I’VE been listening to BBC journalist Evan Davis on the radio telling stories of his recent hitchhiking experiences and it brought back some amusing tales of my own.

Evan was investigating how easy it was to hitchhike in Britain in 2008, and why not many people seem to be taking this option nowadays.

You hardly ever see people standing at the side of the road with a scrappy piece of cardboard now and it would seem like an obvious thing to do with astronomical petrol prices.

About six of us commute from Huddersfield and Halifax into my offices in Leeds every day and we’re all trying to reduce our carbon footprints by car sharing, but it’s not easy. We all keep different hours and everyone seems to prefer their own space, it makes us a less sociable lot but if more people did it then motorways and city centres wouldn’t be gridlocked so much.

In my younger days, when I was a DJ in Leeds, I used to live in Morley and drive to my job late at night. One night I spotted an old lady at the bus stop and felt sorry for her so I stopped to give her a lift.

We got chatting away and when we reached the city centre I asked her where she wanted to be dropped off. ‘I have an appointment at the hospital at four’ she told me, and as it was late at night I replied ‘What four in the morning?’. ‘No the afternoon,’ she told me. ‘So, why were you waiting for the bus so late at night?’ I asked. It then became apparent that the poor lady wasn’t quite with it . She thought it was daytime! So I was faced with the dilemma of being late for work or leaving her stranded. I felt so guilty that I had to take her all the way back to Morley – so much for being a good Samaritan.

My other amusing hitchhiker experience is way back when my brother and I were driving home from South Wales. Anyone who has been on a car journey with me will know that I’m not the chattiest of passengers and usually have a nap most of the way.

On this particular journey, I was lying on the back seat (years before seatbelts were compulsory I might add) fast asleep, when my brother stopped at a service station. I woke up after he’d gone inside and fancied an ice lolly as it was a hot day, so off I went to the shop.

In the meantime my brother came back to the car and as he drove out of the services he spotted a hitchhiker and picked him up. They had been travelling for quite some time when he spotted another hitchhiker. He told the first hitchhiker that ordinarily he would have gladly picked up the other one but he didn’t have room due to me being asleep in the back.

The guy gave him a really odd look as there was nobody in the back….Meanwhile, having re-appeared with my ice lolly to find that my brother had disappeared, I had no mobile phone in those days so after waiting for ages decided to hitch a lift myself.

I managed to get a lift as far as Burnley, where I used a phonebox to ring my parents who were so relieved to hear from me. My brother didn’t know whether I’d fallen out of the car or when he’d lost me so he’d had some explaining to do.