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


18
Weetwood – Getting Maureen to
do the Work

 There are ways to use a satellite navigation unit – and ways not
to use one.
This was the era in which they were still something of a
novelty, and of course Santa, in my view somewhat irresponsibly,
had stuffed them into tens of thousands of decorative stockings
across the country on Christmas Eve. By Christmas Day the
roads were replete with motorists who knew the route to their
destination as well as they knew the proverbial backs of their
hands, but insisted on programming it into their new Tom-Tom,
Garmin or Navman, and then driving with one eye on the traffic
and one on the screen. The consequences were predictable;
insurance companies were rushed off their feet keeping track
of the claims for minor collisions, and the recipients of the new
toys discovered that the voice database of their unit did not
feature one that announced “You have just had a crash.”
For many it took barely two or three days to realise that
whilst it was a wonderful toy to own that was about all it was
– yet another car accessory with about as much practical day
to day value as a pair of fluffy dice, though far more expensive
and certainly less embarrassing. Any practical worth would
have to wait until an excuse could be engineered for a journey
to unknown parts. In all probability there were thousands of
neglected great aunts and uncles living in obscure parts of the country with exotic post codes who received a surprise visit from
a vaguely remembered great nephew that Christmas, as well as a
distinct drop in the revenue gained from speed cameras.

I never had any real doubt about the value of my new
acquisition, but if there were any lingering reservations they
were dispelled one dark and wet evening rush hour. The fare
was a well-dressed young gent who had travelled from London
by train, arriving just as the traffic was hitting its peak and,
as always when it is raining, creating havoc on the roads with
drivers who believed that a spot or two of precipitation required
them to travel at half their normal rate and check their brakes
were working several times a minute. My customer gave off an
air of ineffable superiority, clearly regarding me as occupying
the rank of something like an assistant footman, and calmly
announced his hotel destination with the tone of one who
assumes that since he is travelling there it must be well known
to anyone who lives within a hundred miles of it.
By this time I knew almost all the hotels within five miles of
the principal railway station, but this one I had never heard of,
and neither had the operator who I radioed for assistance in the
office. The customer had never been to Yorkshire before, and
gave the impression that coming back would be the equivalent
of dining out on dead dog with a side dish of fried sawdust,
which from his superior demeanour he probably thought was
a Yorkshire delicacy anyway. ‘Do you have any idea which area
this is in?’ I asked ‘None at all’, he replied, and then fell silent
as one who has passed the baton of intractability to someone
else and now expects to see them run off into the distance with it. ‘Do you have a street name for it?’ I ventured ‘No, but it’s
in Yorkshire somewhere’ he helpfully offered. He might just
as well have told me that there is a needle in his haystack, but
then I remembered that he was a Londoner and may well have
considered that Yorkshire was a small blob on a map roughly
the size of Kensington. ‘What about a ‘phone number, could you
ring them?’ ‘Afraid not’, he responded with the air of one who has
made a final contribution to a conversation with someone both
culturally and intellectually on the level of primitive protozoa.
At this point I remembered that Maureen had a database of
things like hotels in her memory; I had no idea how complete it
was, but it seemed about the only hope I had short of throwing
him out, which at that point was admittedly quite an attractive
alternative. This was where I would find out if the sat-nav was
really as good as I had hoped.
I entered the name of the hotel more in hope than
expectation, and awaited the results. To my amazement there
it was, the very place. Yes, I know that this is what satellite
navigation systems are designed to do, and nowadays if the
sat-nav couldn’t handle it a smartphone would. But these were
the medieval days of electronic navigation, and I was still lost
in wonder that something barely the size of a tennis ball could
not only know where such a place was, but even have a decent
stab at directing me there. The screen displayed the location –
somewhere the other side of Halifax – no wonder I had never
heard of it. But for me it was a lucrative fare with which to end
my shift, even if the company was to be of questionable pedigree
and the conversation facile.
 I instructed Maureen to navigate the way there and then
just followed her instructions, leaving the city and hitting the
motorway network. Twenty minutes later Maureen directed
me to leave the M62 and take a road I had never used before.
From that day to this I really have no idea where I went. Another
twenty minutes obeying directions ensued, taking turn after turn, passing through villages and even glimpsing the distant
lights of Halifax as we skirted it, ploughing on through the rainy
night. I found myself fighting a rising anxiety as the arrival
time on the screen drew ever nearer and all we had seen for
the previous twenty minutes was inky darkness punctured by
the occasional light from a remote cottage. We were somewhere
high up in the Pennines, but exactly where I had no idea. Could
it be that Maureen was to prove a capricious lover and dump
me naked on a minor road outside an obscure village with a
sinister laugh of derision? At least this would have generated
conversation of a sort; the sullen silence from the back seat and
a monosyllabic discouragement of all attempts to engage him in
conversation only added to my anxiety.
The screen showed one minute to arrival; still no sign of
civilisation. Then it displayed the picture of a chequered flag,
Maureen’s signal that arrival was imminent. Still no sign of
life whatever, and anxiety gave rise to ill-disguised panic. The
chequered flag grew closer, and a confident voice instructed me
to turn left in point two of a mile. Still an inky blackness that fed
my fear. What on earth was I to do when Maureen announced
our arrival at a farm gate in Lower Who-Knows-Where?