THUMBS UP...has being risk-averse robbed us of a ride?

Our thumbs are useful for gripping, allowing fingers to click, and acknowledging when things are OK or not so good. I also remember it being used in an elegant metaphor for night shift town center foot patrol when I was a copper in the then concrete jungle of Bracknell's pedestrianized shopping center in the early 1980s: thumb up bum, brain in neutral.

- Ian Kirke

In addition to using mine as a tool of last resort for picking my nose, I have also used my thumb to save me money, to meet some weird and wonderful people, and to travel from A to B. The latter uses are all wrapped up in my distant past when I used to hitchhike and these memories have encouraged me, many years later, to question whether our distinct lack of appetite for contemporary risk has robbed us of a forgotten piece of our cultural heritage? I am a great advocate of personal safety but then not everyone out there wants to cause us harm, yet I acknowledge that it only takes one psychopath to extinguish our most vital possession. An internet search will undoubtedly cause a chill to shoot up your spine with the Santa Rosa (California) hitchhiker murders between February 4th 1972 and December 22nd 1973 providing a grisly example. In an attempt to provide a sobering counterbalance, there are numerous other ways to die that are significantly more likely. As a retired connoisseur of this mode of social transport, I did it regularly and thankfully never met a crazed ax murderer, or at least if I did, they must have had a day off.

For your entertainment, I will regale you with my antics with the primary intention of making you chuckle. However, I contend that the more we have been exposed to information when arguably assessing risk should be that much easier to do, the further it has perversely robbed us of a spirit of adventure that has made many dismissive of anything that carries any degree of anxiety. I will leave that decision for you to make at the end of this rose-colored spectacles journey that began in 1979 on the outskirts of Brackley, due east of Banbury and north of Bicester.