Preface

​PREFACE
Okay. I confess. I have no angle. I haven’t travelled a million miles on rollerskates, haven’t cycled a tandem across the Andes with an orangutan as my riding companion. I haven’t driven a tractor cross-country through Uzbekistan, nor have I traversed Route 66 on a solar-powered electric sofa. I haven’t pedalled a bicycle across the English Channel (though one particular Zetta Hills did*). I haven’t lolloped across India on an elephant. I haven’t done anything whatsoever for charity. Sorry.
Just me, my trusty worn-out rucksack and not much idea what to do next.

None of this would have happened without the spontaneous generosity and kindness of total strangers. En route, some of these people would become temporary friends. 

Its a sobering thought to consider how far through life we would actually get on our own without the aid of others.

Hitch-hiking depends utterly on generosity. Without all those very many people, many of them very lovely, thoughtful, helpful and kind, I would never have got to experience all the wonderful places that I have throughout the course of my life.

Every person we meet contributes in some smaller or larger way to our comprehension of the world we find ourselves in. 

In a very real sense, we are all in this together.
The passing of time is a funny old business. All that follows happened quite some time ago; when I was considerably younger. I got myself into tangles and knots that now I probably wouldn’t. I hope not anyway.

July 2012

*Zetta Hills was a well-to-do Edwardian Lady who cycled TWICE across the English Channel and then in 1920 cycled fifteen miles up the River Thames each time on a bicycle outrigged with eight foot long floating wooden stabilisers. After that she ran away with the circus and rode a big powerful motorbike on The Wall Of Death and then became a sea-lion tamer. And all that before tea-time.