The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

35
Meanwood – The Final Days

  Only as the exit strategy from my strange and now not-so-new
world was being implemented did I come to realise just how
much the experience had changed me, and the realisation
dawned that the way in which I understood the world would
never be the same as it had been barely two years previously.
Nothing of what I had experienced as a cabbie was particularly
traumatic – it had been an oasis of calm in comparison to the
final meetings at my previous incumbency, which had fluctuated
somewhere between the vicious and the vitriolic most of the
time.
The change resembled in many respects my discovery of
the writings of George Orwell about a quarter of a century
previously. The attraction of “1984” and “Animal Farm” had
really been that they were such good yarns, and I was unaware
of the subversion I was imbibing with each new page, breathing
in a philosophical virus that would leave me with a complete
inability ever to see the world in the same away again. It was as
if explosive charges were smuggled in under my very nose, the
detonation went unnoticed, but when I emerged all that was left
of my former personal fiefdom was the rubble strewn around
my ankles; whether or not I missed the old place was irrelevant
– it was gone forever.
Fortunately (I think), unlike another of Orwell’s heroes
Dorothy, the child of the rectory in “A Clergyman’s Daughter”,
 I had not lost my faith, but it was hardly the one I had cherished
and nurtured before I started driving a minicab. The world I
had come to inhabit had so altered my perspective that the
only thing I was sure of in planning a return to clerical orders
was that I could never ever do it in the way I had done it up to
that point. I suppose on one level I had changed my religion
rather than lost my faith. I wasn’t wearing orange chiffon,
chanting mantras or venerating species from the animal
kingdom. It was still the Christian God I believed in, but
not the same one I had grown up with. This old deity, whose
strictures and virtues I had spent half a lifetime extolling,
was distinctly unsympathetic to those who failed to reach the
exacting standards I imagined he required of all those who
worshipped him. Perhaps it was like the cathedral in Coventry
that had been demolished by the Luftwaffe; the traditional,
recognisable edifice that could be mistaken for nothing other
than a cathedral of majestic proportions had been demolished,
and in its place was something that looked quite different. I
imagine when this happened there was a great deal of sadness
among many who knew the old building on the grounds that
this one doesn’t really look anything like a cathedral. But if you
can suspend your expectations of what a cathedral is supposed
to look like and appreciate this architectural masterpiece for
what it is you will see that it is every bit as much a place of
worship as the old one, with a majesty and beauty that fits it for
the modern age rather than the eighteenth century. My faith
has changed for ever – it is less predictable, has a non-uniform
shape and far fewer icons and other sacred objects, and even
those that remain are much less venerated than they used to
be. I dare to hope that it is softer, too – less judgmental and
more conscious of its own weaknesses. I am very keen to keep
the doors and windows open, and to add bits on or take bits off
to make it more fit for the purpose for which it was designed.
The only essential quality of this building is that God is in it,
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the collar and the cab
282
and maybe a God I have more uncertainties about than I did
previously, but in whose presence I think I am increasingly
comfortable.
This God I had come to believe in was the one whose
compassion, common sense and generosity was embodied in the
Jesus whose biography I now understood in terms of inclusivity;
who went on an exhausting search for one stupid lost sheep
which was in some economically insane way more important
at that moment than the ninety nine who were being good little
lambkins. The Jesus who only really seemed to get cross when
confronted by rank hypocrisy – at which he got very cross indeed
and was given to throwing furniture around. The Jesus who
became the target of religious bigotry because he considered it
more important – and more fruitful – to spend much of his time
not with the outwardly pious but with the crooked, the corrupt
and the sexually immoral on the grounds that they were the sick
who knew they needed a doctor. The Jesus who willingly gave
his own life with the promise that when he was lifted up on the
cross he would draw everyone, not merely the religious elite, to
himself.

    The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

34
Alwoodley – Encounters with
the Gay Community

 This is the point at which I should come out. Allow me to be
honest about myself and confess that I am about as “straight” as I
imagine it is possible to be. I find the male form, apart from a few
notable exceptions where I find myself in envy of the physique
of professional footballers and the like, to be unattractive in
the extreme, and the thought of kissing another man is about
as attractive as getting into a clinch with an amorous camel. It
was, perhaps, because of this strong heterosexual orientation,
and the traditional view of homosexual activity adopted by the
Church, that I also have to come out as one of those who saw no
real place for gay people in any Christian community. I confess
this now with both embarrassment and shame, and with sincere
apologies to those who may in any sense have suffered from the
prejudices of people like myself. I owe the change in attitude
to the experience of driving a cab around West Yorkshire,
especially on night shifts.
I had no idea even of the existence of the “Gay Quarter” of
the city until the first time I visited it late one evening at a time
when I was still becoming acquainted with the different varieties
of night-life on offer. The name on my screen read “Stephen”
but I was honestly convinced that it must have been a mistake
as what must surely have been a Stephanie emerged at a rate of
knots wearing a long, flowing dress and high heels, to climb into
the back seat offering the absolute minimum of exposure to any
of the general public who may have been watching. Somewhat
nonplussed I awaited instructions, which emerged from an
unmistakably male set of vocal chords. This was a whole new
world, and for almost the only time in my taxi-driving life I
really didn’t know what to say. What sort of banalities could I
share with this character that wouldn’t run the risk of sounding
inane, embarrassing or offensive? Nothing came readily to
mind, and this was clearly the common lot, as Stephen seemed
either unable or unwilling to make any small talk. A mercifully
short journey to what I would later recognise as the hub of the
Leeds gay night-time scene ended with the opening of a beaded
clutch-bag to pay the fare before Stephen disappeared into a
doorway with marginally less haste than exhibited earlier.
Thankfully Stephen’s apparent embarrassment was to prove
to be unusual. Subsequent journeys to and from the same area
taught me the obvious but, to be honest, completely unexpected
truth that those in the homosexual community are just normal
people like anyone else; it’s only their sexuality that doesn’t
conform to the traditional expectations of society. The presence
of a gay man in my cab was as unlikely to lead to a request for
sexual favours as if the passenger was female, and I could freely
chat to them about the same sorts of things I could chat to
anyone else about. This sounds so ridiculously obvious now, but
at the time the supposed “Christian” attitude I adopted to the gay
community, born of the same sort of ignorant defensiveness that
created my erstwhile prejudice against taxi drivers, seemed to
make complete and irrefutable sense. It was, of course, justified
by the rather selective texts from the Bible I used as a bulwark
against the trebuchets of common sense.

 

 The most significant encounter with someone of a different
sexual orientation is etched on my memory because it was this
experience that forever changed the way I thought about the gay
community as a Christian.
Gary was an executive with a multinational company who
for whatever reason had been working late into the night and
called a cab to take him from central Leeds to the other side of
Bradford sometime after midnight. This was a terrific job to get
for two reasons – firstly the length of journey meant a sizeable
fare, and secondly he was sober – a rarity at this time of night,
so there was a decent chance of a sensible conversation with an
interesting individual. We soon started chatting about a range of
subjects and, as was normal, he asked whether I had always been
a cabbie as I didn’t really sound like one. I revealed my former
profession, he expressed polite interest, and the conversation
moved on.
It was as we were approaching the centre of Bradford that
he just dropped the question out. ‘What does your church
think about homosexuals?’ This was fine – I had a readymade
answer that had been rehearsed in countless situations
for decades, and had always served the purpose well. It went

something like this; God designed people to be heterosexual
and therefore homosexuality is not in line with what he
requires. Some people, either through nature or nurture, find
themselves attracted to people of the same gender. This is not
sinful in itself, but if they have sexual relations with those
they are attracted to that is wrong, and something the Church
should not encourage. I was also anxious to put adultery and
fornication in the same category, just to demonstrate that I was
not really biased.
There was silence for a good 20 seconds before Gary
responded.
‘I’m a homosexual. Always have been. I’ve spent endless
years asking God to make me straight, but it isn’t happening,
and I’ve given up trying. Does this mean God doesn’t love me
and won’t want me?’
This was delivered without even a hint of accusation, selfpity
or rebuke, just as an honest enquiry. I was struck dumb as
the crass stupidity of the simplicity with which I had trotted
out a particular line in rhetoric struck me between the eyeballs.
What a pompous prat I must sound like.

    The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. We are now nearly at the end!

33
East Park – Sundays

 At some point in the middle of my minicab driving days I
changed my mind about Sundays, less through any kind of force
of reasonable argument and more by encountering the reality
of what happens in an urban conurbation like West Yorkshire
on what the Christian Church (mistakenly, really) calls the
Sabbath. I remembered the campaign to Keep Sunday Special,
of writing to my MP, praying earnestly that members of the
House of Commons would see the importance of keeping a day
a week free of commercial activity, all in the name of preserving
something that was different about Sunday.
Of course the simple truth was that the churches up and
down the land were frightened; dwindling, if not disintegrating
attendances, could reach a state of meltdown if there were even
more things to do on a Sunday than there had been previously.
I recall the approbation I registered when the vicar of the parish
church next to Villa Park (the nearest thing I have to a shrine
outside of consecrated premises) decided to ring the church bells
all the way through the football match that had been scheduled
for a Sunday in protest at a yet further violation of the Sabbath.
Now I thought “What a prat!”

 I realised within a couple of weeks of climbing into a
minicab that Church was already such a cultural sideshow that
it scarcely featured on the remotest fringes of the fairground.
At an optimistic estimate 7-8% of the population attend church
with some regularity, and this figure was somewhat lower in
areas such as West Yorkshire. For most of the week – indeed for
most of Sunday – the doors were shut and the buildings appeared
lifeless. When most of the churches and chapels across the region
did open their doors for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings
(fewer and fewer held evening services) they exuded a general air
that was about as welcoming as Stalag XIII on a rainy day. They
were, put simply, an irrelevance to the cultural activity of the
region even on the one day of the week they operated, and here
they were asking for preferential treatment in order that people
wouldn’t go off and do other things they might actually enjoy.
The penny dropped at around 5.30 one Sunday morning
about a year into my new career when I received a job to take
someone from West Leeds to an industrialised area on the
opposite side of the city. I thought how odd it was that anyone
would be going to an area full of factories and waste land so
early on Sunday, and was curious as to why. The customer
was a pleasant, portly lady of maybe fifty years of age, whose
appearance was quite similar to many of those who would later
that morning be attending church.
Unable to restrain my curiosity I couldn’t help but enquire
about the purpose of her trip – perhaps there was a church of
some sort there that held a very early mass. ‘I’m going to the
Car Boot of course, love’ – delivered with the tone of one who
could not understand why anyone would even vaguely consider
an alternative pursuit.
‘What – at this time of the morning?’
‘I’m running a stall, love, and we have to be there by six to set
up.’
Driving through the tunnel system that facilitated rapid
transit from one side of the city centre to the other I felt a certain
level of anxiety for the rather vulnerable looking lady in the rear
of the car. As far as I was concerned I was dropping her off in the
middle of an unpopulated urban desert fringed by some rather
dodgy communities, and would she be safe?
The question was answered about half a mile from the point
on the industrial estate for which I was heading when I almost
collided with the tailback of vehicles waiting to enter the site;
there were hundreds upon hundreds of pedestrians all heading
the same way to a piece of waste land on which it would have been
possible to fit several full-sized football pitches. The spectacle
was jaw-dropping; that this many people would drag themselves
out of bed at this hour on a Sunday to take part in such a weekly
ritual when I was used to starting a service of worship at almost
lunchtime and still having to wait for the latecomers to take their
seats told me, once I had processed the information, all I needed
to know about the place of the institutional Church in our
society. And this was only the advance guard of the operation
– once it opened properly and really got going there would be
thousands of people converging on the area throughout the day,
all excited about picking over other people’s junk and maybe
buying a couple of second-hand toys to take home.
For the first time since I had left my previous calling, and
possibly the first time ever, I came face to face with the rather
uncomfortable question as to whether the institution of Church
has any useful place in our society, and was forced to attempt
something like an honest evaluation of its significance.

    The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

32
Bramhope – Bad Driving

 Some months into my foray into the world of taxi driving
I had learned the painful way that I was not nearly as good a
driver as I had thought, but I was hardly alone in assessing my
ability behind the wheel at anything between “above average”
and “exceptional”. In the UK it is estimated that about 80%
of drivers rate themselves at above average (the figure for the
US is anything up to 93%!) This kind of statistic makes sense
only in subjects like philosophy and theology where paradoxes
and dichotomies defy semantic exactitude – and professional
football where players apparently regularly give “110%”. In the
real and tangible world it is a statistical impossibility – only
something just under 50% can be above average.
The answers to the question why this should be so are
many and varied, and lie in the domain of the professional
psychologist, but I reckon it is because at least in part we rate
the faults of other drivers as being far more serious than our
own. Take, for instance, the scenario where you are occupying
the centre lane of a three lane motorway and, in a short while,
but not quite yet, you will need to overtake something in the
inside lane. You decide not to pull in but to save yourself the
hassle of having to do the whole “mirror-signal-manoeuvre”
thing and stay put because it’s pretty quiet and, in any case,
your speedometer is registering 72 mph and that’s about the
speed limit. Then some huge Tonka toy known fondly as a
4x4, driven in all probability by an overweight middle-aged
bloke whose declining libido finds compensation in aggressive
driving, appears from nowhere in your rear view mirror and
if he’s not doing a ton it isn’t far off. He (I’m using the male
personal pronoun because it usually, though not exclusively is
a he) comes right up to your rear end before flashing his lights
repeatedly and veering into the outside lane, tooting his horn
and pointedly pulling in front of you long before a safe distance
has been established. You are guilty, at the worst, of being a little
dilatory in your lane discipline, whereas not only has he broken
at least three laws in completing the manoeuvre (speeding,
sounding horn, driving without due care and attention) he is
also completely oblivious to these faults. His performance has,
in his own eyes, been superb. Should he have a passenger he
will sound off about “bloody tortoises who don’t have a clue
how to drive at speed on a motorway” without rating his own
performance at anything less than exemplary. If there is no
impressionable passenger he is likely soon to be busy on his
‘phone – probably without the required hands-free kit – telling
a friend about the appalling driving habits he is encountering
today. If challenged he will assert his right to drive at that speed
and in that fashion because both he and his vehicle are capable
of far greater than average performance and the speed limit “in
this day and age” of 70 mph is ridiculously low.
One day we will probably all get into cars that will, in effect,
drive themselves, always obeying the rules of the road and
travelling within the speed limit. At this point our friend will
need to find another outlet to compensate for his inadequacies
in other domains or else regularly take a cold shower.

 Some examples of bad driving were undoubtedly alcohol
related. Most nights after about 1.30 a.m. the vast majority of
vehicles on the road were taxis, private hire cars and emergency
vehicles. I always enjoyed driving at this time of night because
whilst there was still some aggressive driving – the police were
particularly conspicuous for driving at twice the speed limit and
passing through red lights whilst not answering an emergency
call – generally the drivers knew what they were doing and their
behaviour was predictable. Just occasionally I encountered a
drunk driver weaving from one side of the road to the other,
but more often I witnessed the aftermath of journeys cut short
by those who had had just enough to drink to loosen their
inhibitions and were convinced that they were perfectly fit to
drive at whatever speed they chose.
Rarely a night shift passed without witnessing at least
one scene of carnage where, in all probability, there had been
serious injury, if not a fatality. Cars lying on their roofs, spread
at grotesque angles somewhere off the road with doors, boot
and bonnet open or wrapped around the proverbial lamp-post
were common sights in the early hours. The most intriguing
spectacle I recall was a car that was propped up vertically with
its front bumper on the ground and rear end against the central
support of a railway bridge carrying trains across a busy section
of the ring road. It appeared to be unscathed by whatever turn
of events had led to this scenario, and I spent the next half hour
or more trying unsuccessfully to imagine a set of circumstances
that would have caused it to come to rest in this position.

    The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

31
City Centre East – Call Lane at 2 a.m.

No account of my time in the minicab world would be complete
without some attempt to describe the scene in the centre of
Leeds when the bars and clubs began to disgorge their customers
before closing for the night, because this involved one of the
most bizarre rituals of minicab driving that was as compulsive
as it was frustrating. But first I need to explain a little about how
the minicab world worked in practice rather than in theory in
the early hours of the morning.
As I commented earlier the theory is that private hire cars
(as opposed to Hackney Carriages) invariably have something
like “Advance Bookings Only” written somewhere on the
vehicle, or, even more ominously, “Journeys only insured when
booked in advance,” whereas proper taxis can pick up anyone
who hails them in the street. Again in theory these rules are
enforced by employees of the council, or occasionally the police,
approaching vehicles and offering significant sums of money to
private hire drivers to take them somewhere, or perhaps trying
to hail them in the street. If the driver breaks the rules they will
be informed of their misdemeanour and warned of impending
prosecution and suspension of their licence. 
That’s the theory, but the practice is somewhat different.
There were more private hire firms in and around Leeds than
could be counted. I worked for the largest of these companies,
which had the advantage of offering a steady flow of work
around the clock; of course some hours were quieter than
others, but then the number of drivers working fell off too, so
for instance at 4 a.m. whilst there was only a trickle of work
there were not many looking for it, and it was still possible to
find enough to make it worth your while. There were a handful
of companies who did their best to operate rigorously within
the law, including a couple which, in numerical terms, could
compete with my outfit. Once you went beyond that top half
dozen firms, though, it was a very different story; most of the
rest were small operations – some even being literally one man
and a car – who had relatively little work that was pre-booked
or came through a switchboard, particularly outside of normal
waking hours. The drivers who worked for these companies were
generally not subject to a company code of conduct as we were
– the owner of the firm simply wanted to collect rent from his
drivers, and for that consideration would allow them to sport the
company logo on the side of the car and operate pretty much as
they liked. In practical terms this meant that during a night shift
they would have little or no work that came from their office, and
made a living by plying for hire or piracy. Plying for hire means
operating as a Hackney Carriage and picking up anyone flagging
them down in the street, and piracy involves waiting in an area
where one of the larger firms regularly has work and pretending
to be the cab that the customer has ordered. They could get away
with this for a number of reasons: Firstly, because most of the
general public don’t understand the distinction between Hackney
Carriages and private hire cars they remain unaware – in spite of
the warnings on the side of the car – that the driver is operating
not only illegally but also without insurance for the journey
involved. Secondly, in spite of occasional crackdowns and spot
checks by the licensing authority and police, in reality the latter
have no desire seriously to curtail the practice to a great degree.
The principal objective of the police at two or three o’clock in the
morning is to see everyone off the streets of the city centre and
away from the area to their homes. A successful night is one in
which no streets are spattered with bloodspots or vomit, no one is
arrested and they don’t suffer too much verbal or physical abuse;
one can hardly blame them. So to start checking the credentials
of all the private hire cars working is not only time-consuming,
but counter-productive to their main objective.


 So try if you will to imagine the hub of Leeds’s night life and
a thoroughfare named “Call Lane” at two o’clock in the morning.
Wide enough to take three or four cars abreast, about 200 metres
in length and, more significantly, a one-way street linked to the
infamous inner city loop system. Both sides of the road were
replete with drinking establishments, and many evenings saw all
of them bursting at the seams; moreover they all seemed to close
at about the same time.
The ritual would begin a few minutes before two o’clock with
a job on my datahead calling for a pick-up in Call Lane. On one
level my heart sank because I knew what I was in for but there
was also something oddly endearing about the ritual played out
in an entirely predictable fashion each night.
Arriving at the top of the street – if you could get into it
at all – you were confronted by the spectacle of anything up to
100 private hire cars of all shapes and sizes representing more
firms than you knew existed completely blocking the street in
a scarcely believable display of taxi-driving anarchy. It was the
automotive equivalent of lifting a manhole cover to investigate
your blocked drain only to find a very large pile of amorphous
excrement jamming the pipe. You were confronted with the
sight of drivers of dozens and dozens of private hire cars who
were operating illegally, looking just to pick up anyone willing
to step into their vehicles or to steal the fare of another cabbie.
They had, of course, arrived there a little earlier, and had no
interest whatever in allowing the legitimately operating cars
to pass through to pick up their fares until they had secured
one of their own – or, more likely, someone else’s. Those drivers
who were operating within the law and those who had managed
to persuade someone that they were actually the cab they had
ordered (even though the legend adorning the car was different
from the name of the company they had called) now found
themselves stuck somewhere in the middle of the drainpipe and
unable to move. The only means of clearing the drain was to
apply pressure to those who were still causing the blockage by
the enthusiastic and energetic use of the car’s horn, which was
perceived to act as a kind of plunger.

    The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

  30
City Centre West – The Shipping
Forecast and Sailing By

 It was, perhaps, at the mid-point of the second year of my
sentence in what had become, by now, a very agreeable pattern of
life with which I was very much at ease, that I began seriously to
look again at the idea of returning to the world I had left behind.
This was no easy decision; whilst the long hours spent sitting in
a private hire car left me with a sensation of almost permanent
tiredness, and with some extra girth round my middle due to
the virtual impossibility of building a regular exercise routine
into my weekly timetable, it was also comfortably familiar by
now. Compared to my former existence this work environment
was virtually stress-free. I was earning a good wage, and always
had the opportunity of earning a little more should it be needed.
One week I put in an extra shift in order to send some money to
my eldest son who was struggling to have enough to live on at
university. I really enjoyed an environment where I was able to
see my weekly wage accumulating in the very tangible form of
cash being placed into my hand. Ministry I knew to be poorly
paid, and involved hard and often unappreciated work. In the
stress stakes it resembled a button on one of my shirts now that
I had put on a stone or two – one more cream cake and the
uneven struggle to hold back the tide of human flesh would
be history.

 So why go back to it all? Well there was the official reason
which contained a grain of truth, and the real reason which
held enough for several loaves of bread. To the ecclesiastical
establishment and the few remaining pious friends I had failed
to offend with the coarse language and humour that had made
its way into my social intercourse I gave the impression that
ministry was a divine calling, and ultimately if that is what
you are created by the Almighty to do there is no real peace or
satisfaction in anything else.
This was by no means untrue. Clergy of all shades and
persuasions tend to be a slightly odd bunch in much the same
manner as Morris Dancers, Bog Snorkellers and Train Spotters,
and whether this is the way we are put together in the womb
or the result of the sausage-machine training process of a
theological college is really irrelevant – that’s the way it is. But if
I am honest most of this is bovine excrement. Concurrent with
the repair to my self-esteem was the rediscovery of something
I had feared was lost forever, my competitive instinct and
refusal to concede defeat. Put simply I hated losing at anything,
a questionable quality that had landed me in trouble in sports
fixtures but helped to ensure far more wins than losses. My last
job as a minister had been a failure, but the two preceding it had
generally been regarded as successes, and such ignominy was
no note on which to end a career. I had to give it one more go in
order to prove – to myself in particular – that I was still hot stuff
in the pulpit and vestry. So I entered the ecclesiastical marriage
bureau for what I hoped would be the final time.

 

 What was it about Sailing By at 12.45 a.m. that made it so
unmissable? Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of two contrasting
maritime images. A melody redolent with suggestions of a
tranquil sea with gentle ripples generated by the zephyr blowing
offshore with just sufficient strength to fill the sails of the small
dinghies ploughing their way across the bay catching the passing
interest of families on a sun-drenched beach licking ice-creams.
Then the Shipping Forecast with reports from coastal stations
delivered with no background music and a voice straight from
the waxworks museum warning of gales in Humber, Fastnet and
the Irish Sea, not to mention the even graver horrors awaiting
those who ventured into Hebrides, Bailey, South-east Iceland and
North Utsire. There was something evocative about the images of
a catamaran rocked by gentle waves off the coast of the English
Riviera set alongside that of the grizzled skipper of a small fishing
boat with more hair on his face than on top of it steering a steady
course in a wheelhouse lashed by storms with the harbour lights
of Stornoway just visible through the murky night; and in my
image there was always a tin mug with piping hot tea that seemed
to defy gravity while the storm tossed the vessel around like a toy,
making the average white knuckle ride at the leading theme park
seem like a children’s roundabout at the local recreation ground.
All this seemed as a parable of life; which of the two images
was the reality – the storm-tossed fishing boat off the north-west
coast of Scotland or the sedate progress of the pleasure boat?
There is a whole world to ponder in that question and to the
extent that my philosophical faculties were capable of such feats
on the wrong side of midnight I did my best. I think I concluded
that they were both genuine in their own way, but if you really
wanted to appreciate what life in a boat was like you have to
endure the rough stuff to appreciate the delights of the pleasure
craft. In any case whatever I was doing, and whoever was in the
cab at that time this was compulsory listening.
The other thing about the Shipping Forecast was that once it
was complete, the National Anthem had been played and Radio
4 had begun transmitting the World Service, I knew I was into
the home straight of my shift, and this was always a welcome
moment, because by this stage I had been working for up to ten
hours and I could just about begin hearing the call of my bed.

 

    The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

 

 29
West Park – Scarborough Fare, Baked
Beans and the Just Plain Bizarre

 It was in my first few weeks as a cabbie that what would be
seen by most of the profession as the dream job came through
the datahead. These were the days already referred to when I
enjoyed a certain level of preferential treatment (known in the
trade as feeding) to try to persuade me that the life of a private
hire driver in West Yorkshire was second in significance and
pecuniary reward only to CEOs of FTSE 100 companies, and
pretty much up there with David Beckham and Tom Cruise in
terms of glamour.
The first thing most private hire drivers do when a job
comes through the datahead is to note the pick-up address and
then scroll down to see where they are taking the customer; this
probably reflects the fact that in spite of the universal deprecation
of the mundanity of the work the optimist in the majority of
drivers has never quite been extinguished. Nine times out of ten
the immediate consequence of this exercise is the emission of an
audible sigh of disappointment followed by an expletive or two
expressing the sentiment that all they get these days is “shite.”
I had little sympathy with this kind of perennial paranoid
depressiveness. It was a simple fact that the great majority of
our work was of the short-distance, low-fare variety; you made
your money by working hard and completing as many of these
jobs as possible and when the odd one came along that paid £10
or more it was really little more than a pleasant change from
the humdrum, and not necessarily as lucrative as it seemed. The
ideal fare in my opinion is one that is a distance of several miles
along roads that are fast and easily navigable and which ends in
an area from which more work is likely to be forthcoming. By
no means did all of the relatively well-paying fares fall into this
category, and some were to be avoided if at all possible. Work from
football matches at Elland Road or test matches at Headingley
are good illustrations; the grounds would frequently disgorge
customers who wanted to travel quite significant distances, but
on match days most drivers with any experience avoided these
plots like the plague, because it could take half an hour or more
to pick your way through the traffic, locate the customers and
extract yourself from the general melee of people and vehicles
that proliferate on such occasions. Music festivals were another
bad idea – The Who had reformed for a nostalgia tour during
my time in the business and were performing at Harewood
House, a stately home near Harrogate. Late one evening I was
offered a pick-up once the concert had finished. The drive there
took seemingly forever, not only negotiating traffic, but on
arrival finding a hundred or more people all wanting me to take
them home but none of them being the people who had actually
booked. Eventually locating the customer and emerging from
the vehicular and pedestrian scrum I managed to deliver the
intrepid concert-goers to their home in something a little over
an hour after setting off. Since we were paid on mileage – and
only when people were in the car – the amount I took at the end
of the job was about what I could otherwise have made in a little
over half an hour had I stayed in the city. Many drivers on this
sort of run just picked up the first person they came across who
wanted a cab and pretended it was the customer whose name
appeared on their screen – and charged mileage both ways. This
was a hazardous thing to do, firstly because it is against the law
and secondly because the time would come when the original
customer would ring the office and ask “where’s my bloody car?”
This would in turn result in a radio call from Base and an earful
from a frustrated operator or manager.

After a while I dropped the habit of looking at the destination
until I arrived at the pick-up address – especially once I could say
I really knew my way around the areas we worked; most likely it
was a bread and butter job, and so long as I refrained from looking
I could entertain the remote hope of something more lucrative,
and it was quite good fun not knowing where I would be going.
But this “dream job” came in the early days when it was of the
utmost importance to see the destination as early as possible in
order to try mentally to plan a suitable route – assuming I had
the first idea where we were supposed to be going.
So when the datahead gave me a nearby pick-up late one
weekday morning and I scrolled down to see the destination
as “Scarborough” I could barely credit the possibility of a job
that would take me the rest of my shift to complete, assuming
the customer wanted a return ride later that day.
 I decided to radio the office
and ask firstly if it was genuine and secondly how much I should
charge for such a job. ‘It’s for real, love; you have to work out the
fare between you and the customer and come to an agreement.’
So I set about working out what was reasonable to charge. I knew
it was about 70 miles from Leeds to Scarborough, and charged
at full rate this would mean a single fare of about £80, and if I
waited to do the return journey something more than double
that. But this was more than I would normally take in a day, so
what was reasonable? I decided to ask initially for £75 and then
to talk about coming back should the customer wish me to wait
for him.
I started wondering what kind of customer might call for
a cab to Scarborough, and visualised a suave millionaire and a
young attractive companion dressed in designer clothes with
accessories by Gucci. Then the thought crossed my mind – did I
really want to spend that long in someone else’s company when
relative solitude was one of the principal attractions of the job?
I was still pondering this question when an elderly man came
shuffling out of the side door and down the garden path towards
me. Shabbily dressed and unshaven I wondered whether he was
rich, eccentric, insane or a combination of all three. Perhaps
nearing the point of shuffling off this mortal coil had he decided
to blow a large wad of cash on a nostalgic trip to a favourite old
haunt? Perhaps a reclusive millionaire acting on a whim who just
fancied being driven to the seaside. Perhaps he had someone to
see about something urgent – a family crisis? I was never to find
out, but I was already having qualms about him simply because
everything about his demeanour exuded resentful grumpiness,
and I was not at all sure I wanted his company for the rest of the
day for anything under four figures.

 

    The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

You can order the book direct from myself or from the publisher by following the link above.

 28
Moortown – Doing a Runner and
Other Ways of Abusing Taxi Drivers
  One of my friends is a police officer who does a fantastic job on
her beat in making the community a safer and nicer place to live.
She once told me just how difficult it is for a beat bobby to catch
a villain intent on running away, unless inebriated literally to the
level of leglessness. ‘The problem is the amount of gear we have
to carry’, she complained. ‘By the time I’ve attached my stick,
spray, handcuffs, whistle and all the other paraphernalia we have
to carry, then put on my stab-resistant jacket, hat and boots at
the start of a shift I weigh a ton and can hardly break into a trot’.
Private hire drivers just wear ordinary clothes, though in later
times my particular company did begin issuing uniforms (when
I say “issuing” I mean selling them to the drivers at a profit
having made them compulsory.) But inside the cab is likely to be
money, sat-nav, ‘phone, wallet, and various electronic gadgetry
for which the driver is responsible. So when a customer does a
runner to avoid paying it’s nearly impossible to do anything at
all about it, because it would mean leaving the car unattended,
often in dodgy areas, and then chasing some yob who is likely to
be half your age and racing through ginnels much like diarrhoea
through the large intestine; come to think of it this is not at all
a bad analogy.
So when this happened to me for the first time in the middle
of a night shift half way through my second year in the job, I
confess the only surprise I felt was that it had never happened
before, when I was in a position of such vulnerability. These
particular customers were in their late teens at a guess, two girls
and two boys, picked up from a twenty-four hour supermarket
around midnight and asking to be dropped off on one of the
dodgier estates in West Leeds. With a level of intelligence I
would not have expected they sensibly arranged for the girls to
be dropped off first, then when I stopped outside their supposed
address they simply opened the rear doors and disappeared into
nowhere.
What was I to do? I couldn’t leave my car unattended and chase
them for fear it would be standing on bricks when I returned, even
had I been able to catch up with them. Call the police? But then
what? Even if a miracle happened and a patrol car came to my
rescue, and then the unthinkable happened and they caught the
lads, what would happen then? The best case scenario, and a pretty
unlikely one, was that I would be paid my fare, but would have
lost half an hour or more waiting for it. By that time I could have
completed another two jobs, so the exercise would have incurred
a net loss, however much I would have enjoyed the satisfaction of
seeing them caught. So I simply cleared and looked for the next
job, and put it down to experience. But having realised how easy it
was to do this I was astonished that in two years of driving it only
ever happened to me twice.
What’s more I was able to have the last laugh over this
particular incident, because amazingly some three or four
weeks later I went to a pick-up from the same supermarket
and encountered the same group of youngsters. I couldn’t
believe they would call the same cab company having pulled the
previous stunt, but there they were, two girls and two boys in
whose mouths the eponymous butter would not deign to melt.
Fortunately they didn’t recognise me, and this time I jumped out
of the car in time to grab them should they try to run off. I rather
enjoyed what followed.
ME: – ‘Not your lucky day this is it?’
YOUTH: – ‘Wot?’
ME: – ‘You don’t remember me do you?’
YOUTH: – ‘No idea mate.’
ME: – ‘I’m the driver you ripped off a few weeks ago –
remember now?’
YOUTH: – ‘Oh fuck…’
ME: – ‘Well there’s two ways we can deal with this; I drag
you off to the police station round the corner and let
them deal with you or you can pay me the fare you
owe, and if you pay me double, and a bit extra, I’ll
take you home.’
Youth: – ‘OK mate – will £20 do it?’
How I was going to effect the process of getting one or more of
them to the local nick and then convince the police they had
avoided paying their fare weeks previously when I had never
reported it I don’t know, but fortunately they never called my
bluff, paid the fare up front (about double what it would have
been) and sat meekly in the car while I explained how nice most
of us drivers were and how we didn’t deserve to be treated like
this. Amazingly I think we parted almost friends, and certainly
there was no hint of a grudge in their language or demeanour.

Thursday 30th June

 Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.


27
Headingley – The World of
Casinos and Bingo Halls

 My first introduction to the sub-culture of the three casinos that
operated in central Leeds at that time was as a day shift driver,
with the 5.20 a.m. lottery of “Napoleon’s”. This always seemed
to me a particularly apposite name for an establishment whose
driving forces were greed, acquisitiveness and the exploitation
of ordinary people’s vulnerability. On a day shift the first task
was to provide life support for my cab at the petrol station so
that it was no longer running on fumes. The second was to see
how many cars were waiting for work in the plot covering an
area replete with hotels, clubs, lap-dancing establishments, the
main railway terminus and Napoleon’s. If there were fewer than
six it was worth heading there with all possible speed, slowing
only for the speed cameras on Tong Road, to try to pick up a job
taking the casino staff home after their night’s work. Because
buses were not operating this early the casino block booked a
number of cars for their staff, and each one would be allocated
a reference number. When the staff came out each driver would
call out his number, and the relevant passengers would climb in.
Some of these jobs did not pay particularly well, just a couple of
drop-offs to local areas, but some went well outside the limits of
the city, and would provide a very satisfactory start to the day’s
work. Of course the lottery element involved in allocating work
of varying value fuelled the ubiquitous paranoia of the drivers about who had scooped the best paid jobs, but in reality it was
probably completely random – whoever was dispatching cars
had far better things to do than see who was driving each vehicle
and then make an assessment of how much favour to bestow on
whom. I had my fair share of “shite” and more lucrative trips,
for which, perhaps poignantly, there seemed to be a dearth of
adjectives in the cab driver’s thesaurus.
 Night shifts were different, though, because jobs almost
invariably involved taking customers home rather than staff,
and by the time I had completed a hundred or more jobs from
the casinos to various residences I had a pretty good idea of
the sort of clientele they attracted and the kind of losses people
would sustain during an average visit.
The first question, naturally, that one would ask once a fare
was on board was how successful their evening had been. It
may, of course, have been part of a general ploy to be as meagre
with fare and gratuity as possible, but of all the people I ever
picked up from a casino I only recall a handful who claimed to
have had a good evening and made anything like a profit on the
night’s venture; almost inevitably the tale was one of frustration,
disappointment, woe and even anger.
Many losses were, of course, quite modest, and provided
good value for money in terms of a night’s entertainment; these
customers took their losses with a mixture of good humour and
Stoicism. But there seemed to be an equal number that were
of an altogether different nature, who brought into the cab an
atmosphere of anger and resentment. At times almost palpable,
it was sometimes focussed on the management or staff of the
casino, but more frequently it was directed inwards, at their own
stupidity and lack of self-control. Many of the journeys from
one of these establishments were almost literally down the road
to an area of the city where few people would choose to live
unless they were martial arts experts or else armed to the teeth.
Some gentle probing not infrequently revealed that many such customers earned enough money to rent or buy property in a
much less volatile neighbourhood, but their gambling addiction
consumed a significant percentage of their disposable income,
as well as demanding proximity to the means of gratifying it.
There were also some comical stories of trips from casinos;
there was a student who, at the start of term, and with a bank
balance loaded with several thousands of pounds to pay for
the cost of a term’s lodging, food, books and general spending,
had gone into the casino on a Monday evening. By the time I
collected him in the early hours, he had managed to strip his
bank balance naked – though thankfully still kept enough petty
cash in hand to pay his fare. On enquiring what he would do
now he had no money he replied that he would think about that
in the morning, but seemed unruffled and Micawber-like at the
predicament in which he had landed himself.

You might be tempted to think that compared to the heady
world of televised professional poker, and the gambling of large
sums of money at the serious casinos of a major city, the humble
bingo hall on the edges of the densely-populated council estate
would be strictly minor league; you would also quite probably
be mistaken.

 Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

 26
Kirkstall – Students

 Leeds is a city with a significant but incredibly varied student
population, some of whom move there in order to achieve a first
degree and some of whom regard this objective as an optional
but by no means essential by-product of their first time away
from home. The division is, to some extent, dependent on
which university is attended, one being of the old-fashioned sort
with a strong traditional academic base and the other being a
former Polytechnic, a scenario played out in many British cities
since “Polytechnics” were allowed to rename themselves as
“Universities.” Of course it would be a gross oversimplification
to label all students of one as academic underachievers out to
have a good time and little more, and the others as serious,
conscientious and clean-living young people seeking only
academic excellence, but in broad terms my experience certainly
suggested that such a distinction could be made to some extent;
at least that was the case when it came to using private hire cars.
Students were one of those groups of people I expected to
see on bicycles, jogging to lectures or waiting at bus stops at
respectable hours of the day if they were going out to socialise,
rather than ‘phoning for a cab. Perhaps this image was cultivated
by all those episodes of Morse, featuring an Oxford where even
the professors meandered between the dreamy spires perched
precariously on contraptions masquerading as bicycles that
looked as if they had been handed down from father to son for the last six generations. Maybe the hilly terrain of West Yorkshire
didn’t really lend itself to any form of self-propelled transport,
but I recall seeing very few bikes around the city, even on the
university campuses.
Surprisingly the use of private hire cars to travel around the
city made rather a lot of sense. A return cab fare from halls of
residence to the city centre might be somewhere between £10
and £13, but if shared four ways would be more economical
than the bus, and usually more reliable.


My favourite journeys were from a halls of residence
complex labelled “The Brewery” – a place where the eponymous
“piss-up” was successfully arranged in dozens of locations on
a daily basis. I gather the building was once home to a famous
beer manufacturer, but whether it was this dubious heritage or
a sense of irony that justified the epithet at the design stage is
now a matter of conjecture.

I enjoyed many surreal experiences as a night shift driver
in relation to student residences, but one of the more comical
was undoubtedly the ritual of speaking to my wife each evening
somewhere between ten and ten-thirty, when more often than
not I was driving to or from the Brewery. One of the practices
we have adopted, to the amusement if not incomprehension of
many, and to “oohs” and “aahs” from the more sentimentally
inclined, is to speak to each other every night if for one reason
or another we are apart, usually around bedtime. My wife’s
bedtime almost invariably coincided with the time of night the
students were about to go out to the clubs and bars of central
Leeds, and calls took place in transit between student residences
and the fleshpots of the big city. Whilst my headset kept my
hands free and one end of the conversation private, of course my
end was public property. So there I would be, wishing my wife
a good night’s sleep and sweet dreams and telling her I loved
her (another daily ritual) whilst for the customers the night had
only just begun.
This exchange gave rise to some interesting conversations
about everything from faith to sex and marriage, particularly
with the girls. In ascending order of how difficult things I said
were to believe it went something like this; that I was a former
clergyman who still believed in a God you could talk to and have
a relationship with was just about credible. This was especially
so if the evening had begun an hour or two previously in the
student residence bar, where the drinks were much cheaper
than in town, leading to many students becoming somewhat
lubricated before venturing out. That I had been happily married
to the same woman for the best part of 30 years and was still so
absolutely in love with her that I could never imagine being with
someone else was pushing credibility up to, and perhaps slightly
beyond the limit. That I had only ever had one sexual partner and
only intended ever to have one was on the level of asking them
to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden, and that I firmly believed that developing a sexual relationship with one person
was far more satisfying than sleeping around was sufficient to
have me committed to the Funny Farm. Nevertheless countless
conversations with female students finished with something
akin to “Ahhh, how sweet.” After that I tended to be regarded as
a somewhat avuncular figure to whom all sorts of confidences
would be entrusted; this in turn brought out in me the instinct
of a parent with children of similar age, and most trips into town
ended with my admonition to my charges to “stay safe.”

 Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

 25
Swinnow – Night Shifts

With almost a year’s experience under my belt I thought I
knew my way around pretty well, but whereas day shifts had
involved taking people to and from work, shops and health
centres, these rather run-of-the-mill venues were far less likely
to be frequented in the wee small hours. Only a few venues were
held in common, and this was true also of Friday / Saturday
nights compared to weekdays; in fact it was something of a
surprise to discover that each night shift seemed to have its own
particular pattern. There was always something different round
the corner, and in spite of now being considered something of a
veteran in the business, I was still capable of being surprised by
some of the more extraordinary behaviour I witnessed.
I think it was a Tuesday evening a little before midnight
that I was called to a pick-up from a respectable bar in the more salubrious end of town, and Sandra emerged to occupy the front
seat of the cab. Sandra was one of those women whose age is
almost indeterminate – could have been in her twenties or her
forties, slightly overweight, with nondescript hair of a vaguely
blonde hue and modest make-up that looked like it had been
applied in something of a hurry without the benefit of a mirror.
But two things were immediately obvious about her; firstly
she had had a little too much to drink, and secondly she was
cross – and cross in spades. ‘We’re going to Swinnow, love’, she
remarked in a tone that made it clear that her ire was directed at
some individual other than myself. ‘But we’ve got to pick up my
old man first.’
The ‘old man’ was, for some unarticulated reason, in a
bar at the other end of the city centre, a venue noted for its
association with the seedier side of life. Fights were almost
nightly occurrences, and illegal substances were available for a
modest price. Sexual favours were also on sale for a reasonable
consideration, but the chances were you could just pick someone
up for a night’s bedroom gymnastics so long as you weren’t too
fussy.
I decided the safe thing to do was not to try to make
conversation, and in any case she was soon on her ‘phone calling
the recalcitrant partner so that he would be outside waiting
for us. I could identify the equally inebriated individual from
the sheepish look on his face and the sense of foreboding at
the unpleasantness to come written on his features and in his
posture.
No sooner had he climbed into the back of the car than it
started. The first volley of verbal musket-shot directed from
the front passenger seat had no sooner made its mark than an
answering tirade of alcohol-fuelled abuse flew in the opposite
direction. I never was able to work out what the row was
about, but with the possible exception of performances in the
kindergarten we call the House of Commons I don’t think I have ever witnessed quite such an amazing episode of two people
shouting at each other at the tops of their voices without hearing
a single word the other was saying.
I managed, during a brief pause for reloading of weapons, to
extract the address for which we were heading and set off with a
certain amount of apprehension on the fifteen-minute journey,
fearful that the verbal exchanges would graduate into a fist-fight
with all the risks that would entail. Once we were on our way
the war of words resumed with renewed vigour, and I decided
to hope for the best and drive slightly faster than normal.
The route out of Leeds city centre took us on an inner ring
road which, for reasons I never really understood, was classified
as the M64, so the rules of motorway driving applied. The volume
and level of abuse steadily increased until their vocabulary of
profanities seemed to be exhausted. Where to go from here?
It was around this point that the gentleman in the rear of the
car hit upon the novel idea of “upping the ante” by opening the
window and, with a casualness clearly calculated to engender
reciprocal incandescence, tossed his phone out of the window.
The effect on the woman was to spark an eruption the equivalent
of Vesuvius in full flow. It became clear that the ‘phone had been
a costly present from a happier era in their relationship, and
he had just demonstrated, in the most dramatic way he could
imagine, in just how little regard he held her.
If you can imagine a human earthquake and volcano all
rolled into one you will have some idea of what happened
next. Removing her seat belt she erupted in a rearwards
direction preceded by a torrent of language that would have
caused a navvy something more than slight embarrassment.
Fortunately I was able to keep the car in a straight line and
shout loudly enough to read the proverbial riot act to them
both. The fighting subsided almost immediately, though the
verbal exchanges remained just as vitriolic.
After a couple of minutes the man asked if we could go back to pick the ‘phone up, and I was thankful to be able to
explain that this would involve breaking the law, as well as being
exceedingly dangerous. An expensive lesson, but perhaps one
they both needed to learn. 
..................

The verbal volcano subsided and general sulkiness –
a tactic I am far more familiar with, being one of the nation’s
leading experts – took over. There was even a certain meekness
apparent by the time we reached their home. She stomped off,
making abundantly clear whose responsibility the taxi fare was,
and in what now felt like an oasis of tranquillity we had a short
conversation: –
‘Do you ever have that kind of row with your missus?’
‘No, not really.’ (mainly thanks to the longsuffering of my
wife we have a row about once a year just to keep our hand in)
‘We’ve been happily married for 28 years.’
‘So what’s the secret?’
‘Apart from being married to the most incredibly wonderful
woman in the world, perhaps also that we’re Christians.’
‘Do you think that makes a difference?’
‘I think so.’
I recommended a local church I knew that would be perfect for
them both, he thanked me and went his way. I have no idea what
happened to them both, but this kind of informal way of sharing
my faith was pretty common, and I often wonder if over the
course of those two years I contributed more to the Kingdom of God than at any other time in my life.

 Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

24
Burley – Personal Fuel Surcharges and
other means of making a bit extra

 At least one section of the “notice wallpaper” with which the
drivers’ office was decorated was permanently devoted to the
retribution likely to be visited on those who were willing to
line their pockets at the expense of hapless customers. A typical
example ran something like this: –
ANY DRIVER CAUGHT OVERCHARGING WILL BE
DISMISSED IMMEDIATELY. NO EXCEPTIONS.
These bleak pronouncements of certain and terminal
retribution for miscreants almost always followed the same
pattern; printed in large capital letters, accusatory, intimidating,
all-inclusive and usually containing at least one error of
grammar, spelling or syntax that served to encourage the
moderately literate to take them with a pinch of salt. One such
notice adorned the door from the area drivers were allowed
in to collect keys to the main offices where they were less than
welcome: –
NO DRIVER’S ARE ALOWED PASSED THIS POINT
UNLESS THEY HAVE PERMISON FROM THE
MANAGMENT. NO EXCEPTIONS.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
 Some words, like “warned”, “dismissed” and “exceptions” were
such common verbal currency that those who typed the notices
had learned the correct spelling, but someone in the office
with a GCSE in English language would probably have been a
worthwhile recruitment move.
Such auguries sometimes rivalled the descriptions of the
plagues that befell Egypt at the behest of Moses, portending
dismissal from the bosom of the company as if it were on a
level equivalent to being evicted from a plane half way across
the Atlantic with nothing more than a large handkerchief and
a bit of string for a parachute. No shift would be complete
without encountering at least three or four pronouncements
of this nature, provided courtesy of another piece of rain forest
or on the datahead.

Most of these threats, if not entirely empty, were as likely to
be carried through as the promises in a political party’s election
manifesto; containing the broad thrust of the intentions of those
who ran the show possibly, but likely to represent little more
than a vestige of practicality. For one thing it was technically
impossible for the company to dismiss a driver since they all
worked for themselves; the worst damage that could be inflicted
was a refusal to allow access to company vehicles, radios and
dataheads. If the management felt particularly vindictive they
might make the odd ‘phone call to other companies to warn
them against taking on this particular individual should he
materialise on their doorstep; not that that was likely to make
much difference in anyone’s recruiting process.

On the odd occasion when draconian action was taken
and drivers were removed from the company’s books by far
the most common cause was because they had been trying to
charge customers too much. Of all the complaints made by both
customers and management against private hire drivers this is
by far the most common. At a conservative estimate at least 50%
of private hire drivers indulge in this practice, some to the tune
of 10% and some far more. The absence of meters, of course,
makes it easier to be creative about fares, and customers rarely
ask to see the car’s trip meter and compare it with a fare chart. In
any case those who habitually overcharged invariably suffered
a sudden bout of acute but temporary amnesia just at the point
when they should have reset their mileage. I was frequently
treated to stories of overcharging by customers keen to tell me
that they knew what the fare should be and “don’t try it on.”
Of course on one level this practice did no direct damage
to the company, but indirectly it had the capacity to cost them
a great deal. In an age of diminishing brand loyalty private
hire companies tend to lie in the relegation zone of the lowest
division in the league. Customers who were overcharged would
frequently take their business elsewhere, and a drop in the
customer base led to a fall in the quantity of drivers wanting to
work for the company and a consequent fall in rental income.
Conversely a private hire firm that could establish even a modest
reputation for employing honest drivers was likely to be on the
receiving end of a steady flow of new custom from victims of
previous sharp practice.
I resisted the not infrequent impulse to add a bit onto the
fare of customers who made my life difficult, or as one of my
colleagues put it, ‘include my personal fuel surcharge.’ To be
truthful this was less out of any sense of moral principle and more
out of a fear that once I started such a practice I would probably
find it difficult to stop, and would one day find myself having
to account for it on the carpet of a director’s office.

Some of the stories of passengers being overcharged made
me angry, particularly when they involved elderly folk or those
on a limited income who had no option other than to use cabs.
Many accounts, though, were hilarious, and caused me to
wonder about the place on the evolutionary scale of the brains
of some of my fellow drivers. The most vital ground rule if you
intended to add a few quid to the fare was to pick carefully the
customers you victimised, and particularly to make sure they
didn’t know what the fare should be. One woman I picked up
quite regularly to take to a bingo hall a little over two miles from
her home had been using the same company for ten years, took a
cab at least twice a week, and knew the fare to all the destinations
she frequented. She told me one day that the new driver who
had picked her up a week previously had tried to charge her £2
extra for a trip she made every week. She presented him with
the normal fare, and added to it a mouthful of choice verbal
abuse and a whack with her not insubstantial bag, reported the
incident to the company and asked not to have that driver again.
One of the more jaw-dropping attempts at overcharging I
heard about was during a night shift towards the end of my time
in the business. I was fortunate enough to pick up the manager
of one of Leeds’s manifold nightclubs catering for the student
market at the time of night when work is quite hard to find. It
was a good fare – out beyond the boundaries of the city, and
worth a good £12, but reachable in no more than fifteen minutes
at that time of night courtesy of the M621. Not only was it a
decent fare, but the customer was sober, engaging and interesting
– attributes that were all at a premium after midnight – with a
wealth of entertaining anecdotes. It was the kind of job you really
appreciate in the middle of a quiet night shift. He paid happily, 
added a small gratuity in appreciation of my promptness, making
it even more worthwhile, and then told me about his previous
driver, whose stupidity really beggars belief. Having completed
the same trip he announced the fare as £26; he had picked on
the wrong customer. Instead of arguing about the fare he told the
driver to hold on a minute and called the company office on his
mobile ‘phone. Having been put through to the night manager he
simply asked why it was that for a journey he made two or three
times a week at a cost of about £12 his current driver had asked
him for more than double that sum. The manager promptly
asked to speak to the driver, told him not to collect a fare, and
return to Base immediately. The customer had a free ride, and
the driver lost both his fare and his livelihood.
I had no sympathy with him whatever – or others like him;
not only was he giving the rest of us a bad name he succeeded
in exhibiting amazing stupidity in his choice of stooge. It also
made life for the honest drivers more difficult. Almost every
customer I collected had at least one story of extortion at the
hands of a private hire driver they wished to divest themselves
of, and I always knew that the subtext of such conversations
was either a plea not to rip them off or a threat of non-payment
should I try. 

 Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

23
Lower Bramley – God Bless

 Like respectable Edwardian families, who were inclined to
have them institutionalised, most of us have a relative who is
embarrassing in company. The draconian options open to our
ancestors are no longer available, so we have to find other means
of marginalising their potential effect on respectable company.
Those who plan and govern major cities are faced with a
similar predicament; there are whole tracts of land that are an
embarrassment, usually featuring a fairly wide, but entirely
predictable array of local authority housing. These are the estates
that survived the great sell-off of council housing during the
Thatcher era, or failed to benefit from them, depending on one’s
perspective. The generally preferred means of coping with these
substantial bunions is a combination of denial and disguise, the
latter largely being a means of facilitating the former.
My own head was removed from the concrete desert
when my neck was yanked effortlessly by the force of sheer
necessity. It was simply not an option as a cab driver to avoid
this reality since so much of my work took me into the kinds
of urban landscape I thought had become extinct during
the slum clearance programmes of the post-war era. Most of
these dwellings were erected long after the Orwellian “flying
aspidistra” semi in the plush suburban districts that had been
the domestic staple diet of almost my entire life. My maiden
foray into one of the labyrinthine, arthritic byways that wound its way through a bewildering and depressing topography was a
jaw-dropping experience; how did people go about constructing
anything like a decent life in these surroundings? Row upon row
of once-identical buildings containing any number of dwellings,
sometimes configured together like one of those wooden puzzles
given as a gift on Christmas Day, dissembled, and laid aside
after an hour’s futile manipulation. The original uniformity of
appearance was distorted only by the largely, but by no means
universally, cosmetic scars, some inflicted by time and weather,
others by frustrated or malevolent residents, visitors or the
local criminal fraternity. The parts of the landscape set aside for
what was comically called recreational use were adorned with
the discarded detritus of broken-down domestic appliances
and redundant technology – fridges, washing machines, video
recorders, cassette players and the like that had once lured
underemployed credit cards from reluctant wallets. Whilst
on one level this provided plenty of hardware to function as
makeshift goalposts or cricket stumps, any sporting activity
would be the equivalent of a game of hopscotch in a minefield.
Were there any youngsters with the inclination or courage to
venture onto the putative recreational areas they would often
have had to brave not only the dangers of abandoned appliances
but the likelihood of coming to grief on a used hypodermic
syringe.
Some of the damage suffered by homes designed to give
ordinary people a decent and wholesome habitat almost
beggared belief. A tiled roof once the accomplished product of
a skilled artisan that had somehow been crushed from above;
craters in gardens that would not have done injustice to the
reputation of a decent Luftwaffe bombardier, and holes in walls
that might have been inflicted by a medium-sized wrecking ball.

It was these bloated blotches on the landscape that I, like so
many others, had previously been cheerfully ignorant of, that
now caused me a sense of profound shame. How could such
streets and blocks of housing and the people who inhabited
them be so unknown to me when I had lived within a few miles
of them for the last six years? Where was the Christian presence
that might have made some kind of difference to the erosion of
morale and hope that surely must be the by-product of being
brought up and trying to secure some kind of an education in
this setting? I surveyed one particular street whose principal
feature was a rather large pylon, and wondered why anyone
agreed to live there. Let them try to put that in a respectable
private estate where house prices were steadily rising and
provided one of the most popular topics of conversation, and
where most residents knew at least one city councillor; the
mountain of mailbags of protest from Yorkshire’s ‘Disgusted of
Tunbridge Wells’ (perhaps the ‘Horrified of Harrogate’) retinue
would have resembled Kilimanjaro.

 Quite early in my venture into the world of minicab driving
I was directed to what I was sure must have been an incorrect
address, as none of the houses looked as if they could possibly
be inhabited other than by small rodents; most had windows
boarded up, hardly any front lawns had seen the business end
of a lawnmower for some years, and even were some kind soul
to make the attempt at such a feat they would have to clear
enough jetsam to fill a Cornish beach. A major excavation with
an industrial digger might unearth an eclectic mixture of weeds
and the odd blade of grass in the last throes of terminal illness.

 Even if the address on the screen was correct, I surmised,
there was surely no one living in this kind of estate who could
possibly afford a taxi. Just in case there was someone around,
however, I decided it might be expedient to reverse down the culde-
sac to which I had been directed, steering carefully through
the slalom course of discarded white goods and builders’ rubble.
The further down the narrow road I drove the more it resembled
the East End of London in the blitz. Just in case I really did have
a customer I entered the code on the datahead that rang the
intrepid commuter to announce my arrival. I prepared to lock
the car doors and prepare for as rapid a departure as the worn
piston rings in the old Skoda would allow in the event of an
all-out assault by the living dead who must surely be the only
possible inhabitants of such a desolate landscape. It was far more
likely that I would shortly be radioing Base to report a no fare.
I hadn’t been waiting more than 30 seconds when with a
screech of protest what appeared to be the only door still in
proximity to its frame was yanked through about 30 degrees –
just sufficient to allow the egress of what were surely the only
survivors in the devastation that surrounded me.

Sarah looked like a woman in early middle-age, but I
suspect she was younger – a year or two either side of 30;
slightly overweight, with a careworn face etched with the pain
that was the inevitable companion of survival in her kind of
world. Her light brown hair was interlaced with prematurely
grey streaks and had probably not been styled for many a year,
but her smile was engaging, genuine and generous; in fact she
was rather attractive. Most of her clothing, from her threadbare
jacket to shoes that I suspect had holes in the soles that more or
less matched those in the uppers, would have failed to grace the
shelves of a charity shop. Her voluminous bag, like most such
receptacles, was a living example of Murphy’s Law of women’s
fashion accessories – the amount of paraphernalia carried
will always expand to fill however much space is available.
Nevertheless, whatever else it contained I knew what little cash
it could boast would be regarded by most people as pitifully
inadequate for the acquisition of enough food to feed a family –
before the taxi fare was paid – and the worn but anorexic purse
would not be replete with the array of plastic most of us regard
as essential to survival in the modern world. But as I was to
learn Sarah was actually a fairly typical customer. 

 Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

 22
Rodley – Time to Take Stock

It was that time of year when Spring finally breaks free of the
shackles of Winter – even if only to succumb periodically at
any point up to the end of May. April was giving notice to
quit, and the air was rich with the scent of nature reasserting
its immortality. Much the same was happening to my mental
health. The psychological injuries I had previously sustained
had given me some idea of the trauma experienced by those
involved in serious road traffic accidents and unprovoked
assaults. My life had never been threatened physically but my
sanity had; even the odd suicidal thought had crossed my mind
on more than one occasion. I had come out of the operating
theatre, done my time in intensive care, and was now officially
off the danger list.
Easter had passed by in a blur. This of course was nothing
unusual for me, but the manner in which it had passed was,
to put it mildly, unfamiliar. I had made a special effort to be
in church on Easter Sunday – something I managed on most
Christian Sabbaths, though rarely before the service started.
But Good Friday had merited its epithet this year only in the
sense that it had been exceptionally profitable, and there was
something about the triumphalism of the familiar hymnody of
Easter Day that seemed strangely hollow.
 The period from Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday had
hitherto been a maelstrom of frenetic clerical and ecumenical hyperactivity with little or no variation in pattern for the last 20
years or more.
Thursday evening generally witnessed a respectable and
insipid re-enactment of the Last Supper, with small cubes
of bread and individual glasses of sweetened, non-alcoholic
communion wine that assuaged the thirst of the sensitivities
of traditional nonconformity rather than connecting with one
of the most dramatic episodes in the gospels. The real Last
Supper featured large chunks of roast lamb and an almost
limitless supply of decent red plonk, and took place against
the backdrop of looming disaster and certain, agonising death
following the spineless betrayal of a friend. Too much of that
kind of atmosphere would have been considered inappropriate,
and very likely put the good churchgoing folk off their late night
cheese and biscuits.
Good Friday had always provided the opportunity to do
something with other local churches, the argument being that
if we could not work together on the occasion on which we
remembered the death of the Saviour of us all, how could we
even pretend to claim a common heritage and purpose? For at
least one day of the year we laid aside petty resentments over
recalcitrant former members who were now part of another
local flock, allowed theological disputes over the correct
quantity of water to use in initiation rites to lie dormant, and
almost reached the idyllic state of wanting all churches to do
well. Typically this exercise in ecumenical camaraderie took the
physical form of a march down the local high street. We would
pass bemused onlookers exhibiting modest levels of admiration
at our courage and perhaps just the tiniest trace of guilt that
they were out shopping on such a sacred day; over the years the
guilt seemed to diminish and the bemusement to morph into
incomprehension about the whole exercise. We would walk
more timidly perhaps past diverse hostelries hosting the sort of
people I had always convinced myself were not having nearly as good a time as they appeared to be, and was certain that they
knew nothing of the deep joy of the faithful such as I.
Everything culminated, of course, in the triumphant
assertion of each Easter Sunday that “Christ is Risen, He is
Risen Indeed” never again to die, the gift of God to assuage
sinful mankind’s guilt and provide a guarantee of eternal life to
all who believe. Perhaps it was familiarity rather than a loss of
faith, but it seemed to me that the power of that simple message
to change lives, indeed to alter the course of human history, was
largely lost in the background. Thoughts of Sunday lunch and
the anticipation of plans for the Bank Holiday assumed centre
stage after the second verse of “Thine be the Glory”, or five
minutes into a sermon reinforcing the same eternal conviction
with varying degrees of certitude. 

I had to face the harrowing truth that along with the dismantling of my selfconfidence
and professional reputation my carefully constructed
spiritual hermitage had also fallen around my ears, and now lay
like so much rubble at my feet. I stood leaden-footed, exposed
to elements that had previously battered unavailingly on the
walls of my carefully constructed house of faith. Leaden-footed
I might have been, but it would be erroneous to mistake lack of
movement for any kind of stability. I realised just how efficiently
I had worked to keep the arguments against my faith at bay
using a combination of pseudo-spiritual semantics and recalling
memories of the few occasions when the presence of God had
seemed so palpable as to dismiss doubt as so much chaff to be
blown away by the wind of a single line of a familiar chorus.
The quest to delve into my soul to look for the remains
of a belief system amidst the rubble was neither an academic
exercise nor a leisure pursuit. More than six months had
now passed since I had relinquished a pulpit in favour of the
driver’s seat of a private hire car. Whether out of a sense of
puritanical masochism or because I had still failed to learn my
lesson I was meeting leaders of different churches to look at the
possibility of returning to ministry by the autumn – a process
called “settlement” in my denomination – that usually takes at
least three months. There are doubtless clergy who have lost
their faith in a God who has become anything other than a
metaphysical image and who are still able to trot out Christian
dogma quite happily with fingers crossed behind their backs; I
have never been one of them, believing that St. Paul was stating
the bloody obvious when he commented “If for this life only we
have believed in Christ we are of all people most to be pitied.”
It was time to ask hard questions about how much of the faith I
had spent almost all my adult life propagating I still believed.