Free Rides

My first ever book, Free Rides, is out now. The book is a collection of short stories about my hitch-hiking experiences and is available in Kindle format and in paperback. The Kindle version will be free to download until July 30th, after which it will cost 77p. The paperback version costs £4.

I was able to finish the book thanks to a grant from Arts Council West Midlands.

The first chapter is reproduced below.

Not A Job?

It's the summer of 1996 and I’m about to start work as a trade plate driver. This occupation is distinguished from most others by the fact that some amount of hitch-hiking is necessary. There’s a good chance that you’ve seen ‘platers’ standing by the roadside, although you may not know exactly what the job entails.

‘Plating’ involves the collection and delivery of company cars, hire cars and other miscellaneous vehicles from anywhere in the country to anywhere else.

Once a plater has delivered a vehicle it is up to them to make their way to the next collection address under their own steam. This address could be a hundred yards down the road or hundreds of miles away. It could be in the middle of a city or in an obscure village that only its inhabitants have heard of. Any money spent on public transport usually comes out of the plater’s own pocket so the object of the exercise is to cover the distance as quickly and cheaply as possible.

I spent some of my younger days hitch-hiking, mainly to music festivals, so in this respect I know the ropes already. I’m also expecting that the trade plates will make the task easier. These are the size of ordinary car registration plates and show a red identification number on a white background. Their official purpose is to act as temporary tax cover when moving vehicles which have no tax of their own. Their other, unofficial, purpose is to act as a badge of respectability when hitching – a sign that you are in gainful employment and are therefore unlikely to murder anyone who stops to pick you up.

For the last few years I’ve been spending my time idealistically involved with a workers’ co-operative who own a vegetarian café in East Birmingham. We describe ourselves as anarchists, and occasionally appear in local news reports through our involvement in a variety of left-wing protests and demonstrations. But generally the wider world is proving stubbornly indifferent to our utopian schemes, and I’ve decided that I need to hedge my bets and get a regular job as well, saving the overthrow of capitalism for my spare time.

So far I’ve tried warehouse work, catering and industrial cleaning, but have fled from them all, becoming sadly convinced that I’ll never hold down any job where I have to go to the same place every day and do the same things with the same people - I spend too little time bonding with my workmates and too much time absorbed in daydreams.

Plating appeals to me as there will be no-one looking over my shoulder, and I have romantic notions about travelling around the country in fast cars, and surely finding the time to detour to any picturesque location that takes my fancy.

The job interview mainly involves confirming that I have a valid driving licence and somewhere safe to park vehicles overnight. After this there is an induction which consists of a five minute demonstration of how to inspect vehicles for damage, and a fifteen minute film about how to hitch-hike. This stars an unconvincing actor playing the role of a plater who clearly knows his place and who will occasionally turn to the camera and offer such uninspiring pieces of advice as –

‘Sometimes you’ll have to walk a few miles in a day, and you can get a bit whiffy, so I always carry some spray-on deodorant with me, just in case.’

Once this training is complete I’m given a set of trade plates and a fuel card and am now officially ready to start.

The first job I’m given is to finish off a delivery started by another driver, whose fate is unknown. The vehicle in question, a yellow Honda Accord, should have been taken to a leasing company in Trafford Park - an enormous industrial estate on the outskirts of Manchester. Instead it has ended up at the plating company’s office in Birmingham. It is driven to my house in the late afternoon by Bill, who will be my controller and is a mountain of a man. He wears a pinstriped shirt, with bright red braces stretched over a torso that could belong to an American wrestler. He will be virtually my only point of contact with the company, supplying me, over the phone, with job details and meeting any problems with gentle words of advice, or unhelpful sarcasm depending on how the mood takes him. He views my embarking on this new career with a degree of good-natured humour -

‘You didn’t hear it from me but fifty percent of the drivers who start here don’t last a week.’

He’ll tell me at a later date that he fully expected me to be one of the dropouts. But the company also has a high turnover of controllers and I’ll eventually outlast him, and several of his successors.

I arrive in Trafford Park early the next morning, locate the leasing company’s compound, and obtain a signature for the car. Bill informed me the previous day that my next collection will be from Bradford, and so I now set off to try and get my first lift.

During this first day I’ll perform two experiments, both of which I’ll subsequently avoid repeating. The first of these is that I decide to hitch-hike in a busy urban area - the middle of the industrial estate to be precise.

I walk the short distance back to the nearest roundabout, where there is an eastbound exit heading in the direction of the motorway. All around are warehouses and office blocks, and workers making their ways towards morning shifts. I stand incongruously in the middle of this scene, with my plate and a cardboard sign saying ‘M62.’

In the past I’ve done most of my hitching at motorway junctions and at the exits of service stations where there is only the traffic and myself. I rarely wonder about the opinions of passing motorists - they are separated from me by glass and metal, and will be gone in a moment anyway. If the weather is good then I can stand there for as long as it takes, as contented as a fisherman on a river bank.

But I soon realise that it’s a different matter to have a steady stream of pedestrians plodding by, studiously ignoring me, just as they would ignore any other lunatic.

There are some seasoned platers who begrudge seeing a single penny escaping from their pockets and will stand on the busiest of streets, defiantly holding their plates out, rather than buy a bus ticket to get them to somewhere more suitable. But it takes me less than a minute to realise that such methods are not for me. Fortunately in less than another minute an old tipper truck pulls over for me. It is driven by a stocky young guy with close-cropped hair.

‘Where you off to?’ he shouts through the open window.

‘I’m trying to get to the ’62.’

‘Jump in!’

I do, and we set off. He’s going over to Leeds and will drop me at the main Bradford junction. I tell him I’ve just started the job and we talk about the everyday details of it for the first few minutes as we chug out of Manchester. This leads to my second, impromptu experiment, which is to say the word ‘cunt’ to another person. This is a word I use with great regularity when I’m alone behind the wheel and am affronted by someone else’s driving, but I’ve never before said it in the presence of anyone else.

I’m complaining to the truck driver about the company’s dress code, which requires me to wear a jacket and tie at all times, which I have no intention of doing. It’s clear from the nature of job that you are not at the top of the food chain, and wearing smart clothes would only emphasise this fact because it would be obvious that you had not chosen to wear them. I’m in jeans and an old leather jacket, which seems at least to suggest a degree of autonomy. But I express this in a more straightforward way to the driver –

‘I’d feel like a cunt dressing up like that to do this.’

I’m caught up in the feeling of embarking upon a new life of sorts, meeting people I know I’ll never see again, and having the opportunity to try on new personalities for size - although this one doesn’t quite seem to fit.

‘You look smart enough anyway, don’t you?’ says the driver with a shrug.

There is nothing in his reaction to put me off saying the word again, and I think my delivery is good enough for a beginner, but somehow I’ve never ended up using it since. Perhaps I’m too old to acquire such habits, and would surprise too many of my friends if I tried.

We reach the M62 and then climb up through empty moorland towards the top of the Pennines.

‘You got any plans for the weekend?’ the driver asks after a while.

‘I’ll probably just go down to my local.’

‘I’ll be off to the Mardi Gras festival in town this Saturday with my mates. It’s a great laugh - you get all the processions there, and everyone’s just getting pissed, you know. It’s a good atmosphere.’

This is an annual event organised by Manchester’s gay community. As an afterthought he tells me that he isn’t gay himself, although it seems of little concern to him one way or the other - an easygoing indifference in which it’s hard to imagine any prejudice being able to take root.

It starts to feel good to be hitching again – to be meeting such people and seeing unfamiliar places. I’m used to the flatness and close horizons of Birmingham, and as we descend into Yorkshire the wide views of the grey mill towns of Halifax and Huddersfield, nestled among the hills, seem tremendously beautiful in the morning light.

I get the precise details of my Bradford job from Bill, and find that I’m in luck - the tipper driver knows the location of the industrial estate that I need and is happy to go five minutes out of his way to take me there.

He drops me at the entrance to the estate and we say our farewells before he turns around and heads back to the motorway, and I set off into the estate.

I find the collection address, get the car keys from the receptionist, carry out an inspection of the vehicle, fill out the paperwork, obtain a signature for it, and then depart without anyone realising that I don’t really know what I’m doing.

The car needs to be delivered to an auction in Netherfield, Nottingham, and so I hurtle down the M1 for an hour and then crawl and curse my way through the city for another hour until I locate the auction at the back of a business park.

While I’m getting a signature for the car I bump into another plater who apparently works for the same firm. He’s a small wiry man with long hair, thinning on top, and he greets me with the stern question –

‘Where’s your tie?’

I’m taken aback by this for a moment, until an obvious answer occurs to me –

‘I don’t know. Where’s yours?’

He just laughs. He is an old hand at this job and is trying to get home to Birmingham. After a quick call to Bill I find out that this is now my mission as well. The auctions are on the opposite side of the city to the motorway so this is not a promising situation, but my beginner’s luck continues to hold and we bump into a third plater who is picking up a car from here. He’ll be heading down to Bristol and can drop us both on the outskirts of Birmingham.

The auction is a bustling place with cars coming in and out all the time, and hard-nosed, bargain-seeking men walking around with an air of quiet criminality about them. The prospect of a free lift causes yet more platers to crystallise out of this crowd, and the man with the car quickly finds that it is full of strangers.

I’m squashed in next to an amiable old guy by the name of Tommy, who also knows the ropes, and whose expression defaults to a contented smile whenever he is not speaking.

‘How long have you been doing this then?’ I ask.

He pauses for a moment to remember the answer - ‘Six years now.’

‘You must like it then?’

‘Well, it beats getting a job,’ he laughs. This reply sounds well-rehearsed, but genuine nonetheless and I make a mental note of it.

Tommy already has a pension coming in from a previous occupation, and in another couple of years he will be able to add a state pension to this as well and will be retiring. Until then he is happy to potter around the country, no longer scared by long distances and lonely slip roads.

‘You always get home in the end,’ he says with an encouraging degree of certainty in his voice.

We drive out of Nottingham, passing signs for a place called Gotham whose residents, unlike me, are probably too familiar with the name to smile and think of Batman when they see it.

Soon we are on the motorway, and the Old Hand takes over the conversation. He is feeling the weight of his years of experience and dishes out several pieces of advice which are intended not only for myself, but for the benefit of everyone present. One of these pearls will stand out long after other memories of this day have become murky, simply because of its absurdity -

‘When you want to find an address in a city, what you have to think about is whether it’s a road or a street. Streets are usually in the centre but roads will be further out.’

None of us question his sagacity, at least not out loud.

In less than an hour we have reached the outskirts of Birmingham, and I get the driver to drop me at the NEC where I can catch a fast bus into the city. It’s only two o’clock and for all the money I’ve earned today I might as well have stayed on the dole. But as the bus rattles through the warm afternoon I feel happy nonetheless. I’ve found a job that might not to be a job after all, and I have a whole country ahead of me to get lost in.

Riots and Royalty

On the edge of Kings Norton Park, at the opposite end to the church, is a big old pub called The Camp. I have driven past there any number of times, but only recently found out that it takes its name from the fact that there was a Royalist army encampment here in 1643, during the Civil War, when Queen Henrietta Maria and over five thousand troops passed through the area on their way south to meet up with the king.

The circumstances of the visit make an odd contrast to the most recent appearance of royalty in Birmingham, when newly-weds Kate and William came to Winson Green last summer as part of their tour of areas affected by the riots.

When Queen Henrietta Maria arrived, the town had also recently suffered from looting and worse, but on that occasion it was at the hands of Royalist soldiers.

Despite the fact that Britain’s past is peppered with periods of bloodshed and brutality, the Civil War still stands out as a truly jaw-dropping episode. At its most basic it was a conflict between the Royalist ‘Cavaliers’, who believed that King Charles had a divine right to impose his will on Parliament, and the Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ who thought otherwise.

In reality this conflict was overlaid with a myriad of others - Protestant against Catholic, Puritan Protestant against moderate, Scots against English, Highland Scots against Lowlanders, one Highland clan against another.

It was as if every grievance that had been grumbling along in the background of life erupted all at once, and all against a backdrop of famine and plague.

Birmingham at the time was only a small town, but one which was developing a reputation both as a hotbed of Puritanism and as a manufacturer of weapons, which were being supplied to the Parliamentarians.

The town was duly identified as a target by the Royalists, and one that would have to be dealt with in order to clear a path for the Queen on her journey down from York. In April 1643, Birmingham was attacked by a Royalist force of almost two thousand, led by Prince Rupert, the Laughing Cavalier himself. Despite being outnumbered ten to one, the Parliamentarians put up strong resistance behind makeshift defences at Camp Hill, before eventually being overrun. The Royalists went on to burn and plunder the town at will.

There are no landmarks or memorials to remind us of any of this today, and in fact why should there be?

When the royals go on an offensive today it is of the charm variety, and the belief that they were appointed by God himself has long since disappeared.

But even in twenty first century Britain, vestiges of the sovereign’s ‘divine’ powers still remain. Any MP who refuses to take an oath of allegiance to our unelected monarch will find themselves barred from entering the House of Commons. And surely royal visits, such as that by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridgeshire, are meaningless unless there is still some background level of belief that the royal family are, for whatever reason, simply better than the rest of us?

With the Queen's diamond jubilee due to be celebrated later this year, maybe it is not too curmudgeonly after all to suggest that we ought to remember that the fledgling Birmingham was once torn apart by marauding soldiers trying to instil exactly this belief in blue-blooded superiority into the local population.

An Early Resolution

A few days ago I took my eleven-year-old son along to the Stirchley Community Market, at the United Working Men’s Club on Hazelwell Street. The market is held there every month, but we had never quite gotten around to going until now.

There were about a dozen stalls packed into the main room in the club, plus one or two more outside in the car park.

We had mainly gone along out of curiosity rather than with the idea of buying very much, but I still came away bearing some interesting Christmas gifts for my girlfriend.

We also bought a few things for our own immediate gratification. My son got a 'friendly' Christmas hand grenade made from soft felt. We got his sister a couple of badges from illustrator Liz Lunney's stall, which both featured cartoon rabbits. One bears the slogan 'sour rabbit cares about you,' which seems encouraging.

We also bought some cup cakes from the Cupcake Bistro, chatted to a guy from the Friends of Hazelwell Park, mooched around the rest of the stalls, which sold everything from jewellery to tea towels to second hand records, listened to medieval Carols sung live, and generally had a good time of it.

There was a cosy, relaxed atmosphere - a sense of  a small community of local artists and businesses coming together to support one another.

We've lived in Stirchley for over five years but I've only recently become aware of the place as having its own cultural scene, independent of the nearby, well-established vibrancy of Moseley and Kings Heath.

For anyone who wants to keep up to date with local goings-on, the tweets emanating from @stirchleyhaps, and their accompanying website, are good places to start. They provide regular details of upcoming events, and also the kind of trivia about the everyday lives of Stirchley-ites which helps to flesh out the place and bring it to life.

Earlier this year Stirchley briefly had its own squatted social centre at the Whit Marley building, which held a couple of art exhibitions and an open mic night, amongst other things. This has now closed, but there are still regular comedy nights at the British Oak, a traveling cinema, and gigs at the Roadhouse.

There are co-operatively run businesses such as the Bike Foundry, Loaf online, and the South Birmingham Food Co-op, all of which sound very useful, but not one of which I really know much about yet.

When I first came to Birmingham, about twenty years ago, I was involved in a couple of workers co-operatives - a vegetarian cafe over in Saltley, and a small housing co-op, both of which long ago bit the dust. These days, when it can sometimes seem as if we are all capitalists by default, its nice to know that those alternative ideas are still around and being put into practice.

I write a lot about places outside of Birmingham where I happen to end up through work. Maybe I should make it a New Years Resolution to find out more about the stuff that's going on on my doorstep.

Nighttime in Highbury Park

When we first got our dog, Charlie, from the Dogs Home in Digbeth, he had not yet been neutered. This meant that we got into the habit of walking him late in the evening when there were fewer other dogs around for him to force his attentions upon.

However, even though he has now been 'snipped', the late night habit has continued. If anything his walks have become later still, and the average number of family members coming along has decreased. Most nights it is just the dog and me in the darkness of Highbury park.

As soon as we arrive I let him off his lead, at which point he usually disappears to do his own thing. Sometimes I can see him as the faintest of shadows against other shadows. Sometimes he will hurtle past me on a mad dash to nowhere in particular. But most of the time all I have is the vague idea that he is around somewhere.

Highbury park is a big old place, big enough to get away from the sound of traffic and light of street lamps.

Occasionally, for no clear reason, the darkness will spook me and for a minute or two I will find myself constantly resisting the temptation to look around me for the approach of unknown assailants. But mostly it is a relaxing emptiness, free from other people, or the expectation of them, and free from the plethora of sights and sounds that fill almost every part of the city in the daytime.

I am using these walks to learn about the stars. I have an app. on my phone which provides me with a 3D view of the night sky from my current location, with all the planets and constellations labelled. I have started from the Great Bear ( the one that looks like a saucepan, and the only one I already recognised ) and worked outwards.

On cloudy nights I  just stroll along. With so little sensory input, small changes become instantly noticeable. Now that Autumn is underway, the leaves on one particular tree have become dry enough to rattle softly in the breeze as I walk past.

Once in a while there are other people. One night I passed a trio of silhouettes on a bench by the river. Low muttering tones and the hiss of an opening can suggested street drinkers who had nowhere better to be.

Once I heard, but didn't see, younger drunken people in the distance, at least one man and one woman. At one point the woman's voice rose in screaming fear while the man shouted his hatred back at her. A few moments later they were united again in harsh raucous laughter, receding away into the night.

A couple of days ago the police were searching the park in pairs, their white torch beams bobbing up and down as they looked for a couple of guys whose appearance they were unable to describe to me other than that they were carrying JD Sports bags. For a few minutes the park seemed transformed into a vast dark arena where some primeval hunting game was being played out.

But these nights are the rare exceptions. Almost always it is just the dog and me, which, I think, suits both of us fine.

The Art of the Possible

An article I wrote for the September issue of Radar magazine about a squatted social centre in Birmingham, and the recent art exhibition that was held there, is now available online at www.theradarmagazine.co.uk

Light Relief

It's a bright Wednesday morning and I'm walking from Leeds train station, through the city centre, on my way to a Nissan dealership about a mile away.

Christmas has come early for the citizens of Leeds this year - festive lights are already strung across most of the main shopping streets, a full two and a half months before the event.

[gallery]

When shops begin to put out their Christmas stock at this time of year, in a blatant encouragement to spend early and spend often, there is a clear cynicism involved which no amount of tinsel is ever going to disguise.

But with this display, where the reasoning is less obvious, there is something almost upliftingly silly about the whole thing, suggesting as it does that there is someone in the local council whose decision-making processes are free from the dull confines of common sense.

I wonder what these streets will look like on Halloween as groups of ghoulishly-dressed revellers totter and meander beneath the reindeers and smiling santas?

Old Fashioned Values

It's a wet Wednesday morning and I've just arrived by bus at the premises of Imperial Tobacco, in Nottingham.



The outdated name and the grimy concrete exterior give the impression of a company which has given up on any ambition of improving its public image.

I'm here to collect a VW Passat to take to an auction on the other side of the city. However, I'm also looking for something else. I want to see a No Smoking sign somewhere on the building, because I know they will be legally obliged to have one, and because I know it will make me smile.

I find one single small yellowing sign by the main entrance. In contrast to this, the outdoor smoking area looks positively lavish - four separate, roofed shelters with wooden seating, big litter bins, and leafy plants. It is by far the most attractive part of the site. In this day and age it is nice to see a firm that still looks after its workers.