I was driving to Newhaven in the rain recently when I passed two older women waiting at the bus stop in Rodmell. I pondered stopping and offering them a lift. Obviously I couldn’t be sure I was going to the same place they were heading, and since my car is full of junk and smells like a horse died in it, I decided, on balance, not to frighten them. I picked up someone hitching a lift from Rodmell last summer. It was a male musician who had been trying the impossible - to get to Glyndebourne on a Sunday via public transport. But he was not the one with the thumb out, his female companion was, presumably because they knew that cars are more likely to stop for women. I pulled over and she smiled sheepishly and ducked out of the way so he could hop in with his instrument case. I was amused by this trickery. It brought back memories of my hitching days as a student. Once I hitched from Nottingham with a friend called Vanessa to see a couple of blokes we fancied in Essex. Armed as we were with Vanessa’s spectacular breasts, we had little trouble getting lifts, and ended up in an articulated lorry being driven to the doorstep, which was in a small housing estate in Bishops Stortford. I still wonder how the driver found his way back to the M1. But even without killer breasts, I think hitching should make a comeback, along with more car and lift sharing. You meet some interesting people and hardly any of them are serial killers. Well except Vanessa of course, but I didn’t know that then.