When I was 18 I found myself in the wilds of Herefordshire, picking strawberries for a multitude of farmers. But that summer wasn’t terribly good for the crop and so I sought work in the next county – Worcestershire. I had very little money, but I had my mate Gav, who was also recently turfed out of the strawberry picking game and needed to find work desperately. We decided to hitchhike to Worcester as we heard there were spring onion packing jobs-a-plenty – and this is the story of our journey there in a used Lexus.

All we had with us was a packet of Somerfield Basics sliced chicken and a bag of sugar. I bought the bag of sugar with our meagre funds as I thought it was a good value source of energy. It is no co-incidence that I lost a major tooth that summer. Anyway, as I was pouring refined sugar down my neck by a roadside, and Gav had is thumb jutting out to oncoming traffic – a car suddenly pulled up for us.

It wasn’t a crap car either – it as one of the nice Lexus jobbies. All shiny and expensive looking. We got in and happily started chatting to the well-dressed geezer inside. He seemed amiable enough, telling us about his second hand car, but as time went on the conversation lead us to become a little suspicious of how this guy was making money. This suspicion was ramped-up by the fact that I spotted several needles on the dashboard. My naive 18 year old mind suddenly told me that we were in a drug dealer’s car! Shit, I thought – we’re doomed.

I was pretty worried and remembered all the stories about people having very bad things done to them after accepting lifts from strangers. However, as time went on it transpired that the driver was in fact a diabetic, and that was what the needles were for.

Grateful for our lives, we got out of the car in Worcester – which does actually smell of Worcester sauce! Yey!