Tim Bradford - Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

Driving through England on motorways is not an exciting thing to do. Driving through England on motorways at night is incredibly boring. Like Phil Collins singing about watching paint dry on a continuous tape loop on the radio. I sometimes wonder what proportion of the countryside you can see from a motorway is actually attractive. Motorways were specially designed so the country would look shit and people would think the motorway is more attractive so they should build more of them. I accept that the country hasn’t been completely covered in motorway and concrete. After all, when you’re lost in the countryside you can drive around for days looking for a way out – you won’t even find a pub or shop or person who speaks with a recognisable accent, never mind a motorway. But when you are on the motorways it does seem as though that’s all there is. Especially around Birmingham. Everything is motorways and junctions, lights of the road, lights of cars, more junctions, road signs, concrete, cars, tarmac, more cars and more lights, that reach into the distance like a vicious, never-ending torch-carrying mob, a mob that wants to kill the monster but you want to protect him something in his eyes suggests a vulnerable tortured soul they’re getting nearer no stop aarrrghh … Anyway, after Birmingham I started to fall asleep at the wheel. As you do as soon as you get anywhere near Birmingham. 3 I came off a slip road and stopped for petrol at a little garage. The lanky spotty floppyhaired nineteen-year-old creature behind the counter looked at me with the doomed sad eyes of one too used to sickly bright lights and the smell of petrol. I was feeling very tired so bought some Lucozade, 4 that sickly sugary drink with the eerie nuclear fall-out orange glow.

Back on the road, I came off at a roundabout near Shrewsbury and took the first left turn. Standing at the side of the road was a hitcher. I was nearly asleep again and lolling backwards and forwards, half dreaming about rural Ireland, the sea, mountains and curly-haired Australian actresses. Picking up a hitcher is an instinctive decision. You don’t have time to analyse them or hand out a questionnaire. In an ideal world none of us would be in a hurry and we’d have time to interview a prospective hitcher over coffee in some transport café:

Driver: So, where do you see yourself in five hours’ time?

Hitcher: I think London is the place for me, all things considered.

Driver: What skills can you bring to a car drive?

Hitcher: I can put tapes into the cassette player and can make light conversation peppered with the occasional witty but shallow observation.

Driver: Well, thanks for spending time talking to me. I’ve a few more candidates to see and I’ll let you know in a few hours’ time.

Hitcher: Great, thanks very much. Bye.

Driver: Bye then.

An alternative would be to swipe a smart card into a hitcher checkpoint and an upcoming driver can check to see if you’re compatible.

Of course, the reality is SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEECHH quick get in mate. It’s only when it’s too late that you find you’ve picked up some crazy looking bloke with specs and wild hair like a crazed tinker in a blue waterproof jacket. Or, more commonly, an overweight, spotty type with a moustache. But I needed someone to keep me awake. I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel before and you get a bit of a shock when you suddenly realise you’ve either been driving for twenty minutes in a daze or you’ve driven off a cliff and you’re fifty feet underwater.

I cleared the shite – including the Singing Leprechaun – from the passenger seat onto the floor and told the hitcher to screeeeeech quick get in mate. He was an overweight, spotty type with a moustache and was up and running almost immediately.

‘I didn’t think I was going to be picked up. I’ve been waiting here for two hours. Loads of people went past, then you turned up.’

I did, it’s true. I told him I just needed someone to keep me awake.

‘Feel free to just jabber away,’ I said, carelessly.

He told me he was looking for work. At two in the morning outside Shrewsbury!? He’d hitched over from East Anglia, where he’d been working as a panel beater and putting up marquees and thought Wales might be the land of milk and honey. Zilch and no money more like, I suggested. I told him I was going to Ireland so could drop him off anywhere on the way. He had a sort of bristly squaddie tash with skin so ‘crazy’ he was an exact fifty-fifty cross between Nigel Mansell and Manuel Noriega – if Noriega had had the Jeff Goldblum role in The Fly and Mansell was Geena Davis and they’d both got caught in the ‘pod’ and merged. 5 It wasn’t just acne it was something … more sinister.

So, a panel beater eh? That means you get to give World Cup pundits a good kicking then? I asked.

‘No, it’s cars and that,’ he said. His accent was hard to place – maybe half Brummie, half Norfolk.

But it was the marquees thing that was great, he said. He put them up for car races and that, cash in hand. Now the work was gone and he’d had to give up his bedsit. I asked him where he was from. His parents were Irish. His mother still lived in Mayo. That’s where Oasis are from, I said. What? he asked. Mayo. Their mother is from Mayo. They used to go there on holiday. Hmm he said. Anyway, they moved over to Birmingham when he was a kid and he was small and got bullied because of his accent, so decided to lose it and become a Brummie. He’d hated being a kid, he said. Hmm, I said. His father had recently died of a heart attack. He was out of work. He’d got bad skin. It was heartbreaking stuff. I asked him to stick on another country tape. The first song was Patti Loveless’s ‘We Ain’t Done Nothin’ Wrong’.

‘This is a bit sad isn’t it? Have you got any happier stuff?’ No, I said, indignant that he had overstepped the mark with his lack of hitcher etiquette. He started talking about never being able to settle down, always on the move and I asked him if he’d read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. No, never heard of him. I’ve got a copy somewhere in my bag, I said. Want to borrow it? I was coming on all Henry Higginsish here. Nah, it’s OK, he said. I wouldn’t ever read it anyway. I started to nod off again as he droned on.

Hitcher: Life is so sad.

Me: Uh huh. Hmmm.

Hitcher: Marquees bluh bluuuh bluuuh bluuhhh marquees

bluuuh bluuuh bluuuuh.

Me: Car keys? Uh huhh! Hmmmmm!

I stopped at a garage somewhere in Wales and bought us both a sandwich (he didn’t have any money, he said). When we set off again I asked him when he’d last seen his mother in Ireland.

‘Oh a long while,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got cousins in Dublin who I saw a couple of years ago.’ I suggested to him that, since Wales seemed pretty quiet jobwise (although, admittedly, it was the middle of the night) and the Celtic Tiger 6 was still so rampant, he should go with me on the ferry and get off in Dublin. It wouldn’t cost him anything. He pursed his lips and thought about it. OK, he could go and see his mother. And his cousins would put him up for a while, until he got a job. But he still wasn’t happy. Think about it, I said. We agreed he’d go as far as Holyhead and then make his mind up.

How many are like him, I thought? Most of the Irish people of my age in London all came over ten years or so ago for the money because there wasn’t anything for them at home 7 (though now, of course, things are different). So many people around the world claim Irishness (seventy million apparently). They or their ancestors have all had to leave and the sentimental myths are built up. There’s often a dream of returning. But to what? Sometimes all that’s there is a memory of Irishness, a semi-fictional home, a country they carry in their hearts to salve the rootless detachment. I thought of the folk songs which must have been written by people missing home, like the ‘Fields of Athenry’, or ‘Spancel Hill’. I thought about asking the hitcher to press the Singing Leprechaun’s belly for me. His soulful rendition of ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ would have been the perfect soundtrack to my mind’s sleepy wanderings.