Monthly Archives: August 2021

Hitchhiking memories – to Denmark and back 1973

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The year was 1973, I was 18 and I had recently arrived in the UK from what was then Rhodesia, having narrowly escaped being called up for national service in that country to fight in an unwinnable war.  I had spent most of the summer working at a timber yard near Farnham, Surrey, where my sister Jane,  was at art school. It was a tough, macho world of work where I would witness much bullying  and would return home exhausted, with splinters in my hands having taken lengths of wood off a huge saw all day without ear or hand protection. The house where I was living was a friendly one made up of various members of the Nissen family, who were half  Danish.  The mother was called Jenny and the daughters were Diana and Sarah and the youngest was Andrew, 17, and just leaving school.  In a mad moment we all decided to go to Denmark for a sojourn at the end of the summer for the adventure to see Diana, who had recently had a baby son and had already moved to Roskilde.

    I teamed up with Andrew to go with. We decided it would be fun to hitchhike all the way to Denmark. (Andrew later on joined a religious order and became a monk.) Jane and Sarah went separately as we didn’t think four hitching together would work.  We set off early one morning in late August and caught lifts mostly with trucks across Kent through to Dover. This was the easy bit. A four hour ferry trip across the North Sea to Ostend followed where if memory serves me well it was well past midnight when we arrived and not much was open. We had a tent between us and we scaled a wall and decided to pitch the tent in what looked like a municipal park, it was hard to see as it was unlit. Morning came and on peering out the door of the tent we realised that we were in the grounds of a royal palace and there were royal guards in uniforms around. (These days we might have been arrested for trespass or worse.) We were quickly noticed and marched off the premises by the guards and were on our merry way towards The Netherlands and Germany.  But it wasn’t easy as we walked for what seemed like hours with a heavy backpack to get to the outskirts of Ostend without having much of a clue of where to go. More follows…

A dj’s horror night in Hammersmith

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Friends in a band in Oxford persuaded me to be their support dj at a gig at the Novotel Hammersmith in London right in the middle of Euro 96. My mistake was that I didn’t do my research of what kind of crowd it was. When I got there I found out it was a party and dinner for a convention of estate agents. The band played, they did well, but the already pissed up crowd was looking for something else. Those days I wouldn’t play just anything, I was quite particular and my speciality was soul, reggae and African. I brought along a couple of boxes of records and singles and only had record decks. Within minutes of starting I had several fairly inebriated women demanding songs, mostly Abba if I remember right. I happened to have one Abba single with me that night. That didn’t last long. I had about six singles which worked, but I couldn’t just repeat them. Then the blokes waded in and were demanding Oasis, again I failed to deliver. You can’t play what you haven’t got. It got worse and worse as the crowd became more and more inebriated. I felt a feeling of blind panic wash over me. I couldn’t escape, there was nowhere to go and I had about another 90 minutes to fill. England had beaten Spain that night so that was another factor. Again I failed to have the right music. I thought I was about to be hauled out of my space and beaten to a pulp. (Pulp would have been good.) The crowd of baying men and women were getting quite threatening and annoyed with me. The band had long since scarpered, I was completely on my own. Salvation came in the form of a guy who took pity on me and offered to help, he said he’d go home and pick up a portable CD player and some cds, which he did. The rest of the evening slowly improved, he was very helpful. To this day I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t turned up. Eventually this torturous night ended, I was a wreck and vowed to never let this happen again, always to check out in advance what was likely to work – or just bring everything. On the long drive home I was flagged down by a man whose car had broken down and I managed to tow him and his car several miles back to his house somewhere in south west London. What a night!