WHEN people ask me to name the worst job I’ve ever had, I’m always torn between two summers in my teens.

The first job I ever had involved collecting eggs in a battery hen farm, an experience that affected my sinuses as well as my love life (Eau de Chicken Manure is guaranteed to have the girls swooning for all the wrong reasons).

But picking potatoes on a farm still sends a shudder down the same spine it almost ruined.

Apart from the back-breaking work, it was hitch-hiking the eight miles to and from the farm that both restored and ruined my faith in humankind in equal measure.

Thumbing a lift is an age-old method of travelling cheaply, but you don’t see too much of it these days.

Society’s ills are cited as the main reason for the slow death of the art of hitching, but sadly, who can you really trust these days?

Back in the innocent days of the early 1970s, it was the only way an impoverished student could get about the country, unlike today’s beneficiaries of the Bank of Mum and Dad. For the most part, unless you looked like you’d emerged from a cesspit or were called Rutger Hauer, it wasn’t long before some kind soul in a car or lorry pulled up and escorted you to your destination, or at least some way towards it.

Sometimes, however, fate – or the weather – took a hand and on one dark and stormy night, with the rain coming down in torrents, I stood forlornly on the side of the A56 in Cheshire.

In those circumstances, Butterworth’s Law comes into play, in that the desperate need for a lift is directly proportionate to the ability to find one.

I was due to be going out with a new girlfriend that night and my pathetic state would take more time than I had to transform.

For half an hour cars flashed by this bedraggled figure, dripping wet and so shattered from the day’s exertions that I could barely raise my thumb in the time-honoured fashion.

Then my Good Samaritan pulled up. I ran to the car and threw myself into the passenger seat before he could drive off.

It was a remarkable scene. Shoehorned into an entirely unsuitable Ford Anglia was a man so large that the top of his head had made an indentation in the roof and his lips were almost touching the windscreen.

“They gave me this goddamned hire car and I’ve just driven from London,” he barked, grinded his way into first gear and saved my day.

For 15 years, this wonderful and funny American lawyer and I kept in touch and I was only sorry I couldn’t get to his funeral after the big heart he’d shown me that day let him down.