The Collar and the Cab part 1

    
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.

 

1
Woodhouse - Strange New World

It was two o’clock on a frosty January morning, and I found
myself in the still well-populated main entrance of Leeds
General Infirmary. Work was plentiful and my warm minicab
was waiting just outside, but whether it was my semi-dormant
pastoral instinct or simply a sense of common humanity I was
unable to leave the side of the rather frail, elderly woman I had
just transported from her home some twenty miles away, even
though the ward staff had assured me that someone was “on
their way down”; I had been around enough hospitals in enough
cities in my previous professional capacity to understand what
“just coming” was likely to mean in relation to the imminent
arrival of the grossly overworked and underpaid members of
the nursing profession.
A fare from Halifax to Leeds in the early hours of the
morning paid for by the NHS was something to put a spring
in the step of any taxi driver, but on this occasion the elation
generated by the job was at least tempered by the knowledge
that the lady I would be transporting had been summoned by
the staff caring for her husband because he was nearing the end
of his life.
Seamlessly and entirely subconsciously I found I had
switched vocations when the customer emerged from her house,
and functioned as a member of the clergy on the 30-minute
journey to the centre of Leeds without ever mentioning the profession I had spent most of my adult life pursuing; I was somewhat relieved to discover that pastoral care of people in extremis still seemed to come quite naturally to me. Having
announced our arrival at the reception desk I felt responsible for
her until a designated member of staff had come to relieve me.
This gave me an opportunity to look around and observe those
who had little better to do than observe me. Until a little over a
year previously in exactly the same place at exactly the same time
of night, in many respects fulfilling the same function, I would
have been dressed in a clerical collar, and that alone would have
commanded a level of respect, possibly deference, even from
members of the higher echelons of the medical profession.
Now dressed in my company sweat shirt with a plastic badge
announcing my credentials hung around my neck I would have
looked like any other middle-aged private hire cab driver.
The delay gave me the opportunity to try to work out what
others seemed to make of me. Making an allowance for a certain
level of innate paranoia what I picked up was not pleasant; a
combination of suspicion, mistrust and even latent hostility
seemed to float in a vaguely malevolent fashion from the facial
expressions and body language of medical, clerical and auxiliary
staff, and even from the recalcitrant individuals who were
compelled by recent legislation to leave the building in order to
feed their nicotine craving.
None of this came as a great surprise. I was aware by this
point of just how many people had had unpleasant encounters
with members of the taxi-driving profession by being “cut up”
in a line of traffic, “ripped off” by excessive fares or otherwise
brutalised with some metaphorical sharp object. More
particularly I was not surprised because I was reminded of my
own views of only a few years previously.