The Winds of Change

London to Newcastle Part III

“Sorry man,” the driver said as I got in. We were a mile north of Peterborough services, in a petrol station latched onto the A1 like a tick. “I just farted.”

“Nice to meet you too.”

“I didn’t think anyone else would be getting in.”

Fair enough, I replied. I could hardly blame him. He had every right to fart as much as he liked, I suppose. You take what you get when hitchhiking.

Still, it made me wonder how many lifts I’d missed because the driver had just farted and felt too ashamed. Not Fred. I thanked him doubly for stopping.

The windows went down. A blast on the accelerator, onto the A1, and all hint was gone.

Fred said he’d just come back from Helsinki. He lived there, in a little place east along the Gulf of Finland. Not far from the Russian border.

“What do you think about immigrants?” He asked abruptly, as if it had been on his mind. Maybe when he farted. He grumbled something to my answer and said he didn’t think their culture was compatible with ours. “…I’m talking about muslims,” he added.

In Fred’s mind, we let too many unsavoury characters in. There weren’t stringent enough checks. Too many bad eggs and no regard for the safety of the inhabitants.

He told me his mate went to Frankfurt recently to get a working visa. He had to get a whole bunch of biometric tests, fingerprints and eye scans etc. Why don’t they do that here? He asked.

Fred went to Sweden recently and thought there were parts that hardly looked like Sweden anymore. He wasn’t the last to moan about immigrants that day. All seemed to be saying the same thing. Perhaps Farage is tightening his messaging.

Fred grew up in Dartford. A “shithole” by his own admission. But he moved to Yorkshire as a late teen, dragged up by his mother. She was a dominant woman, Fred said, and he couldn’t handle dominant women. He’d tried. His ex was one. She’d really wanted kids, so they had two together. Otherwise, he wasn’t sure he would have had them.

She was his soulmate, he told me, but they couldn’t stand each other any more, so Fred had a girlfriend in Finland.

He didn’t think he’d move back to theUK any time soon. He liked the Finnish way of life. It was a shame booze was so expensive, but that was about it for issues. He said they all drink Long Gins. Gin and juice. But it cost seven or eight quid, so everyone would pre-drink.

He worked as an electrician in Google’s data centres. As AI steadily spreads, there’ll be more popping up so it was good work. They invested $1bn in new centres in Finland alone last year, drawn to the country’s cool climate and renewable energy sources.

It was the right industry to be in. About two weeks before, I’d lost my job to AI. In a roundabout way, the data centre electricians, and the tech companies of course, are the beneficiaries. There’ll be steady work for Fred for a long time. Until they find a way to automate him.

Fred dropped me just south of Doncaster. I’d made good progress, but pinching the map, I realised I was only about halfway to Newcastle.

You get a real sense of the size of the country when you’ve got to work for every mile. Not quite like walking, when every hill and valley is sketched into you, nor cycling, which I imagine is the same. But it’s less passive than driving or the train. You form a kind of relationship with the distances you travel.

Keiran took me on. He had spiky hair and a faun-like aura. There were tiny teddies with big beadie eyes huddled in the crevices of the car, peering up at me. We passed a lorry parked in a field that said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

Keiran had a portable mechanics business. He was the cheapest in the Leeds area, he said, and made good trade, driving around to people’s homes, fixing cars, usually by plugging them in and running the diagnostics.

He said he couldn’t fix cars made in the last few years though. Companies don’t release the software so they have to be sent back to the manufacturer. I suppose, in a way, AI was coming for Keiran’s job too.

He worked hard for now, though. He was out at 6:30 this morning and he wouldn’t be back until 10. It was harder than his old job in an actual garage but at least he was his own boss.

It was a good distraction too, working hard. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend of six years. She’d wanted kids, he didn’t, and that was that. It was rough he said and I consoled him as best I could.

We’d come off the A1 to avoid traffic, beetling through the hills somewhere near Leeds. Keiran’s van was running low on battery. It wasn’t clear we’d make it to the service station. It was at 1%. He’d look down at the dashboard nervously from time to time.

On our left, set into the hill as you might scrape a place to perch on a steep bank, was perhaps the most vulgar house I’d ever seen. It’s hard to explain how exactly, but it was gopping, and enormous, imposing itself on the unfortunate valley below. It seemed to be raised up on a giant plateau, with huge shiny windows, sharp walls painted a bright and ugly colour.

The road bent round behind it, under its high walls, stuck with signs saying “24hr surveillance” with a graphic of an angry dog.

We made the service station in time. Keiran was relieved. He still had three jobs to get to that evening.

It was 4 o’clock by now. I was over halfway distance-wise wise too. The final stretch, through the Dales, moors, and Pennines, looked intimidatingly long.

Luckily I didn’t wait 5 minutes. Maybe people in the north are just friendlier. The south had felt like an armwrestle.

I got in the car quietly as the driver signalled he was on the phone. “How did the shoot go?” He asked. “I’ve just picked up a hitchhiker so if he tries anything I may have to shoot him!”

He laughed loudly and ended the call, introducing himself as Mike.

He lived in Cambridge for three days a week for work. It was a chore, but for the fact his daughter was studying physics there.

“Wow, she must be clever,” I said.

“Errr,” he pondered, “She’s alright. No…I suppose she is clever, you’re right.”

Mike took me to Wetherby. Funny, I replied, last time I was at Wetherby, I was picked up by someone on their way there.

“Oh, another one for the ride share!” he laughed again and left me on the roadside.