Terry is Neal Cassady and I am Jack Kerouac. He’s full of energy and madness and I sort of write it all down. Or maybe I am David Cassidy and Terry is Jackanory, always telling crazy stories and appearing every evening at about 5 o’clock. Actually, this On the Road analogy is a bit crap, because although Kerouac did all the writing, it was Cassady who did the driving. Kerouac never drove. Ever. He bummed lifts. Either in cars or on freight trains. Terry can’t drive either. Though he claims he has been able to since the age of six – he just doesn’t have a licence.

      Me and Terry in the car would take over some little community in the west of Ireland and terrorise the locals – annoy ‘cops’ and flirt with chicks in roadside tourist gift shops, just like those lads in Easy Rider. We were bohemians, outlaws, outcasts, in the grand tradition of mad partnerships:

      • Kerouac and Cassady

      • Hunter S. Thompson and his lawyer

      • Fonda and Hopper

      • Boswell and Johnson

      • Bob Hope and Bing Crosby

      • Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

      • Abbott and Costello

      • John Noakes and Peter Purves

      • Sandy Gall and Reginald Bosanquet

      • Pippin and Tog

      • Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

       Using telepathy and ‘special’ mind powers to make Terry ring:

      Deep breaths, Tim. Get comfortable. Put your memory tanks onto ‘timer’ mode (Economy 7 will do).

      Ring ring ring ring ring. Terry Terry Terry Terry Terry.

      If Terry doesn’t ring

      The leprechaun will sing

      Ring ring ring Terry ring

       I make a decision to take the singing leprechaun (that I’d bought on the Swansea – Cork ferry) with me if Terry doesn’t show:

      If Terry didn’t show I had already had the thought that I might take my little green fabric friend with me. (He has the voice of a very squeaky Irish jockey and sings the hits of the day, particularly at Christmas. Well, no, actually, all he sings is ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.) My singing leprechaun comments on the action now and then but can’t influence it. If I’m doing something wrong, or he wants to say ‘no’ he’ll sing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ (possibly recorded by the wheelchair synth player of Fulham Palace Road) when I press his belly. If he’s feeling happy and positive, the singing leprechaun stays quiet. I think. I can never be sure. The singing leprechaun would be Jack Kerouac and I would have to be Neal Cassady, which meant a hell of a lot more work for me. I went out to pack the car. I must have been out for no more than ten minutes but when I got back there was a message on the answer machine from Terry.

       The message on my answer machine from Terry:

      ‘Hello hello. Yeah, er, hi Tim, it’s Terry. Er, I’m afraid I’m going to have to be really boring and middle-aged and blow you out this weekend. Yeah, er, I’m just feeling really knackered at the moment. Sorry mate. Speak to you when you get back. Erm, give us a bell sometime if you get a chance cheers bye.’

      Terry had phoned from some pub in the centre of town. Which meant I couldn’t ring him back to try and get him to change his mind. The singing leprechaun looked up at me with searching eyes. I pressed his little tummy and he sang me a beautiful version of that old Irish song. I collected the rest of my stuff, turned off the heating and went out to the car.

      One o’clock in the morning and it was just me, the car and the cold inky-orange streets of West London – incredibly, I’d managed to get to the top of Fulham Palace Road without running over a tramp or one of those pale but high-spirited late-night youngsters who sometimes hang around outside twenty-four-hour shops shouting at each other in cod-Jamaican accents and looking as though they’ve recently overdosed on casual sportswear.

      Feeling just a little hypnotised by the enthusiastic purr of the Corsa’s 1.4L engine, I shifted up and down gears with all the grace of a bull elephant doing needlestitch, then coasted up through an almost deserted and ghostly Shepherd’s Bush to the roundabout, then up the A40. Hammersmith is a gateway in and out of London: big roads take you west, the tube and the A4 take you into town. It’s good for country boys like me who don’t know where the hell they want to be – in the city or out in the sticks. I paused for a moment to change down into second, then a manoeuvre so simple even a little kid in a pedal car could do it – get onto that motorway and head for Wales. But not me – God knows what I was playing at but I soon realised I was heading back into town towards the West End and the City. Wrong direction again. The Singing Leprechaun in the passenger seat said nothing as I came off at the next slip road at Royal Oak station, did a U-turn near some claustrophobic-looking Georgian townhouses then back out onto the road underneath the A40. Is it left or right? Left or fucking right? ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, sang the Singing Leprechaun, which I took to mean a left. I had another three hundred miles to go along the A40, M6 and loads of other Ms and As. I knew I was bound to get lost now and again and didn’t really care, but if I fucked up like this every three or four miles I wouldn’t make it to the ferry for at least another couple of days.

I’ve never liked driving much. Not in cities anyway. I’ve never really trusted myself with all that metal and glass. When I was seventeen my parents give me a choice of driving lessons or a record player for my birthday. To have a car was a passport to success in Lincolnshire, particularly with women. The more sought-after girls lived out in the back of beyond, the daughters of farmers or village schoolmasters. By choosing not to drive I was also choosing the town girls (or, in reality, choosing no sex), choosing fresh air, choosing two feet, choosing music.² While some of my friends got into wing mirrors, exhausts, turbo brum-brum camshaft wheelie gauges etc., I was into free jazz, new-wave pop, electro and Northern industrial music. In a way it was still an attempt at pulling – a girl would come round and I’d leave my Teardrop Explodes French import EP, Ornette Coleman Atlantic albums, or Cabaret Voltaire and Afrika Bambaata twelve-inch singles somewhere obvious for her to see (like on the front doorstep, or perched on the toilet bowl). A not very successful technique, naturally. Perhaps I should have hung them from the ceiling.