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.

10
Harehills – Cwollifying

 I had been driving a private hire car for a
couple of months but by exploiting a loophole in the law the
company I drove for had taken me on as an “unbadged” driver,
operating a car as a “Public Service Vehicle” without a proper
licence. The give-away was that these cars carried no licence number, and whilst most members of the public never noticed
the difference everyone in the cab-driving fraternity knew that
you were both new to the game and unqualified, and afforded
you about as much respect as a disease-carrying tsetse fly; your
existence could not be ignored and was even significant for its
nuisance value, but you could be repelled by the insect spray of
a disdainful look, and kept at bay by means of the mosquito net
of contempt.

 To the considerable surprise of the drivers’ supervisor, and my
even greater astonishment, it had finally dawned on us both that
I could make a living at this game, and a mutually beneficial
relationship had broken the surface of the murky swamp in
which I was expected to drown. The busy period of the year
was approaching – the lead-up to Christmas – when the nation
seems to whip itself up into a frenzy of consumerist activity, and
the only way to complete a list of tasks as long as a roll-call of
failed English test cricketers is to have someone else driving you
around. Then you can concentrate on being stressed over what
to buy a maiden aunt (unseen since last Yuletide) for a tenner,
what you can get for half that price that gives all the appearance
of being a lot more expensive for the neighbours, and how to
manage Christmas dinner now your teenage daughter has gone
vegan. I hadn’t made my fortune by any means, but I was making
significantly more money than I ever did as a clergyman, and
the pressure was being applied to “go for my badge.”

 The combination of a desire to hold my head up at the early
morning refuelling rituals, the comfort of a well-filled purse and the warm if not entirely selfless encouragement of my supervisor,
not to mention the complete absence of ecclesiastical politics in
this feral world were more than enough to make my mind up. So
I decided to invest time (which was in short supply) and money
(which for almost the first time in my adult life wasn’t) in trying
to gain my licence.

 Whilst there are regional variations the general pattern is that
qualification is won by a driving test, a police check, a medical,
a two-hour induction course and the payment of a sizeable
sum of money to the local authority. The reward for success is
represented by a small piece of plastic with a picture taken by
one of those computerised cameras programmed to make the
subject look ridiculous, and the right to drive for the operating
company of your choice, so long as they are agreeable.

Arriving at the elegant domicile of the medical practitioner
appointed by the cab company, in a village inhabited by
professional footballers and lottery winners, I realised that I had
opted for the wrong career and reflected on where I could have
been had I worked a lot harder at school or played football every
weekend instead of doing a Saturday job and going to church.
I was shown into an area that looked like a general dumping
ground for unwanted furniture, newspapers and bric-a-brac of
dubious pedigree. Its status as a medical consulting room was
justified by the strategic placement of an eyesight chart and a
set of scales, offering only a mildly anachronistic contrast to the
eclectic range of moderately expensive junk.

 I had had a few medicals in the past, for life assurance
and, oddly enough, to ensure that my body was capable of
withstanding the rigours of clerical life, hardly the most
physically demanding profession to pursue. A psychiatric
evaluation would have been far more appropriate, though no
one sane enough would probably have been sufficiently stupid
to seek such a vocation. The only question that occasioned any
anxiety was just how much of my clothing I would need to
remove, and whether by wearing loose-fitting garments some
of the embarrassment could be avoided. The overeating that was
my inevitable comfort habit when facing the kind of insecurity
I had endured over the previous few years had resulted in my
overall dimensions reaching the point where loose fitting clothes
were the only type that did not make me look like a medieval
monarch; but I hoped that if sleeves and trouser legs could be
rolled up rather than removed a little less naked flesh would
need to be exposed. My concerns were completely groundless; I
was spared the embarrassment of exposing my more than ample expanses of flab by being asked to remove no clothing whatever,
and indeed such an apparent innovation would have seemed
pointless given that no physical contact took place between
the consultant and myself, barring the accidental touching of
hands as I offloaded a cheque for £40 some five minutes after
entering his residence. Having been asked to read a line of the
eyesight chart probably visible from an orbiting space station
and asked (loudly) if my hearing was ok there appeared to be
nothing more to be said or done. A sum that took me half a day
to earn had just been deposited in the hand of someone who
had done little else other than sign a piece of paper after a brief
conversation and an alleged examination that could have been
conducted by his housekeeper whilst dusting the sideboard. 

  The driving test centre was in one of those urban areas where there is an underlying sense
of both malevolence and depression, and to emerge from the
centre to find all four wheels still affixed to the vehicle occasions
a modicum of surprise. The waiting room was another alien
world – the only people who had reached the fourth decade of life
were the driving instructors, who were also identifiable as being
the ones exhibiting merely mild symptoms of anxiety. Their
perennial concerns about the survival chances of their vehicles
at the hands of learner drivers were probably compounded
by the fear that during the few minutes they were in the test
centre an army of joy riders would have stolen their pristine cars
and made bonfires out of their means of making a living. The
rest of the room appeared to be straight out of kindergarten,
and the atmosphere was replete with anxiety, anticipation and
adrenaline, all apparently oozing from the spotty faces and
expressed in the body language of the young hopefuls, who were
clutching car keys like maiden aunts at a speed dating evening.

 Entertaining the mostly forlorn hope that they were about to
secure their passage to independent transport they also seemed
to exhibit a passing curiosity about what I was doing there,
looking as out of place as a teenager starting primary school.
Youthful eyes turned briefly in my direction; only one of us –
Geoff or myself – could be the instructor, so which of us was
the geriatric prat who couldn’t be bothered to get his licence at a
sensible age, and for whom the imminent prospect of a wooden
box hardly made the exercise worthwhile?
It was with some difficulty and uncharacteristic restraint
that I resisted the very strong urge to pass my driving licence
round the room to present my credentials, or to declaim my
status as a qualified driver on a higher plane of existence than
the rest of them. Instead I opted to slink into the darkest, least
conspicuous part of the room and hope that attention was now
focussed elsewhere.
My cover was blown almost immediately. The door of the
anteroom opened, evoking memories of earlier driving tests which
came flooding back with gut-wrenching clarity. Each candidate
turns to see who is emerging from the examiners’ room, hoping to
be allocated to one of the few who do not look like they might have
been Stalin’s right hand man during one of his periodic purges. I
barely had time to look, only to hope that my name would be the
last to be called, so that I could remain incognito.
“Reverend Richards, please”, rang out the strident voice,
and suddenly the entire population of the room had ceased to
worry about the forthcoming ordeal and was looking round
to see who the bearer of this dubious epithet might be.