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
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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.