hitch-hiking North - submitted by Antonia

One summer Tom was in a car crash, when his brother Hugo was driving and he was in the passenger seat. Tom got the impact, and his hip was broken. It happened up in Durham at the start of the summer long vacation, and no doubt some plan or other was ruined by this accident. Mark and I decided to go and visit our immobilised friend, so the obvious way to get from Oxford to Durham was to use Mark and Tom's method, i.e. hitchhike. I hadn't done this before, mainly because of all the terrifying warnings issued especially to girls about hitchhiking. But I knew I'd be safe with Mark. It turned out to be a fun and memorable journey, not exactly direct because we went via Cambridge where we stayed with Mark's family for a night. But the thing I remember most is Mark's failsafe hitchhiking method, which he didn't explain to me until it was actually put into action. "Stand there," he said, strategically placing me by the road, while he lurked some way off behind a convenient bush or other shield, with the backpack. His theory that a single female hitchhiker has more success than a couple, or a couple of male ones, proved absolutely right. We never had to wait more than a few minutes. A lorry or car would stop to pick me up, and then Mark would emerge from the bushes, to the chagrin of the driver. "Get in the front," he'd tell me, or "You get in first", if it was a big lorry cab. My job was to flirt mildly, but with Mark right there I was in no danger of a misunderstanding. We did brilliantly - our best lift took us almost the entire length of the M1 in a ritzy new car, driven by an entertaining man who worked on the North Sea oil rigs, diving to do repairs and spending days underwater in a diving bell. He was keen to show off his car - it was something that would seem crappy now, a Ford Capri or something, but it was fun at the time. I liked the big lorries too, because even though they went rather slowly, it was great to be so high up above the road. So we got to Witton Gilbert remarkably quickly and then kept Tom company, probably decelerating his recovery a good deal by dragging him out to the pub each evening.