Chapter 105: Utilising Dreams

Taunton to Bristol

It was a bad place to hitchhike. The cars flew off the roundabout like sparks from a Catherine wheel. There was nowhere to pull over. I stepped gingerly over the barrier into the overgrown verge. It was thick and wet and made my trousers damp. I leant back and held out my sign and winced as cars howled past my nose.

It was still a long way to London. The map said it was three and a half hours and that was without traffic; it was Bank Holiday Monday. If there’s one thing in Britain you can guarantee, it’s that there’ll be traffic in the southwest on a Bank Holiday Monday. And now I was likely stuck on a roundabout.

But I got lucky. A moment later a car swerved to a halt, apparently indifferent to the risk of having its boot rammed. I leapt into the back in a flap of gratitude and we took off.

Kashif had his son in the passenger seat. They were driving to Bristol from Barnstaple. I said that’s where I’d just come from too and he might have passed me earlier if I’d not been picked up. They were going to Masala Bazaar. It was a journey they made roughly once a month. It took two-and-a-half hours but it was the nearest place that sold halal chicken. They’d call up in advance to get their order ready so they could sweep in, pick it up and begin the two-and-a-half hours home. They would buy enough for a month, freezing much of it and then when they ran out they would do it all again.

Usually, he added, they would stop at KFC too. The one opposite Masala Bazaar was the nearest halal branch, the only one for 200 miles. Most KFCs in other parts of the country were halal but not out here.

We hit traffic. It hadn’t taken long. I looked out of the window and thought how varied the reasons were for people being on the road. We slowed alongside a farmer in a brand new Landrover. Through the metal slats of his trailer, you could see the black eyes of cows on the way to the abattoir.

Kashif was a pharmacist and a physician. A serious man, he described his several roles with pride and accuracy. He ran freelance clinics and was his own boss. If they set up a Covid clinic or a 111 clinic, anything like that, they would hire him. He had four degrees and utilised them every single day. He’d just completed one in prescribing at the University of West England.

“Do you have a degree?” He asked, sitting up straight to eye me through the mirror.

I said I had one in history.

“Do you utilise it every day?”

“Well,” I thought for a moment, “I think I learnt a great deal from it, about… err…critical thinking and so on. And it was good for writing and I want to be a writer, so I suppose.”

Kashif didn’t seem satisfied with my answer and he asked again if there were any actual benefits to the degree. I repeated my answer but in the end we decided there were in fact no discernible benefits at all. It obviously hadn’t taught me to be convincing in its defence. Kashif said his daughter was doing GCSEs and she wanted to do medicine too. “Big dreams require hard work. That’s the universal rule.”

We talked about Devon. Kashif said a patient of his ran the security for a local estate. He was an ex-marine and told Kashif the house had 70 doors and that it was stuffed full of taxidermy and paintings. The owner had estates all over the country and would arrive in a helicopter.

I replied that I’d been picked up by an ex-marine and that the driver who’d just dropped me, George, a carpenter, had told me about another estate called Portledge Manor. It was owned by a man called Tony Buckingham who’d had 100 tradesmen working on it for four years straight. George had done some internet snooping and discovered that Buckingham was an oil baron and owned diamond mines in Africa. He once bankrolled a plane-ful of mercenaries to Sierra Leone but they got arrested at the airport. No one knows what they were planning to do. Devon’s full of big houses owned by bad men George said, but at least it kept the tradesmen busy.

The traffic inched forward. Kashif entertained us by bobbing into different lanes to get an edge but it didn’t make much difference. We settled into the jam in the end. I watched as the trees turned silver in the wind, scales spreading up the windward side. I suddenly began to feel quite ill and stopped talking much.

The road finally opened. I mustered an encouraging, ahh the open road but a moment later we were back in traffic. “I shouldn’t have said that,” I apologised, following it shortly after with, “Well at least the weather’s cheering up.” I instantly regretted that too and shortly after it began to rain.

“That’s the British summer for you,” Kashif observed, “It’s 45 degrees in Pakistan at the moment.”

He was from Lahore - the heart of Pakistan, he said. He doesn’t go back much but the children go twice a year. He nodded at his son on the passenger seat. He hadn’t said a word all journey. I didn’t have the energy to pursue it and fell back into watching the trees and the cars.

Finally after two hours, we reached Bristol, entering the city from the north. I found a suitable place just off the motorway. The walls of the pebbledash houses were bursting with huge murals. One said DJ Derek, One Love and had silhouettes of people dancing and rainbow colours everywhere. Another mural showed a bee hovering above a dandelion.

I shook Kashif’s hand and his son’s, asking his name.

“Doud,” he replied.

“Do-ud,” Kashif corrected him.

I wished them luck on their long journey home and hoped they enjoyed the KFC. Kashif wished me luck on my long journey home too. He was confident I’d be ok. “You’ve seen the traffic,” he said, “It’s extreme! It’s your lucky day. Everyone is going to London.”

He waved me off and bid me a final farewell, “I hope you utilise your dream in the near future!”

So do I, I thought as they disappeared.