I like my job.
It has the curious characteristic of never feeling quite permanent, for the last twenty years I, and other people, have cherished the assumption that sooner or later I would get a real job and stop messing about doing this.
It is only relatively recently that I have reached an acceptance that actually another job really isn’t likely to happen, and that the reality of my adult life is that, albeit by default, taxi driving has been my chosen career.
I have been cross with myself about this. As employment goes it is right at the end of the status parade, nowhere near corporate lawyer and actually slightly behind shop assistant. If I am honest I think that probably it is only marginally ahead of post office robber and lady of the night: there has always been a fringes-of-society, slightly outlaw feeling to the job. Occasionally I am guiltily aware of potential squandered, of promise unfulfilled, of avenues unexplored and wonder if I might have wasted my life.
I can take this opportunity to assure you that this is absolutely and certainly correct.
I have, during the course of the half century I have been on the planet, achieved nothing of note whatsoever. I have made no mark on history, and probably never will. I shall die and fade away completely unremembered. I have had no astonishing insights, conquered no summits, and discovered no hidden planets. I haven’t even, so far, been memorably wicked.
This outcome to my life would have appalled the ten year old me, who was quite certain that the world had grave need of my as yet unidentifiable, but undoubtedly considerable talents, and that it was eagerly awaiting my debut.
However, I am grown up now, and know a lot more about things like phone hacking and Sunday newspaper exclusives, and have come to consider that obscurity and insignificance is actually just fine by me. More than fine. I can’t imagine anything more hateful than people wanting to take pictures of me in the street. It irritates me when taxi customers ask my name.
I think that I have got to assume that had I really wanted fame and fortune I would probably have put some effort into getting them, which I very evidently have not. In fact, my efforts in the fortune-raising department usually cease immediately as soon as I have made enough money to pay the most pressing of the bills and I can hurl my car keys into the drawer and recklessly dash off to do something pointless, and preferably expensive and entertaining, instead.
I once read a book whose basic premise was that you have always got exactly as much money as you want. If you want more money then you go off and make some.
This is particularly true in my profession, where in disorganised moments in the past I have been in the position of needing to buy bread and milk, and had to go and sit on the taxi rank for a couple of hours before breakfast. If I want money I can always earn it. I have just got to want it badly enough. I have got to want money more than I want a lie in, or an evening in front of the DVD machine, or a swim and a sauna: and the cold reality of it is that quite often I don’t.
Therefore I can only conclude that the evidence is uncompromisingly clear. I am as wealthy as I actually want to be.
Of course I go out to work a lot at the moment, because I want money quite badly, on account of school fees. I saw our neighbour in the garden this morning, and he said plaintively that we were hardly ever in our house making an annoying noise at the moment, he had got to have the radio on to make up for it.
The thing about being a taxi driver is that I have never found anything else that suited me as well. I can’t imagine that I ever would. No matter how I might secretly pretend to myself that if only things had been different I might have been a brain surgeon, or a merchant banker, or an accountant, none of this is true.
I would have been rubbish at all those things mostly due to the amount of effort involved in attaining them. I have occasionally thought that I might take some sort of distance learning course and attempt to better myself, improve my career prospects and chances at fortune: but I haven’t, and the reason for this is not at all complicated. I am irrefutably idle.
And so here I am, on the taxi rank with everybody else who can’t quite get their act together to get a job, and in fact the reason I have never tried to get out of it is that I have found my perfect niche.
I am completely free to come and go as I choose, I never have to call in sick, or late: I just am sick, or late. I don’t have to wear high heels or make up or a suit. I can lie in bed if I like. I can think what I like with no corporate line to follow, no enthusiasm or group-think or executive dining room to aim at, no opinion that I had better not voice.
I can go home if I have had enough, and nobody will care except Mark and the children. I can eject a vile customer or refuse to take him in the first place.
I spend most of my day reading, or thinking, or writing to you, or listening to the radio, or sewing, or chatting. Sometimes I have got to drive round the Lake District.
I love the gambling, the utterly random spin of the wheel which might take me to London or to the Langdales or to the garage with a flat tyre. I love that I can set out in the morning and have got no idea where the day will take me.
I am as wealthy as I want to be. I can spend as much time with my family as I want to do. Some days are really, astonishingly, wonderfully lucky.
My goodness, it’s a good life.
I can’t think why anybody would want to do anything else.
