1. Take tube to Brent Cross. Luggage gate often open, so consider not buying ticket to enhance satisfaction of a completely free ride from door to door.
2. Prepare false address for ticket inspector.
3. Look for strip of cardboard to write destination on. Leicester is difficult to spell, but you can remember it by reciting: Lucy Eats Ice Cream Every Sunday Tea, Even Raspberry.
4. Walk east along North Circular, looking down from footbridge at snarl of traffic. Depending on how poetic you feel, analogies of the hitcher being a branch floating on a river may induce euphoria.
5. Before standing on M1 slip road, use toilet at the service station under the rail bridge. Warning: it never had any paper. I once had tear pages  from the biography of Karl Jung. Tip: use pages already read.
6. Take position. If another hitcher is there already, stand back and wait your turn. Do not  jump queue and walk the slip road. CCTV cameras will spot you and despatch bored motorway police.
7. Hold out sign. Or thumb if you cannot remember how to spell Leicester.
8. Relax thumb. Too erect you appear tense, or look like Timmy Mallet from the start of Wacaday.
9. If the hitcher before you is dressed in a tatty suit from the 1960s, carries a battered leather satchel, is Irish, and goes by the name of Charlie, you will have to stand with him as no one will pick him up alone.
10. If you do get a lift with Charlie, and the truck driver is a Scottish veteran of the Falklands War, and him and Charlie sing some old sea shanties, you may think life could not get any stranger. Until you are standing with Charlie at a roundabout outside Northampton, and joined by a six foot Yorkshireman with a Mohican and a crucifix tattooed on his forehead. Do not panic. Most likely cyberpunk will angrily start hiking the hard shoulder and get arrested.
11. When/If a car stops for you, be bold in the decision to accept or decline the lift. Consider: could you push their head through a window if necessary?
12. Talk once in car. Silence is unlikely to be golden, as this is easier to achieve without a freeloading passenger.
13. Be diplomatic. If three jolly Scousers start making racist jokes, remember you are outnumbered and travelling at around 70mph.
14. Not reacting to a story from a driver about him once giving a blowjob to an Italian trucker may stifle conversation, and shorten distance of original hitch offered.
15. Lifts from religious drivers may become sermons. Carry garlic and a wooden stave.
16. Polos make cheap thank-you gifts.
17. Close the door when exiting car. Do not be concerned as other drivers stare at you walking around a non-pedestrianised traffic island. They do not have your buzz of hitching the M1 and sharing your deepest thoughts with a total stranger. They did not hear how a father cried talking about his estranged son. They were not passed the business card of a leggy fashion designer just back from Hong Kong. They did not take a chance on another human being to care for them. And neither did they just travel a hundred miles without torching the atmosphere. It was hardly your foot on the accelerator, was it?

Actually applicable to any route in the UK, circa 1994/95, and not exhaustive. Please feel free to make additions...

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