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.

5
Drighlington – Survival Day

The journey from the first shift to becoming an established driver
is straightforward in the same sense that a solitary egg in a lump
of frogspawn is guaranteed a transition to royalty courtesy of
a kiss from a princess. A minority would reach tadpole status,
but the odds against making a good living over the longer term
are heavily stacked against anyone entering the minicab world.
Because attrition rates are so high most companies adopt a
policy in keeping with the laws of natural selection – recruiting
as many new drivers as possible, knowing that the majority will
not last beyond a few weeks, many not beyond the first few days,
and not grieving too much over the inconsequential loss to the
collective gene pool of the taxi world. The level of mourning
expressed over the premature demise of yet another would-be
cabbie is generally on the level accorded by evolutionary
biologists to the extinction of a primitive protozoon.
Each week new drivers would appear at Base clutching
their bag of equipment like eleven-year-olds on their first day
at senior school. In keeping with their juvenile equivalents the
bag was as much a source of security as anything, containing
a packed lunch with some comfort food, as well as a pristine
street map, a pile of change and a money bag with a far more
substantial appetite than was ever likely to be satisfied.
Survival for the first two weeks or so was the key for most,
the feat of completing ten or twelve days work depending on
a number of factors, only some of which were within the
individual’s control.
Recognising the importance of some of the tadpoles
surviving to maturity most companies try to manipulate the
process of natural selection somewhat by creating a favourable
environment for the genes of the vulnerable new drivers.

Like soldiers arriving at the Western Front in 1914 full of
romantic hopes of Christmas in Berlin after a couple of minor skirmishes
there was little that could prepare most of us for the
feral and, at times, psychologically brutal life of the average taxi
driver. The apparently mundane reality of the mud of the Somme
concealed seemingly limitless possibilities for demonstrating
the vulnerability of the human body to shrapnel, machine gun
bullets and barbed wire. Climbing into the driver’s seat of a
private hire car was unlikely to cost anyone their life, but would
ruthlessly expose human frailty, psychological and physical, to a
wide variety of unseen hazards.

Those first weeks were precarious to say the least; it felt as
if the juggernaut of my life had come to rest with almost half
hanging over the edge of a cliff. It would not take a great deal
of weight transfer to terminate my existence; one or two bad
experiences and the elusive terra firma I still held would slide
into the ocean of ignominious defeat after breaking my back
on the malevolent rocks below. Whilst there was a part of me
that sought the comfort of noble failure the constant, if largely
mechanical, discipline of leaving home early and working long
shifts boosted not only the family bank balance, but also, more
importantly, my self-respect. I may have had to work mercilessly
long hours to achieve the objective, but here I was doing
something I had never tried before, and making a living out of
it. I was becoming dependent only on myself and the natural
resources with which I had been endowed. It was so much better
than feeling held to ransom by the whims and prejudices of a
religious institution obsessed only with its own preservation
from the infections of a world it was finding ever more difficult
to keep at bay.
On one particular day, and for no particular reason, I
experienced a sensation familiar from what seemed a previous
aeon. It was akin to rummaging through the boxes in the attic on
a rainy Saturday afternoon, and encountering my county schools
under-15 cross country trophy, and sensing the same feelings as
on the day it was presented to me as a spotty youth. This strange
feeling I was experiencing, rising through the swamp of years
of morale-sapping criticism and a mire of self-doubt was pride;
not the nose-in-the-air self-promoting X-Factor sort of pride,
but a tangible response to a tangible accomplishment. I seemed
to have reached a point where at the very least I would not add
taxi driving to the substantial catalogue of things I had tried and
failed at in recent years that had so substantially filled my wellstocked
store of personal disasters.