It was mad, but I did it nonetheless. I picked up the hitchhiker, something I seldom do. There could be no particular reason, other than that it was two days short of Christmas, and night had fallen.
But hitch-hikers are not what they were. The rules were very clear in that distant epoch when I hitched: the hiker's duty was to make conversation in return for the gift of a lift. My sense of gratitude from that time lives with me still - to the Austrian ex-wartime paratrooper who rescued me amid the snow near Klagenfurt and who fed me strudel and chocolate coffee; or the Frenchwoman in Switzerland who, while her husband drove, secretly stuffed crispy bread-rolls and Camembert into my rucksack; or the young German driver who fed me lambchop sandwiches and made me promise, absolutely swear, that when my time came, I would give lifts.
I repeated that promise with an unquenchable passion at a autobahn entrance outside Vienna, where I waited for two days without a lift - and where I nearly resolved to become a lifelong homosexual in protest at the way girl hitch-hikers so shamelessly refused to honour the hiker's code of moving downstream of existing hikers - and invariably would get lifts within moments of undoing a shirt-button or two. That second near-resolution, mysteriously, came to nothing.
Giggling girls
Yet I kept my promise to give hitch-hikers lifts, and in return they kept the conversation going. But over the years things changed, as I noticed most powerfully one Sunday morning in Co Galway when three teenage girls from Kerry spent their entire journey giggling at my expense - until I threw them out, many miles short of their destination. Only my legendary willpower of steel prevented me from reversing over them, uttering wild cries of joy.
Then last summer I picked up a local lad near Ballyconneally; he spent the entire journey in aloof and sullen silence and departed without a murmur of thanks. I am to this day tempted to scour Connemara, find him, and bury him in a bog. Never again, I swore. Never again.
So why, with night fallen, did I pick up a hitch-hiker on a back road near Clonee? Maybe the last residue of the goodness of Klagenfurt, the remembered Camembert, the oath over the chop sandwich. The hiker got into my car and said: "Clondalkin, please."
"What?" I cried in disbelief.
"Clondalkin. You can go over the new motorway."
A pause to breathe. "Excuse me. I'm not going to Clondalkin. I'm going to Phibsboro."
Hitch-hiker from hell?
"You're some ----in' taxi driver," said my guest. "And where the ---- am I now, anyway?"
Oh sinking heart, the hitchhiker from hell is in my car. He is young and unkempt and looks perfectly capable of sticking a hypodermic in my eye.
In as low a tone as I am able to muster I report that he is not in a taxi, we are in Clonee, Co Meath, and I am heading for Phibsboro.
"Fine so." Then he falls asleep. The smell of drink from him would make a breathalyser stand on its hind legs and bark.
Suddenly he is awake again and eyeing me. "Why did you give me a lift?" A good question, a very good question indeed. "Because I thought if I didn't, nobody would."
"And here's me thinking you were a taxi. Would you like some wine?"
Oh no, dear God no, this drunken homicidal beast wants me to go drinking Cyprus sherry with him. I reply in a voice of odious piety: no, indeed not.
"Does your wife? I mean, I won this bottle here in a pub raffle, and I don't drink wine myself, and nor does Michelle. The girlfriend. And you're giving me a lift. And it's Christmas. It's not bad - it's Rioja. Would you like it? For the wife, like?"
I turned and looked at him. I was in the company of a thoroughly decent but drunk young gentleman. I said, a little more amiably: "You've had a few."
"I have. I was with me mates, we've been drinking in the pub since ten this morning after we got off the building site, and Michelle got the bus up and joined us, but I got pissed and fell asleep, and when I woke up, they were gone."
"Any of your mates fancy Michelle?"
"They all do, but she wouldn't mess around with anybody else, only me."
"How'd you meet her?"
"At a mate's christening."
"How old's the mate?"
"Seventeen."
"Rather old to be christened," I observed. It was not the funniest thing that was ever said, but he sat back and roared, tears rolling down his cheeks. He told me his name, Lee. His mate and his girlfiend and their baby lived in a flat, and maybe he and Michelle would move in together.
Christmas present
"And have babies?"
"I don't know about that. I'll have to find her first. I'll ring her when I get home. Will you take the wine, as a Christmas present from me and Michelle, for picking me up when loads of fellas wouldn't? Will you? Just to please me? Please?"
I took the wine from him with pleasure, and I drove him into the centre of Dublin to the Clondalkin bus-stop. "Merry Christmas to you," he said, shaking my hand.
Merry Christmas, Lee, I replied. And a happy new year. Somewhere in this universe, the spirits of a Frenchwoman, an Austrian and a German nodded in approval.