Probably the most tiresome thing about this job is that it carries on during those wonderful hours when everybody else has loosened their Firm Control Underwear, stuck their feet up on the table with a large glass of something restorative, and is sighing with relief.
When you drive a taxi the entertaining pictures and captions that people post on Facebook on a Friday afternoon in order to be celebratory about the approaching weekend are merely ironic to you because you are grimly aware that you are about to dive into the busiest days of your week. Weekend is Workers’ Playtime, and all my customers will be playing. In the modern mostly non-Muslim part of the world where we are what I really mean by this is that they will be drinking. By midnight on Saturday actually all my customers will be drunk. It could be either merrily drunk or grumpily drunk: but they will be drunk.
I don’t at all mind drunk, in fact when it is me it sometimes seems like a lovely idea. It can also have some splendid spin-off advantages because drunk people in the right frame of mind can become wonderfully, cheerily benevolent with their tips. I make a serious effort to cultivate this frame of mind in likely customers.
After twenty years of driving a taxi I have long ago learned to spot the ones whose drunkenness is likely to lead them to ejecting the contents of their stomach, also the ones who have inadvertently spent their taxi fare and who are making rascally plans about what to do next. A sort of uneasiness in the gait of the first, a slight bravado and determination in the eyes of the second. All of them will be left standing outside the local nightclub by me to get in with a newer and probably inexperienced Eastern European driver who will have to look at it as a valuable learning curve and possibly take his back seat out to scoop regurgitated burger from down the cracks.
I am one of the world’s experts at handing out rejection to unwanted customers. Fellow parents at my children’s very smart schools would be utterly astonished at the Anglo-Saxon decisiveness with which I can refuse a fare from a person whom I judge to have insufficient funds. This is not a career with much scope for sympathetic customer relations, and I only bother using my interpersonal skills at all if I think there might be some pecuniary benefit to me in doing so.
This is not greatly demanding because what is mostly required of me as a conversationalist in the taxi is not to reveal quite how depressingly stupid I believe a customer to be. One of the sentences most guaranteed to reduce a tip to a minimum is: “gosh, you’re a complete prat, sir, aren’t you?”
Tips are an important part of the whole activity but not always forthcoming. If ever you fancy doing this as a career, let me give you the heads up now: you won’t ever get much out of the middle classes because the value of their pensions has dropped and they are without underwear under the expensive coats. You might get something if the man is paying and you can forget it completely if it is his wife. Women of any age are rubbish at tipping, and young girls in heels in which they can’t actually walk quite often come out without any money at all, presumably hoping that people will overlook this in return for them having neglected to get dressed beyond their underwear. I have a suspicion that this works better with some of the other drivers than it does with me.
In fact the very best customers can be the unexpected. Scallywags from Liverpool will sometimes hand me a twenty pound note and hop out chirpily, leaving me genuinely delighted and cheered by their generosity. Impoverished kitchen staff from hotels will almost always tip out of their rotten wages, because they know how important it is. Sometimes people just tip because they are nice.
They will all be here in the Lake District this weekend, clambering in and out of taxis and – I hope – keeping me busy. My glass of wine and unfastened underwear happens at about five o’ clock on Sunday morning when we pool the weekend’s plunder, tell each other stories about rascals and adventures and amusing moments, have a long hot shower and collapse into bed. I have done this almost every weekend for the last twenty years.
I love it.
