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!


Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it.
The Collar and the Cab


16
Pudsey – Getting the Hang of it

I don’t know quite when it happened; I can’t put a date or time
on it, and its passing went unmarked and unheralded much
as crossing a continental border does in an aircraft, but in the
middle of one shift, just before my first Christmas as a minicab
driver, I knew I had arrived. I had moved well beyond “Survival
Day”, and was now sure that I could make a good living at the
job. This was not like one of those periods most football fans
experience, where a string of promising results engenders the
feeling that your team is now about to explode into the big
time only for hopes to be crushed by an early cup exit at the
hands of Chipping Sodbury Girls High School. This was not
an assessment based on a few good days’ takings and a string
of pleasant customers; it was a sober assessment of everything
that had come my way to this point. There were good days and
bad days, days when I finished early because I had taken as
much money as I wished to earn, and days when I laboured for
thirteen hours for the equivalent of a minimum wage, or even
less. But there was also consistency. I now knew a bad day would
quite probably be followed by a good one, and that so long as I
simply kept at it I now had an alternative career.
The feeling was somewhere between relief and euphoria;
relief that I had ended a period of five or six years where almost
everything I attempted seemed to result in disappointment
or failure, and euphoria because I knew that now I had an independent means of making a living.

  Some of the qualities required to make a decent living in
the world of cab driving are obvious. Good driving skills, the
capacity to work long hours and a reasonable knowledge of
the geography of the area would occur to most people. I felt
fairly confident about ticking the first of these two boxes, but
when I started my knowledge of the routes through the city
was at about the same level as the primary school child’s grasp
of human anatomy. I may have known that the leg bone was
connected to the hip bone and the foot bone was connected to
the leg bone but that was unlikely to earn me a place at medical
school. My grasp of the interconnection of routes through and
around West Yorkshire was very much on the level of a parody
of the prophecy of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones. Whilst
my ignorance in this regard was probably more profound than
most of those who take up the job there were other factors to
compensate that enabled me gradually to make a success of it.
Discovering how to make a decent living as a taxi driver of
any description requires a fair amount of determination and
mental toughness, and I have always been equipped with a
reasonable level of these attributes. More surprisingly, a decent
level of intelligence also helps. The trail Fred Housego blazed as
a “bright cabbie” by winning “Mastermind” as a Lond , and IQ levels
attributed to operators of private hire vehicles reach three figures
only on rare occasions. The fact remains, however, that having well-functioning grey matter is a massive advantage in a world
where being in the right place at the right time is so essential, as
well as knowing how different parts of a city are connected and
which routes are best to use at what times of day or night.



Price might have been the principal concern of regular
users of cabs, but following fairly close behind was punctuality.
Some journeys were booked well in advance, in which case
there was little margin for error – especially if there was a
train or, more importantly, a holiday flight to catch; you really
needed to arrive by the pick-up time on the screen. Most jobs,
though, were booked over the ‘phone and appeared on the
datahead moments later. The driver who was next in the queue
for a job in that area, on receiving the information, knew
that time was very precious. I came to realise that if the car
arrived at the relevant address within ten minutes of it being
‘phoned through the customer would probably still be there.
If the delay exceeded fifteen minutes the chances were that
they would have gone – either with another company or by
other means, such as bus or even on foot. So I developed a
“ten-minute rule.” If I really wanted this fare I needed to be
there in this space of time or be prepared to lose it.

The satisfaction of knowing that I could remain in this job
as long as I chose and make a decent living was comforting.
The next task was working out how I could reduce my hours
by making money at a faster rate. 
I learned which areas were really not worth being
anywhere near at certain times of day, which were the best spots
to wait in if there was no work on the screen and which were
best avoided. I was able to memorise when certain places that
had a free phone to our switchboard disgorged their customers
– notably places of entertainment like bingo halls.