It’s funny to think this grim, grey concrete suburb is such a portal. You’d never guess if you got off the train at West Drayton, as I did that day, that within a few hours you could be among the Pyramids of Egypt, the forests of Brazil or the towers of Tokyo.

I walked for half an hour through murky terraces. Pebbledash walls, tiled roofs, bay windows. The more architecturally adventurous had mock Tudorbethan beams. Tracksuited youths sloughed about on bikes. The noisy tug of the airport was impossible to ignore, a kind of gravity.

I’d found a roundabout with a decent looking slip road right onto the M4 to Bristol. It was the road coming out of Heathrow so I thought there’d be a decent chance of a lift.

To get there I had to pass through the grounds of the Holiday Inn, a vast, fearsome-looking place, somewhere between a sixties tower block and a mental asylum. Such a building fits right in here. There are many asylums out in these edgelands.

Buses were unloading tourists as I passed. People filed into the hotel lobby. Others clung to the outside smoking. There was an acute sense that this was the underbelly of travel and tourism, the inside of the machine. It was a glimpse of the workings of the vast, unruly industry, a glimpse of what most people see, though they probably choose not to see it. They no doubt save their photos for the real sites. Leicester Square, red-coat Guardsmen. Anything but this.

I jumped over the fence to the roadside. A resilient lime tree, bent over. Its once green leaves were tarred with exhaust. It left a grey streak on my trousers as I brushed by.

Now for the cars. Countless, rushing, slowing, listing sensibly to the left, revving aggressively, indicating, checking mirrors. After a few minutes, a man pulled into my makeshift layby, really just a gap of unused tarmac in the armpit of the left turn. He was wearing a bucket hat and had a smear of stubble across his chin. “You going to Bristol?” He said. I was, I replied, was he? “Errrrr, nah. Stevenage.”

It was the opposite direction. I wondered why he stopped but thanked him all the same. In a place like this, any human interaction is something. A small reminder that we subjugated this unfortunate patch of the earth to benefit ourselves.

I thought of J.G. Ballard. He lived not far away and based his bizarre book Crash! in this neck of the woods: the motorway slip roads and flyovers that wire Heathrow into the rest of London. Ballard loved this kind of place, places of concrete. Places where even the most scraggy shrub feels like an impostor. The book is about someone who is sexually obsessed with car crashes. Read it if you haven’t, it’s pretty strange.

Nearly half an hour passed. I was beginning to think this was a bad place to stand. Not least because I could feel the exhaust forming a film on the back of my throat, clogging my nostrils. I don’t remember ever standing in such a filthy place.

Then I got lucky. An Audi swung in. Its driver was a youngish man called Mohamed. We shouted a quick exchange over the noise. He wasn’t going far, only two junctions, but I reckoned I’d be better off anywhere but here.

It was a relief climbing in. The air was cool and clear. It tasted of nothing, instantly noticeable after the pollution. There were two kids on the back seat, both wearing the white gowns of some kind of martial art. Karate I quickly learnt.

Mohamed would take his kids to practice on Saturdays. They were making good progress, purple belts already. They took after their dad. “What belt are you?” I asked. “Black,” he replied coolly. He said he’d been to the world championships. Rotterdam, 2006, representing Afghanistan.

He asked about hitchhiking and said he’d done it a fair bit in the Middle East, once in Saudi Arabia on Hajj. Mohamed thought it was much safer there. People were more open and there were no rapists or murderers.

He told me he’d studied civil engineering at City University. He’d done it for several years but lost his job when COVID hit. He changed careers and set up a car dealership with his dad and brothers. It had grown quickly. He said last year they turned over 700. I wasn’t sure if that meant cars or large ones.

It hadn’t all been plain sailing. For a time he was working 14 hour days, seven days a week. But now it was off the ground, things were settling down. When it was quiet in summer he’d only work two or three days a week. September was busiest he said, people moving for university, moving house. The country on the move. Things got pretty hectic round then, he said, raising his eyebrows.

It was barely ten minutes to the Windsor junction. This was a much better spot. Far less stressful somehow too. Over the tops of the hedge I could see the bulbous towers of the castle. I made a note to head straight here when hitching west next time.

A low plane came howling overhead. Its metallic underbelly clearly visible from the roadside. I thought of the countless souls flying in and out of Heathrow, conveyed into London, conveyed out of London. Millions and millions. Work, business. On holiday.

I realised you always get a good sense of a city from its ugliest parts. Even if you don’t fancy hanging around in them.

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Tibshelf Service Station. I was back in the world of cars. The world of the hitchhiker. The peaks of the Peak District were a temporary excursion, a brief escape from the exhaust and the noise. A glorious one though. I missed it already. I felt like I’d stepped outside the zoo enclosure, back onto the tarmac paths of the human world.

The service station could have dropped the ‘Tibshelf’. It was like every other. Homogenous, bland. American brands, expensive coffee. At least I didn’t wait long. Amy was driving a Mazda van and was excited to pick me up. The van was full to the roof so it took some effort to squeeze in my bag. It joined a sofa wedged at an angle.

I told her I’d been camping in the Peaks, by a reservoir.

“No way, me too!” She said, “Which one?”

It wasn’t the same.

“Huh, funny though. Small world.”

“Or maybe it’s just a small world for hitchhikers and people who like picking them up…” she laughed.

Amy was doing a PhD. I tentatively asked what it was on.

“Do you want the elevator pitch or the three-hour one?”

“Well, we’ve got a while,” I replied.

It involved meta-analysing previous studies on pesticide use and drawing out statistical data. From what I could gather at least. She said that kind of analysis was common elsewhere but hardly done in agricultural studies, hence why she was doing it.

I asked about pesticides themselves. Were they bad for humans at all? That wasn’t her area so much. Still she didn’t think so. There’d been plenty of terrible chemicals used in farming over the years but now they were mostly pretty safe in Britain.

She told me about DDT which was common in the 50s. It was a chemical developed during the war to kill people so unsurprisingly it was good at killing insects. It wasn’t until Rachel Carson’s book Silent Springs in 1962 that there was enough public pressure to ban it. Carson told the same old story about companies spreading misinformation and using lobbies to eke out as much money as they could before the inevitable. I guess the story’s old now. It was new back then.

Amy thought it was similar to the scandals about sewage being dumped in the UK’s rivers. Public pressure can stop these things, she said hopefully. It did with pesticides.

Amy preferred the idea of natural pesticides. In greenhouses, where the ecosystem is controlled, it’s easy: you just introduce lots of predators. Outside was more of a challenge but entomopathogens are one advancing answer. They’re zombie fungi which target a single insect but don’t damage the rest of the ecosystem.

Amy reminded me that pesticides are just a tiny part of the problems we face on the food farming front. For one, most industrial farmland isn’t used for human food. It’s used for livestock. “Most of the world gets its food from farms that are less than 5 hectares,” she said cautiously, a frown on her forehead, “You’ll have to fact-check that.”

I did - she was more or less right. Family farms account for 80% of the world’s food in value terms and 35% of food comes from farms smaller than 2 hectares.

“And something like 40% of the corn America grows is used to feed its cattle,” she continued (correctly).

“Well you can have all the natural pesticides in the world,” I replied a little cynically, “but you’ll never get America off beef.”

We were cruising down the M1, the van rattling fondly. The weight of London was already beginning to weigh and I said so. Amy didn’t like the city. She thought South Wales was busy enough.

“I’m a sensitive person and I thought I was just absorbing other people’s moods and vibes,” she reflected. I liked that idea. Absorbing other people’s moods and vibes. It makes sense. Certainly explains why commuting’s so depressing. “But then I realised it was the noise,” she continued, “What makes being in the countryside so peaceful is the quiet. Peace comes from the soundscape.” I liked that idea too. Very wise.

Amy dropped me at another service station somewhere on the M1. I don’t remember which. Could have been Tibshelf frankly. It looked the same. Wherever it was, the soundscape was far from peaceful. Lorries, horns, snorting motorbikes. Again I was lucky not to wait long.

This time it was a young couple. Probably my age. Audra and Andreas on their way home from Loughborough. They’d both been at uni there and were visiting Andreas’ brother, also at uni there. Audra did nutrition and physiotherapy and had since got a job in Kent. “There’s not much going on in Loughborough,” she told me, “Not much going on in Kent either. But at least it’s nicer!”

They were both Lithuanian and had met over here at uni. Audra was one of the last intakes before Brexit severed the passage. Her younger sister wasn’t so lucky.

I told them about an old colleague who was Lithuanian. He took a tour group, a geography class, through Cambridge and the teacher refused to believe that Lithuania was a country. He spent half the tour trying to convince her. To no avail.

“My boss told me he was from the Isle of Mann,” Audra replied, “I thought he was making that up too…!”

Audra said everyone in Lithuania was constantly talking about the war. The fear of being invaded was pervasive. The country’s geographical position means it’ll be easily stranded and Putin had already threatened an attack, quickening hearts. Lithuanians knew what it was like to be occupied too. Audra said that there’s a unique bond between all the countries around Russia, forged by united opposition. Georgians, whenever they meet Lithuanians for instance, greet them with fraternal warmth.

The car was hot and sticky. Andreas apologised for the broken aircon and opened the windows which made chatting a little tricky. I leant forward to hear, the bare skin on my leg sticking to the leather seats.

They asked where I’d been so I shouted about my weekend in the Peaks. They knew the area well from their Loughborough days. “There’s a big TT event in Matlock,” Andreas called over his shoulder. — “Yes, I’ve heard Matlock’s famous for biking,” I called back. “I’d love to go to the Viking Museum in York!” Audra chipped in— “Push bikes or motorbikes?”— “What are motor Vikings?” asked Audra. We gave up.

It took a couple of hours to reach London. The sun was low as we arrived. They dropped me at an overground station on the M25 and I made my way home, attentive to the city sounds.

It had been a time in the Peaks. I’d miss the quiet for sure. Though on reflection, I realised I’d only spent a couple of hours actually among them—excluding a sleepless, midge-bitten night. The rest of the time it was laybys, pavements and service stations as usual. Certainly not quiet, but I’d say, far more interesting. Perhaps you’ll agree.