Oxford Lost 2011

On 26^th February, Heather Stevens, Yasha Jannoo and I, along with a bunch of others were kidnapped and taken 100 miles away before being dumped in the middle of nowhere without food, water or oxygen. We were forced to make our own way back to Oxford, fighting against the harshest conditions on Earth: wind, rain, snow, lightning, lahar flows, etc.

This was Oxford Lost, a charity hitchhike organised by RAG to raise money for four amazing charities: Shelter, Helen & Douglas House, Pathway Workshop, and Emerge Global. Check ‘em out. The aim of the game was to get dropped off in an unknown location (which later turned out to be Poole, which was generally lovely but with some fairly racist graffiti and some very angry drivers) and then have to make our way back to Oxford without spending a penny. Which basically meant either ‘doing a Grand Theft Auto’, or hitchhiking. Not sure which is the safer option, to be honest.

My team and I went for a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy theme, with me and Yasha in dressing downs and Heather in a makeshift Marvin costume (it was GLORIOUS. Except it came apart when we got to Poole and had to be abandoned. But for the five minutes she was wearing it, the whole of Poole was in awe. AWE.). Our first lift was from a lovely man named Keith, who had lived in Poole all his life. He vomited corny joke after corny joke at us, although he had a certain charm and style which made them genuinely funny. After being in the car with him for five minutes, he turned to us and said “Would you mind if I took you on a detour? There’s something I want to show you”. To hear a stranger say that straight after realising that you had failed to send the Oxford Lost HQ the licence plate of the car we were in is a genuinely terrifying experience. And being in that position tends to put strange images in your head of you suddenly becoming Jason Bourne and ramming a pen into your attacker’s eye.

Of course, we weren’t actually in that situation. For it turns out that Keith was one of those ‘genuinely nice blokes’ I hear so much about, and actually took us to a hill to show us the view of Poole. In an earlier draft of this blogpost, I said that ‘I felt like an arse for not trusting him’, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it was healthy and natural for me to be slightly wary of the stranger who has just picked us up, particularly one as eccentric as Keith. I believe it is better to be a bit distrustful and be proved wrong than to blindly trust someone and then be proved wrong. Keith was our first lift of the day and the most memorable character we met on the trip. We were in his car for no more than 15 mins, yet I feel like I’ll remember him for ever. So, thanks, Keith. Theith.

Keith dropped us off on a dual carriageway by Ringwood, which I thought sounded a bit like ‘ringworm’ so I wasn’t particularly keen on it as a place. Obviously, my impression was completely right because, where we were, it was pretty dire. We stood at this stupid dual carriageway for about an hour, receiving nothing but racial abuse and jeers. There was hope, at one point, when a car filled with young, attractive girls drove past. One girl leaned out of the window and said “Are you going to Oxford?”, to which I replied ‘yes’ because I felt no need to lie, and she then made a sort of ‘come hither’ gesture. What she didn’t seem to realise, though, was that she was on the wrong side of the road and the person driving didn’t give a shit. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had gotten in that car. But then I remember that, about 30 mins later, we got picked up by a bright pink limo bus and that anything less than that would have made my life totally shit.

In case you missed what I just said, it was BRIGHT PINK LIMO BUS. Its driver was a man named Graham, who was very nice and offered to take us about 20 mins up the road. In the meantime, he put on the disco lights and played some wonderful, wonderful music by a lovely lady called Alexandra Burke. We had a little bit of a rave in the back of this limo bus, clothed as we were in dressing gowns. It was a surreal experience.

After that, the lifts just kept on coming. After only having been dropped off by the limo bus 15 mins earlier, we got picked up by a young couple who were going to Reading. Which is actually not that far away from Oxford, in the grand scale of things, but is very far away from Ringwood, which is a very good thing. The ride to Reading was fairly quiet, because I think everyone was very tired by this point, and the couple kind of wanted to listen to the Rugby on the radio. Us nerds in the back had no idea what was going on.Interestingly though, the woman who gave us a lift was called Lintilla, named after a character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show, and she was a massive Douglas Adams fan. Small world.

When we got to Reading, it was pretty dark. We were wearing dark dressing gowns and our signs had zero colour on them. Getting a lift was going to be tricky, but we decided not to listen to Yasha’s whining of “Let’s blag a traaaain” and headed off to find a good spot to hitch. As we were standing there hitchhiking futilely, a woman came up to us and offered to give us money for a bus back to Oxford. After explaining that we weren’t allowed to spend any money because it was a charity hitchhike, she then gave us a £10 donation. My impressions of Reading at this stage were very good, and they only got better when a stupendously posh man in cream trousers and a blazer offered us a lift. He was in the army and was on his way back home, and was one of those very posh army officer sorts. Lovely man, although I later realised that he was actually our age and it depressed me a bit. How can people be so confident and be able to drive CARS and be in the army at my age, aren’t we still CHILDREN? Apparently not!

By this stage, we were so close to Oxford we could smell it. We got another lift from a very friendly, ditsy blonde woman called Izzy, whose front seat was not particularly stable and almost ended in Heather’s untimely demise.

We made it back to Oxford with the help of a Brookes student, who was very nice but whose car was filled with a suspicious number of empty drinks bottles. If you don’t think that sounds suspicious, then you fail to understand the number of bottles there were in this guy’s car.

In my friend Heather’s blogpost, she talked about that what struck her most about this whole adventure was the transient nature of the relationships we formed. We were in the cars for relatively short amounts of time, and we formed bonds with some of them, but we’ll never see them again. My view of things is slightly different; what stuck out most for me was the fact that we got lifts at all. I kept trying to imagine myself or my parents driving down the street and seeing these hitchhikers and then deciding to pick them up. What compels someone to do that, and to be so friendly and lovely about it? Could I do that just the same, or would I drive straight past? I feel like the hitchhike raised some important questions about human behaviour and personalities which I’m not quite smart enough to answer, but definitely make food for thought. It was a great trip doing something that I never thought could be enjoyable. It was a difficult trip at times; there was that one rough spot after our first lift when we all thought we were not going to make it back. Hitchhiking is strange; it feels like hours of standing around feeling slightly bored, but then when you do get a lift there’s a burst of adrenaline and excitement, and the feeling of euphoria you get after a lift makes all the waiting worth it.

If you’d like to see our adventures, we have a little video for you all to savour and enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PpfGl7uwXg

And check out Heather’s blogpost on it as well! http://threeblognight.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/i-even-put-a-video-in-this-one-like-a-frickin-wizard/