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.