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.

 3
Wortley – First Day

 Being advised to pick up my car for the next day’s shift any time
from 5.00 a.m. onwards, and wanting to give this job a decent
chance of success, I felt compelled to introduce the alarm clock
to the aforementioned unfamiliar arrangement of its digits. I
decided that I would arrive early, though probably not bright,
for my first shift. Starting work a full four hours before I was
used to doing anything more than emerging from a stupor and
imbibing coffee was, to put it politely, a novel concept, but I
was off to bed at 10.00 p.m. – the time I was normally settling
down for a few hours of decent telly – with the alarm locked and
loaded and anticipating a good six hours of dreamless repose
before rising refreshed and prepared for a new challenge.
I should have known by then that life is never that simple.
Perhaps it was that bed was unfamiliar territory at that time of
night, and however many yawns I forced out I was simply wide
awake. Then there was the constant thought that I had better
get to sleep quickly otherwise I would be too tired to start work,
accompanied by an ominously undefined and unspecified dread
about what tomorrow would really be like; whatever the case the
next six hours and fifteen minutes were spent counting enough
sheep to fill a Yorkshire Dale and changing positions more times
than a politician caught fiddling his expenses.
I believe that my sleep tally that night was exactly zero;

 

 But this was 16th September 2005, and an entire continent
of new experiences awaited me. Unlike our plucky colonial
ancestors, cutting swathes through virgin territory to plant their
flag and impose their way of life upon reluctant beneficiaries, I
was scarcely able to force myself through the practical processes
by which I began work. Apprehension and determination fought
for control of muscles still atrophied by the absence of sleep I
had endured in the course of a night when the clamorous voices
of certain failure announced their verdict on my latest stupid
idea.
Fuelled partly by caffeine and partly by a dogged
commitment to what seemed an increasingly bizarre exercise I
arrived at “Base”, the name given to the complex of buildings
and their associated activities from which private hire vehicles
were collected for the day’s work. After a while I discovered this
epithet functioned equally well as a moral metaphor as for a
quasi-military one, but today I was the new boy in class and
hoping that the teacher was nice, that the school bully wouldn’t
notice me and that I wouldn’t have to undress for P.E.

I had hoped to meet a mild-mannered avuncular figure
anxious to calm the nerves of a new boy who would dispense
the keys to one of the myriad Skoda Octavias sitting in the
convalescent unit called “The Yard” with genteel good-humour.
Instead I encountered Dave – at this stage the visual epitome
of all that I dreaded in this strange new world, though later
someone I recognised as one of the most genuine people I was
privileged to meet on my new planet.
Dave’s job was to arrive at the office in the middle of the
night and issue car keys to drivers working the “day shift”, a
technical term for any stretch of eight hours or more from 3
a.m. to 6 p.m. the same day. This function he carried out with
a unique and at times beguiling mixture of belligerence and
affection. Dave’s physical appearance could best be described
as intimidating, the sort of man who would be picked out by a
witness at a police line-up almost on principle.

Clutching the key to the “pile of crap” between anxious
fingers I located the four-year-old yet geriatric vehicle allocated
to me, tried with limited success – and enough creaking and
groaning to wake the neighbours from their beds – to adjust
the driver’s seat and experienced mild surprise when the engine
spluttered into life with the kind of sound you would expect
from a dozen chain smokers all coughing at the same time. Dave
checked the vehicle over, a vital task since he knew every dent
and every scratch on every car – material enough to fill half a
volume of an Encyclopaedia Britannica – and so could verify
whether any further damage was caused by the driver taking the
car out or had been inflicted by its previous incumbent.