Thursday 30th June

 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.


27
Headingley – The World of
Casinos and Bingo Halls

 My first introduction to the sub-culture of the three casinos that
operated in central Leeds at that time was as a day shift driver,
with the 5.20 a.m. lottery of “Napoleon’s”. This always seemed
to me a particularly apposite name for an establishment whose
driving forces were greed, acquisitiveness and the exploitation
of ordinary people’s vulnerability. On a day shift the first task
was to provide life support for my cab at the petrol station so
that it was no longer running on fumes. The second was to see
how many cars were waiting for work in the plot covering an
area replete with hotels, clubs, lap-dancing establishments, the
main railway terminus and Napoleon’s. If there were fewer than
six it was worth heading there with all possible speed, slowing
only for the speed cameras on Tong Road, to try to pick up a job
taking the casino staff home after their night’s work. Because
buses were not operating this early the casino block booked a
number of cars for their staff, and each one would be allocated
a reference number. When the staff came out each driver would
call out his number, and the relevant passengers would climb in.
Some of these jobs did not pay particularly well, just a couple of
drop-offs to local areas, but some went well outside the limits of
the city, and would provide a very satisfactory start to the day’s
work. Of course the lottery element involved in allocating work
of varying value fuelled the ubiquitous paranoia of the drivers about who had scooped the best paid jobs, but in reality it was
probably completely random – whoever was dispatching cars
had far better things to do than see who was driving each vehicle
and then make an assessment of how much favour to bestow on
whom. I had my fair share of “shite” and more lucrative trips,
for which, perhaps poignantly, there seemed to be a dearth of
adjectives in the cab driver’s thesaurus.
 Night shifts were different, though, because jobs almost
invariably involved taking customers home rather than staff,
and by the time I had completed a hundred or more jobs from
the casinos to various residences I had a pretty good idea of
the sort of clientele they attracted and the kind of losses people
would sustain during an average visit.
The first question, naturally, that one would ask once a fare
was on board was how successful their evening had been. It
may, of course, have been part of a general ploy to be as meagre
with fare and gratuity as possible, but of all the people I ever
picked up from a casino I only recall a handful who claimed to
have had a good evening and made anything like a profit on the
night’s venture; almost inevitably the tale was one of frustration,
disappointment, woe and even anger.
Many losses were, of course, quite modest, and provided
good value for money in terms of a night’s entertainment; these
customers took their losses with a mixture of good humour and
Stoicism. But there seemed to be an equal number that were
of an altogether different nature, who brought into the cab an
atmosphere of anger and resentment. At times almost palpable,
it was sometimes focussed on the management or staff of the
casino, but more frequently it was directed inwards, at their own
stupidity and lack of self-control. Many of the journeys from
one of these establishments were almost literally down the road
to an area of the city where few people would choose to live
unless they were martial arts experts or else armed to the teeth.
Some gentle probing not infrequently revealed that many such customers earned enough money to rent or buy property in a
much less volatile neighbourhood, but their gambling addiction
consumed a significant percentage of their disposable income,
as well as demanding proximity to the means of gratifying it.
There were also some comical stories of trips from casinos;
there was a student who, at the start of term, and with a bank
balance loaded with several thousands of pounds to pay for
the cost of a term’s lodging, food, books and general spending,
had gone into the casino on a Monday evening. By the time I
collected him in the early hours, he had managed to strip his
bank balance naked – though thankfully still kept enough petty
cash in hand to pay his fare. On enquiring what he would do
now he had no money he replied that he would think about that
in the morning, but seemed unruffled and Micawber-like at the
predicament in which he had landed himself.

You might be tempted to think that compared to the heady
world of televised professional poker, and the gambling of large
sums of money at the serious casinos of a major city, the humble
bingo hall on the edges of the densely-populated council estate
would be strictly minor league; you would also quite probably
be mistaken.