My hitchhiker’s guide to lifts gets a Covid-19 thumbs-down
Franco & Heard in 2015
A SCENE on Dalziel and Pascoe took me back years to my hitchhiking days.
It showed a pretty young women trying to thumb a lift to Scotland and, this being a crime drama, she came to no good.
I was an inveterate student hitchhiker: overnight from Nottingham on the old A6 to Glasgow. Crick to London when the M1 opened.
In 1963, the coldest winter since 1947, I did the Nottingham-Wakefield run every night for two weeks to see my girlfriend in maternity hospital. My hair froze when I got out of lorry cabs, but I was lucky. A Hanson’s of Bradford driver picked me up most nights on Doncaster Road.
We hitched up to Edinburgh to get wed – and back.
Who would do that now? Indeed, who would give anybody a lift during a pandemic? You’d stand by the roadside for ever waiting for someone to stop.
Obviously, I haven’t been able to road-test this, but I imagine drivers are extremely reluctant to risk picking up a potentially Covid-19 infected traveller.
This is a great pity, because I enjoyed my thumbing days.
I met interesting people and never had any trouble.
Well, except the time I was catapulted through the windscreen of a Mini in Cornwall in a head-on collision, hence the
“duelling” scar on my right cheek. That was my first appearance in print: “City Man Hurt” said the Stop-Press in the Nottingham Evening Post.
Hitching may be out of the question now, but hopefully it hasn’t gone for a Burton and will return.
By the way, why do we use that expression?
It originated in the RAF in WW2, to describe the fate of an airman presumed lost or dead.
Enough to give you the shivers.