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.

 

4
Gildersome – Where the **** is that?

 Optimistic self-delusion had supported the myth that
having lived in a city for six years I “knew my way around.” An
hour gazing in bewilderment and incomprehension at a string
of addresses shattered it. The meagre grasp of local geography
I possessed related to the kind of area where respectable
churchgoers made their home; I would be working mostly in
areas unlikely to be frequented by genteel men of the cloth
trading pastoral care for a warm beverage in a china cup.

 

I gazed at the legend on the datahead, fighting the rising
panic. The realisation I had suppressed for the last day or two
– that the city I had come to call home was as familiar as the
back streets of Calcutta – crashed through the flimsy screen of
optimism as a high velocity bullet through a water melon. Six
months later I would have a Sat-nav to do the job for me. At this
stage the frugality that was an essential tool for survival for a cleric
bringing up a family of four children militated against that kind of
profligacy, certainly until I had established whether I could make
a living out of the job. I consulted my five-year old yet pristine
A-Z, and with a huge sense of relief located my initial destination.

 

 The first panic was over as with a sense of
triumph and a newfound optimism I arrived at the address and
awaited my first customer; I pulled myself upright in my seat
and tried to exude the pheromones appropriate to a seasoned
professional taxi driver. I tried to glance nonchalantly at the
young woman towing her semi-comatose toddler down the path
to the car whilst holding on with the other arm to a new-born
infant who must have only recently shuffled onto the mortal coil.
In a month or two I wouldn’t regard the sight of a young mother
with two small children calling a taxi at this hour anything other
than normal, but this was one of many sights and sounds that
caused my jaw to drop alarmingly during my first week. Having taken a second or two to regain an air of competence I decided
I could afford a fleeting smile and even condescended to collect
the folded buggy from the front doorstep where the disability of
only having two arms had necessitated it’s abandonment. I have
always wondered why God didn’t equip those women who he
knew would become mothers with an extra arm and had come
to regard it as a design fault along with the appendix and nasal
hair. Of course what I should have been doing all this time was
scrolling down through the writing on my screen to see where
the customer was going and try to work out where it might be.
I soon paid for my mistake as I suddenly realised that I had not
been summoned because she fancied a cosy chat in the company
of perhaps the only taxi driver in the county with a degree in
theology. 

The euphoria was short-lived, and even the earlier
panic was made to look insignificant by that occasioned once I
remembered that we were supposed to be going somewhere.
Tracy (there seemed an oddly disproportionate quantity of
customers called “Tracy”, followed quite closely by those who
revelled in the appellation of “Stacey”) would expect to find
a taxi driver occupying the vehicle. I was a taxi driver in the
same sense that an eight year old boy is a gunfighter because his
parents have bought him a cowboy outfit for Christmas, though
perhaps I enjoyed fewer natural resources than the said juvenile.

I don’t recall the destination of this particular Tracy, but
future Tracyesque interchanges those first few days followed
a familiar pattern and developed about the same level of
unpredictability as a set of rail tracks: –
TRACY: – I want to go to Priory Medical Centre please love
ME: – Gulp
TRACY: – You know – just off Green Lane
ME: – Errrrr… Is that in Armley?
TRACY: – O no, not another fuckin’ new driver without a
bleedin’ clue.