Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

 26
Kirkstall – Students

 Leeds is a city with a significant but incredibly varied student
population, some of whom move there in order to achieve a first
degree and some of whom regard this objective as an optional
but by no means essential by-product of their first time away
from home. The division is, to some extent, dependent on
which university is attended, one being of the old-fashioned sort
with a strong traditional academic base and the other being a
former Polytechnic, a scenario played out in many British cities
since “Polytechnics” were allowed to rename themselves as
“Universities.” Of course it would be a gross oversimplification
to label all students of one as academic underachievers out to
have a good time and little more, and the others as serious,
conscientious and clean-living young people seeking only
academic excellence, but in broad terms my experience certainly
suggested that such a distinction could be made to some extent;
at least that was the case when it came to using private hire cars.
Students were one of those groups of people I expected to
see on bicycles, jogging to lectures or waiting at bus stops at
respectable hours of the day if they were going out to socialise,
rather than ‘phoning for a cab. Perhaps this image was cultivated
by all those episodes of Morse, featuring an Oxford where even
the professors meandered between the dreamy spires perched
precariously on contraptions masquerading as bicycles that
looked as if they had been handed down from father to son for the last six generations. Maybe the hilly terrain of West Yorkshire
didn’t really lend itself to any form of self-propelled transport,
but I recall seeing very few bikes around the city, even on the
university campuses.
Surprisingly the use of private hire cars to travel around the
city made rather a lot of sense. A return cab fare from halls of
residence to the city centre might be somewhere between £10
and £13, but if shared four ways would be more economical
than the bus, and usually more reliable.


My favourite journeys were from a halls of residence
complex labelled “The Brewery” – a place where the eponymous
“piss-up” was successfully arranged in dozens of locations on
a daily basis. I gather the building was once home to a famous
beer manufacturer, but whether it was this dubious heritage or
a sense of irony that justified the epithet at the design stage is
now a matter of conjecture.

I enjoyed many surreal experiences as a night shift driver
in relation to student residences, but one of the more comical
was undoubtedly the ritual of speaking to my wife each evening
somewhere between ten and ten-thirty, when more often than
not I was driving to or from the Brewery. One of the practices
we have adopted, to the amusement if not incomprehension of
many, and to “oohs” and “aahs” from the more sentimentally
inclined, is to speak to each other every night if for one reason
or another we are apart, usually around bedtime. My wife’s
bedtime almost invariably coincided with the time of night the
students were about to go out to the clubs and bars of central
Leeds, and calls took place in transit between student residences
and the fleshpots of the big city. Whilst my headset kept my
hands free and one end of the conversation private, of course my
end was public property. So there I would be, wishing my wife
a good night’s sleep and sweet dreams and telling her I loved
her (another daily ritual) whilst for the customers the night had
only just begun.
This exchange gave rise to some interesting conversations
about everything from faith to sex and marriage, particularly
with the girls. In ascending order of how difficult things I said
were to believe it went something like this; that I was a former
clergyman who still believed in a God you could talk to and have
a relationship with was just about credible. This was especially
so if the evening had begun an hour or two previously in the
student residence bar, where the drinks were much cheaper
than in town, leading to many students becoming somewhat
lubricated before venturing out. That I had been happily married
to the same woman for the best part of 30 years and was still so
absolutely in love with her that I could never imagine being with
someone else was pushing credibility up to, and perhaps slightly
beyond the limit. That I had only ever had one sexual partner and
only intended ever to have one was on the level of asking them
to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden, and that I firmly believed that developing a sexual relationship with one person
was far more satisfying than sleeping around was sufficient to
have me committed to the Funny Farm. Nevertheless countless
conversations with female students finished with something
akin to “Ahhh, how sweet.” After that I tended to be regarded as
a somewhat avuncular figure to whom all sorts of confidences
would be entrusted; this in turn brought out in me the instinct
of a parent with children of similar age, and most trips into town
ended with my admonition to my charges to “stay safe.”