I’d had a really nice time in Manchester, but now that I was flying solo again, there wasn’t much reason to stay, and Lauren in York would have a couple days off from work soon, so it was time to visit. And besides, I finally had Pokémon Go, so it was really time to start getting around and catching them all. A bus took me to a roundabout that was supposed to be good for hitching northeast, but construction had tightened the on-ramp from the roundabout into one narrow lane, so it wasn’t going to be easy for cars to see me or pull over. But a guy named Tom took me a few stops down the main road to where I’d have a better time, and I didn’t have to wait long at the new spot before getting another lift.
My driver’s name was Paul. Paul was awesome. He was a friendly older dude who remembered hitchhiking around northern England as recently as 25 years ago. He and his Irish wife had both done their share in their youth. When I told him I would be in Spain in a month and I’d heard hitching was hard there, he told me that he’d done it and had decent luck. Several times he’d gotten lifts from gay men hoping for favors, which he remembered as a distinctly Spanish-hitchhiking thing, but he’d never gotten into a situation where he’d felt unsafe. Athens was the city he remembered having the worst time hitching out of, though.
We talked about Trump, inevitably, and Brexit. When I shared with Paul the perspective of the non-xenophobe pro-leave Brit I’d hitched with in Ireland, he shook his head and said something like “doesn’t he know rich people in England know how to fuck over the working class just as well as rich people in the rest of the EU?” He wasn’t having it.
He was going to Halifax, which is a little ways before Leeds, almost halfway to York. Leeds is a little city in the north that I still don’t really know much about – people generally approved of it, but no one was telling me to go there. Getting into Leeds would bring the trouble of getting out of Leeds, it being a city and all, so the best thing would be to get a lift from someone going straight through and beyond. The hitching spot by Halifax was good, and I turned down a couple of rides, but I finally decided to take my chances and accept a lift into Leeds. This driver was yet another Paul, one who lived in Leeds and had a tattoo of a ring on his wedding finger. He was a nice guy, and the trip was short.
In Leeds I caught a wild Parasect, a terrifying bug/grass Pokémon that’s basically an insect whose brain functions have been taken over by a parasitic fungus, which is a phenomenon that happens in real life. Pokémon has some heavy stuff, guys. I walked through the train station to get a peek at my options, then busked in the pedestrian city center for a little while. At some point a couple of young buskers played a really hammy version of “Wonderwall,” where the singer/guitarist was doing all these frilly vocal lines over the melody, and a second dude started beatboxing over the second verse, all blasted through an amp. My own nook was pretty quiet, since my act can’t really compete with amplifiers, but after twenty or thirty minutes of playing, a guy playing electric violin over backing tracks set up not even forty feet away from me and proceeded to completely drown me out. I was grumpy and confronted him on my way out, not demanding that he stop, but just pointing out that what he’d done was really rude. He spoke with an accent, and I’m not sure if he understood me at all.
Walking out of Leeds to where I would get a lift seemed tough, and I didn’t feel like it, so I took the rain to York instead, meeting Lauren in the walled city center in the summery afternoon. Leeds is a very old town whose history is well preserved, with an epic cathedral and ancient walls. Lauren tells me that in York and the area surrounding it, there’s a church for every week of the year, and a pub for every day. The city center itself is full of winding streets too narrow for cars, and lots of foot traffic. The busking is a little competitive, but there are more than enough places to play. My last night in York was a Friday night, and I made good money night-busking.
I knew Lauren at Hope College. We did a mission trip to Queens, NY, together, and subsequently I dated and married one of her housemates for a bit. While at Hope Lauren did a study program in York, and she went back there for an advanced degree after graduating, at which point she met Matt, a thoroughly English guy who swept her off her feet with, I assume, his kind nature and adorable Britishness – throughout the week he would say these unbearably English things in his fine accent, like “Oh, I quite like poppadoms,” and I would stifle a big goofy smile at how perfectly he embodied my idea of Englishness.
Lauren hadn’t originally intended to move to York and marry a guy and settle down there, and I hadn’t heard much from her since the move, so I was very curious to see how she was getting on. Marriage can be beautiful, but it can also be scary and overwhelming. I was hesitant to expect the best. But while she does miss the States and acknowledges the little sacrifices that have come with living abroad, their relationship itself is something special. They’re a great team, affectionate and genuinely appreciative of each other. They share common values in a deep way, but their personalities are pretty complementary – Lauren more creative and empathetic, an English major and ESL teacher, and Matt a curiously analytical software engineer who appreciates Lauren profoundly. But the sweetest thing in the world to me is how they’ve met in the middle on video games. Matt is a casual but committed PC gamer, and he’s invested in a few good cooperative indie games that they can play together on their respective screens, welcoming her into his hobby in a gentle way.
Lauren hasn’t picked up the accent much, but she’s started to pick up the vernacular and mannerisms of the English, the most entertaining being the tendency to apologize automatically for the most unnecessary things, like being bumped by a rude person or a free-swinging door. But all our mutual friends will be glad to hear she’s doing great. It’s taken time for her to find a social life and career in York, and the possibility of permanently living in the UK is something they’ll likely have to wrestle with as time goes on, but she may be the happiest I’ve ever seen her, and to be able to say that in your twenties is a very cool thing.
Buoyed by the warmth of genuine hospitality from good friends (and the new teaser material for Rogue One and the trailer for Rebels season 3 from Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016’s live stream), I left last Saturday to head south. A friend of mine in London (from Pittsburgh) would host me on Sunday night, and subsequently I would stay with an old friend of my mom, but Saturday night was up in the air. I would hitchhike south and try to end up someplace fun for night-busking before making my way to London the next morning.
After a short lift west to the main southbound road, I found a long lift with an ex-military guy named Craig, a former soldier who now worked in private security – celebrities he’s covered security for include Foo Fighters, One Direction, and Jessie J, who is apparently an insufferable diva. He took me to a short one with a girl whose details I’ve forgotten, and a final lift into Leicester with a couple of old hippies from Glastonbury, I was in the city center of what could be considered England’s first multicultural small city – for several decades it’s been an attractive destination for immigrants and refugees, so it’s very ethnically diverse, and there’s a lot of great food. I learned all this from my drivers and Google – until then, I’d only heard of them because of their recent football success, which is such a crazy underdog story that I’m sure it’ll be made into a movie soon.
I found a place to stay, wandered around looking for food (settling eventually on cheap curry and gelato), and finally set up to busk. It took a couple hours to find a busy, pubby section that fit my acoustics, but when I finally found my groove I made good money. One group of happy drunk lads tipped me 20 quid, so of course I played as many of the group’s goofy requests as I could muster – obvious Oasis and Mumford and Sons, but also Foo Fighters and Noah and the Whale. One guy asked for Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire, but his buddies had no idea who those were and drowned him out. By the end of the night I’d made 50 or 60 pounds, turned down two offers to go clubbing, had a nice little phone chat with Jane and her best bud Kelly, and gotten to sleep just before the sun came up.
The next day it took me a couple hours to get to the hitching spot across town because I kept stopping at Pokémon gyms, but I eventually made it, finding a quick lift from another ex-military guy named Pete, who saw action in the Iraq war and now works on oil rigs. He was on his way to drop off his laundry at his mom’s, but after that he took me to a busy service station on the main road to London. I bought some cold little mango chunks and munched on them while holding my thumb out for cars getting back on the highway.
After about half an hour with no luck, two sisters picked me up, on their way from Sheffield to London to visit their dad. I asked Hannah, the driver, about the Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur tattoos on her arm, and the three of us got into an excited chat about Pokémon Go and how fun it is. Turns out Hannah’s also a songwriter with a degree in music stuff – composition or something – who’s floundering a bit in her 20s figuring out what to do with an education that’s not as practically useful as she’d hoped. I’d been there in a lot of ways, so we had a lot to talk about, bouncing between busking and Star Trek and weird character interactions in anime.
And then I was in London, and I’m there now. For the first time on this trip, I’m sort of caught up! Let’s hear it, everybody.
No Cynics On The Road 