During my years as hitchhiker, mostly in the 1980s, I used to reflect with bitter wonder on the number of drivers who made friendly gestures explaining why, on this occasion, they couldn’t give you a lift.Typically, it was because they were turning off somewhere just up ahead, as indicated with a finger. Sometimes it was because the car was full, a fact communicated with a helpless shrug.But in all cases, it implied that the driver was the sort of person who always gave lifts when possible. And this might have been a reassuring message if it wasn’t also such a blatant lie. If the proportion of people making such gestures were representative of reality, no hitchhiker would ever have waited long anywhere. The grim truth resulted in such traumas as the night I got stuck in Mullingar. The scars still linger.It was an August Sunday in 1985 and I had been trying to get to Athlone from Croke Park. Ultimately, I made the mistake of accepting a lift that took me nearer my destination while leaving the main western road.It was about 9pm when I took up position on the outskirts. Four long hours later, I was still there, increasingly oppressed by Joni Mitchell’s line about being “a hitcher, a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway”.She made it sound glamorous. But that was California’s freeways, probably. Even Joni might have struggled to romanticise incarceration by the broken white lines of the R390 out of Mullingar.On the plus side, I was rescued eventually, by a pedestrian rather than a driver. He’d passed me earlier when going to a dance. Then he passed me again on his way home and, stricken with pity, offered me a sofa for the night.Those memories flooded back last month during a short-lived but surprisingly successful return to hitchhiking. It was All-Ireland final Sunday in Mayo, I’d just climbed Croagh Patrick and I needed to get back into Westport, mid-match. So, in a desperate stratagem, I stuck out my right thumb for the first time in decades, wondering if modern drivers would even know what that meant.Then I recalled some of the tactics of my hitching days: show your face, project friendliness, don’t look like an axe-murderer. And astonishingly, within seconds, I had a lift. Furthermore, in an act of historic closure, it was a driver from Mullingar (thank you James and Margaret O’Callaghan – I hope I remembered your names correctly).There were occasional triumphs back in the 1980s too, it must be said. Like the day I made a very late decision to see Bruce Springsteen in Slane. The concert had already started, as confirmed by a live radio report which, as heard in a south Dublin kitchen, filled me with an emotion we would now call FOMO.Dropping everything, I caught a 15A bus into town and a 19 out to Finglas, then hitched four different lifts to Slane (they were all turning off just up the road that day but stopped anyway), before paying £5 in and seeing the last two hours of the show.Then, too, there was the time I was trying to get to Ballycastle, Co Antrim, one Saturday evening. I was starting from Ballymoney, which was as near as the train could take me. That also left me on a lesser road, late. But first I got a lift to Dervock, a village known to be – I mention this only to excuse my subsequent outbreak of paranoia – 99 per cent Protestant.There I came to the notice of a merry gentleman who was getting a lift home from the pub and insisted I join him. This took me even deeper into Paisley country. But the friendly drunk wasn’t going far. So, implying that these parts were unsafe for a Free Stater, he offered to pay the driver to take me the rest of the way.I politely declined to the driver’s relief – he looked as nervous of me as I was of him. Then my friend insisted on finding someone else to drive me. At which point, he sauntered up his driveway, singing the Enniskillen Dragoons (a traditional loyalist song). And God forgive me, as soon as he was gone, so was I, sprinting 800 metres up the road. From there, I jogged and walked the remaining eight or nine miles to the north Antrim coast. Whenever a car passed, my thumb remained under wraps.Lifts from women were always rare in my experience, for obvious reasons. But there were a few, of pleasant memory. And in general, people who picked up hitchhikers tended to be good company. The occasional misadventures were, in part, self-inflicted. Unlike more organised hitchers, I never got around to printing out signs saying where I wanted to go. But in light of my subsequent vocation as a daily newspaper columnist, that may have been a subconscious choice. In this line of business, back and side roads are your friends, usually. Destinations are overrated.