1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge by Tony Hawks, Prefers to remain anonymous

will ya?’
    This did the trick. I responded immediately and against all my better judgement I was loading my gear into his tatty van in order to advance a further three miles up the road. Still, as I’d heard somewhere before, a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.
    Both he and the dog watched with interest as I lifted the fridge into the back.
    ‘What have you got there?’
    ‘Ifs a fridge.’
    ‘Oh. You wouldn’t want to be travellin’ with a fridge for too long.’
    Wouldn’t you? No I suppose you wouldn’t. I got into the front seat and the dog jumped on to my lap using me as a means of improving its view out of the front window.
    ‘Where are you headed?’ I asked.
    ‘The cattle auction up the road here.’
    ‘Are you going to buy a cow?’
    ‘No, I’m just going to kill time.’
    I suddenly felt a long way from home. I was in a place where people went to cattle auctions to kill time. Then I noticed something which had been obvious all along but had escaped my attention such had been my preoccupation with trying to decipher what he was saying. The old man was covered in mud. There’s some rubbish that biologists or physicists give you about humans being 90% water, but this guy was at least 25% mud. It looked like he’d been rolling in it Presumably to kill time. The strange thing was, his dog wasn’t very muddy at all. How could that have happened? Dogs pride themselves on getting muddy and to be less muddy than your owner must be deeply shameful. I reckoned that’s why the dog was so keen to look out of the window—keeping a check on the whereabouts of other dogs so it could avoid them and maintain some kind of respect in the area.
    We arrived all too quickly in Carrerrerarse, the six minutes spent in the company of this mud-covered man and his dog having afforded me a brief respite from the notion that I had made a foolish error in my life. This hitching with a fridge business was possible. The man had stopped and he had picked up both me and my fridge. It was just bad luck that he was only going a few miles. And it was just bad luck that Carrerrerranoughnabollocks was one of the worst places for hitching in the Northern Hemisphere.
    As the old man pulled into the side of the road, he was greeted by three other elderly farmer types who were also covered in mud. They weren’t as muddy as him, obviously, but certainly muddy enough to be on the committee of the muddy gang. I got out, collected my gear and said goodbye, conscious of the fact that I was outside a cattle auction in the heart of rural Ireland, with a rucksack, a fridge and an insufficient coating of mud to be welcome in these parts.
    All around me were the scenes of traffic congestion I had been dreaming of only minutes earlier. Trucks, wagons, carts, Range Rovers and tatty red Fiesta vans were arriving for the cattle auction and they were of absolutely no help to me. In fact they were an enormous hindrance, making it something of a problem finding a place to stand where through traffic might see me. I lifted the fridge on to its trolley, hoisted the rucksack on to my back and started to walk up the road. Needless to say it was muddy. I looked round to wave goodbye, but the old man had gone and instead I saw his Jack Russell eyeing me disparagingly through the van’s windscreen. Instinctively it seemed to know the way I had chosen to travel lacked wisdom. I gave it the finger and continued on my way.
    As I walked I could hear the monotone machinegun-fire delivery of the cattle auctioneer over the distant PA I hoped for his sake that his entire audience wasn’t made up of those who were killing time. I walked on. A farmer was staring at me. ‘What’s his problem?’ I thought. I had forgotten that he had just seen an unmuddy man pulling a fridge behind him give the finger to a Jack Russell dog.
    Presently I arrived at the hitching location which I considered to be the least unsuitable to those available to me. I was still