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

 19
Hunslet – Paranoia – Feeding and Shite

 Certain mild forms of psychiatric disorder appear to be almost
essential requirements for particular professions. Currently
dentists and farmers are the most likely to suffer from levels
of depression severe enough to precipitate suicide. Politicians
experience periodic bouts of narcissism and delusions of
grandeur, depending on their popularity ratings. Football
managers and players seem to suffer from manic depression,
their place on the bi-polar scale determined by the results of
their team and the perceived merits or otherwise of the match
officials. But if the conditions known as “housemaid’s knee”
and “tennis elbow” relate in any way to those occupations there
should certainly be a condition called “Taxi Driver’s Paranoia.”
I encountered quite severe forms of the illness not so much
from day one but from hour one in the private hire world. Several
drivers arriving at a similar time to collect a car seemed to share
the common objective of outdoing one another in relating
accounts of how awful a hand they had been dealt. 

For the first week I assumed that I had just come across a few  disgruntled drivers who had for whatever reason not enjoyed a
very good shift; three months into the job I realised that this
kind of attitude is endemic, and in some perverse way acts as
a kind of soothing balm to anaesthetise them from the more
unsavoury aspects of the job.  ....... those who drive for hire and
reward seem to acquire a variety of persecution complexes that
provide succour for their distressed souls. These are expressed
in a variety of forms; from the Mazurka of Martyrdom through
the Sonata of the Scapegoat to the full-blown Symphony of the
Sacrificial Lamb with full highly-strung orchestra. The detail of
the score would typically contain several stories demonstrating
to any reasonable listener that they had been picked on to
perform a succession of thankless tasks adding up to a shift that
not only failed to keep the wolf from the door but positively
welcomed him over the threshold and into the kitchen. Only by
working their butts off could they prevent the rapacious invader
from ascending the stairs to devour their families. All such jobs
and periods of work were known collectively as “shite”, the final
“e” affording the opportunity to lengthen the middle vowel and
thus facilitate the expression of a greater level of disgust than
the simple monosyllabic “shit”, though the two terms were used
more or less interchangeably. The root causes of the persecution complex are to be found
in the thought patterns encouraged by the isolated nature of the
job on the one hand, and the value attributed to the work allotted
to them on the other.
The relative isolation the driver experiences from anyone  else working for the company during a shift was, for me, one of
the most attractive aspects of the job. It is impossible to survive
two decades in clerical ministry without being a decent “people
person” and being able to cope with the often unreasonable
demands of the average churchgoer. Twenty years or so of
constant pressure from people with problems and needs – some
real, many imaginary – had, however, left me with a powerful
longing to hold the human race in general at arm’s length. At
one point in my life this had resulted in an attempt to buy an
isolated croft in the Outer Hebrides and move there lock, stock
and barrel. The attempt was thwarted in the end by the owner,
one of Stornoway’s loyal army of Free Presbyterian churchgoers,
pulling out of the contract at the last minute when she was
presented with a better offer. I have since come to regard this
episode as divine deliverance; I would have loved the barren
landscape of Lewis, and could even have coped with the weather,
but would have very rapidly despaired of this particular brand of
Puritanical hypocrisy. 
So when I began to drive a minicab for a
living the discovery that once ensconced in the car I was unlikely
to have to speak to anyone with any kind of call on my time
and attention, and indulge only in the superficial conversation
typically held with customers, was one that made my heart feel
very light indeed.
Given that most taxi drivers register at least half way up
on the schizophrenia scale, however, the apparently arbitrary
manner in which most work arrived via the datahead was almost
certain to result in some measure of paranoia. There would be
few problems when work was plentiful and profitable. Shifts like
these allowed very little time for thinking about anything other
than work. When a job was completed the driver was required
to enter a code into the datahead which cleared the vehicle for
the next assignment. In busy times this would appear instantly,
to be replaced by another when that job was completed. This
non-stop flow of work could easily last for several hours, and messages would appear on the screen pleading with drivers
not to take a break until it died down. Occasionally this state
of affairs would last all day, a twelve-hour shift would pass in
the eponymous twinkling of an eye, and there would be little or
no opportunity for reminding oneself that we were a persecuted
minority oppressed by the arrogant plutocrats who believed
they owned our souls.
Most days, however, there was at least one sizeable lull in
the flow of work, providing ample opportunity for exercising
one’s paranoid imagination. No amount of staring at the
inactive screen would induce it to cough out another piece of
work, however much willpower or hypnotic effort was applied
to the uncooperative electronic circuitry. When such periods of
enforced idleness extended upwards of fifteen minutes, and still
no work emerged, it became increasingly difficult to attribute
the dearth of earning opportunities to anything other than some
malevolent individual who had decided for whatever reason that
this particular driver on this particular day should be deprived of
a decent living. These attacks of paranoia would begin in quite a
mild way, with perhaps just the odd stray thought about a recent
conversation with one of the telephone operators that could have
been misinterpreted, but the longer the wait without work the
more frequent and the more intense they became.