Thumbs Up

I suppose it’s inevitable in your 60s that there’s a tendency to look back across six decades and reflect how things have changed. Some things are obviously transformed but one of the less obvious things that used to be commonplace but you never see any more, is hitchhiking.

Hitching was a way to get around on the cheap. Me and Dawn used to do it all the time in the early 80s, standing on slip roads with our thumb out. It could be dispiriting of course, if you didn't get a lift for an hour and you had to put up with people stopping and then pulling away at speed. Yeah, really funny, mate.

I don’t recall getting a lift from any nutters, though we did once get a lift in an MG sports car outside of Newcastle from the bloke that replaced Sting in Last Exit.

I mention hitching because we saw a fella with his thumb out as we were going home, about a mile from our house, so we weren’t going anywhere useful to pick him up. And it was such an unusual sight, when it was once so common. He did look like he had been at Woodstock for 3 days but we would have picked him up if we were going somewhere.

When I told a younger friend this, he was horrified at the thought of hitching per se and about picking anyone up. He was consumed by the potential dangers of picking up or being picked up by a stranger. We did consider this a bit when we did it but it never put us off.

And to make a wider point, the thing that has really changed in the last 45 years, is this suspicion of strangers. Strangers used to be people we just hadn’t met yet, but now they seem to be regarded as a potential threat. I’m sure hitchers did get attacked in the 70s, but any more than now?

Is there more danger or just more paranoia about danger? I suspect the latter but the self-conscious, paranoid genie is out of the bottle now and it seems we can’t go back. When I think about how we used to go out to play for up to 8 hours, totally unsupervised, I'm even shocked. No one paid a thought to any potential dangers. I don’t think it crossed anyone’s mind. That’s not to say there weren’t points of danger, mostly avoiding ‘big kids’ and you had to hold your breath as you walked past the witches' house! But it wasn’t the hellscape sometimes now imagined.

And I think the lesson to take from that is that much modern fear is in the head in a way it never used to be. I grew up in the nice part of a rough town, if anyone was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of urban life, it was me. But I experienced very little that was a bit dangerous, at least anything that didn’t involve alcohol.

So if you’re hitchhiking, we might pick you up. It’s OK, I’m not a nutter but I may play you obscure jazz-rock albums.