There used to be hundreds of Sith Lords. They used to torture and murder each other all the time. Then Darth Bane came along and decided there should only be two. So he killed the rest.
We had almost two hours til our ferry and Evan was gladly filling me in. “You see, that’s how you end up with the Sith and his apprentice that you get in the movies.”
He got out a timeline of the entire Star Wars canon and pointed out the ones he’d read, a good portion of them. “Brilliant books,” he said reverentially but the fact the franchise had been bought by Disney irritated him. We shifted from lightsabers and Jedis to the ‘wokerati,’ whose lack of common sense was ruining the company.
“I saw a thing on Piers Morgan the other day…” he moaned and showed me a clip of him ranting about Disney. Luckily we didn’t dwell on Piers Morgan long. Evan moved on to Harry Potter land in China. “If you do go,” he advised - he used to live in China - “Make sure you try the Weasley brother sweets. They’ve got all sorts of flavours.”
He scrolled to a video of his friends popping them and pulling faces in a queue for a ride, “That one’s soap! Soap was actually quite nice funnily enough… Oh beef…! That’s my friend, she’s Ukrainian too. Beautiful woman. They had vomit, bogeys… It’s great.”
That led us to how he once met Tom Felton, the actor of Draco Malfoy: “He was in the same bar as me and an ex,” Evan explained, “She was a huge fan so we went up and she was flirting and everything and was like ‘ooo I bet you’re a Capricorn aren’t you?’ And he said no he was actually a virgo. So I said I was a virgo too. September? Yeah same! 22nd? Yeah, no way! What year? 1986…! We were born on the same day! Although he was born in the morning not the evening.”
He pulled up Tom Felton’s IMDb and then spent a few minutes rustling around for his passport, just to prove he wasn’t making it up, which he wasn’t.
“Yep…” he nodded smugly, “We hit it off after that, me and Tom. My girlfriend was really jealous… We broke up a week later.”
Soon the snake of cars began to trickle forward. Men in hi-vis jackets waved us along as we wound a slow course to the ferry. There was a clunk as we rose onto the bridge and then the sun disappeared. The engines vibrated in the dark.
The crossing was uneventful. Evan said he wanted to sleep so I left him flat on a sofa. I was glad I didn’t have to ask strangers for a lift to Paris so I sat and read my book, glad too of the chance to relax. In the bathroom a man with a handlebar moustache was throwing up in the sink. His friend was retching in the cubicle. He emerged looking green, only to rush to the sink and add to the pile.
When the ferry reached Calais, I found Evan, now cocked upright. We went below to the car and drove into a grey French afternoon.
By Evan’s estimation, it was about three and a half hours to Paris. I was already feeling tired. I’d woken before 6 and hitchhiking uses a lot of energy, all the talking, worrying, walking and smiling at cars. I let Evan talk, he was clearly glad of the audience. I answered with ever-shortening replies.
It was interesting hearing about China though, particularly during lockdown. Whole blocks were shut down imprisoning the residents. He and his wife were lucky because they had lots of food but many didn’t. Their friend’s block was shut down for longer than theirs so Evan had to take food and throw it over a gate. He showed me videos of police in hazmat suits just locking the gates to entire blocks. Many people threw themselves out of windows. He showed me videos of that too.
Regardless, he loved China. The other day he recommended the scheme he did to a young woman. They were both modelling. It turned out Evan did a bit of modelling - he wanted to be an actor. He said he’d seen every film out there.
The racism in China was awful apparently though. He had fellow teachers who weren’t white and the students and their parents would get angry if they were taught by them. “One guy,” he told me, “an American, looovely guy, he was the best teacher out there, qualified up to his eyeballs, but people refused to be taught by him. It’s just how they are over there you can’t change it.”
He said they all wanted to be taught by him, “or the Ukrainian with blue eyes and blonde hair, beautiful lady.”
He told me about a foreigner who went into Tiananmen Square and shouted that Xi was an idiot. He disappeared. “It’s just how they are,” was Evan’s conclusion, “Like it’s their country, it’s up to them how they run it. Like when foreigners come here and make the rules here and tell us what to do. We don’t go into their country doing that!”
“Well,” I replied gently, compelled to offer more than a single-word response, “We did spend 300 years doing exactly that…”
“Oh yeah I forgot about that.”
Evan returned to England with his wife last year. Teaching maths wasn’t quite so stimulating though. With English teaching, he could see a difference in a student’s ability after just a couple of years. Those people could go anywhere in the world now and he could be glad of the part he played. It was harder with maths.
It wasn’t that alone that made him want to move away. He said he found the English closed-minded. “They don’t go places, they stay where they are.”
I didn’t offer the opposing historical evidence this time.
“I speak to people and they say they like travelling,” Evan continued, “but then I ask them where they’ve been and they say they’ve never left England! Well how do you know you like travelling if you’ve never left England? No, in China we met people who were doing things. Like my friend and his wife, they have their own company…we have our own company…” His friend has a Twitch account that makes between 3-5k a month apparently, “That’s the sort of people we are… we do things, we progress.”
The wind turbines of northern France we spinning slowly in the gathering gloom. Round and round and round. I watched them, sunk into their spin as they slid past gormless and beautiful.
“Gorgeous out there isn’t it?” Evan said soothingly seeing me absorbed, momentarily stopping his soliloquy.
It was soon dark and the pale blue pinks of evening turned to the luminous red and white streaks of headlights. Signs pointed to Charles De Gaulle Airport and as the roadside became busier you could feel a great city approaching.
We came off the motorway at last and slid into a complex of lanes and levels as Evan told me a story about dating apps. I’ve forgotten the details. We stopped by the arrivals hall, shook hands warmly, took a video of ourselves - Maidstone to Paris…! We made it! And said goodbye.
I took a train into town. People looked glumly about the place and crammed into the busy carriages. Suddenly there was a few muted shouts and a kerfuffle. The man standing next to me had his face buried in the floor. The only noise was the quiet clicks of handcuffs being applied. The plain clothes cops hauled him up and left the train.
It was pouring with rain when I met my friend. We went to a bar nearby. The water streamed off the awning and splatted noisily on the cobbles. A friendly man next to us engaged us in conversation and we drank together. The wine hit the spot like few drinks I can remember. Such is the way after a long journey. My friend told our companion I’d hitchhiked all the way from London.
“La stop?!” He replied bemused holding out his thumb, “De Londres? Corrr ca c’est tres genial!”
He shook his head in disbelief and called the waiter.
“Ca c’est treeess genial!”