Saturday night driving a taxi can be an eventful, and occasionally surprising, experience.
I was interested, although not particularly surprised, for instance, at three o’ clock this morning to listen to a gentleman who had been refused admittance to the local nightclub, standing on the pavement announcing that he was the messiah and that the doormen would regret their flinty natures and that he would shake the dust from the nightclub doorway off his shoes before he left.
I have never experienced dust as much as excessive sticky being the detritus of our village nightclub, and in the event it turned out that he
didn’t have time to shake them very much, because when the local officers of the constabulary turned up to encourage him to go home, he declined, and some minor violence occurred which was abruptly terminated when he was rather forcefully loaded into the police van and the drugs removed from his pockets.
After that there was another surprise, when a guest from one of the smarter hotels emerged from the same nightclub – we only have one – in the company of two of the chambermaids, who, it turned out, he had met on the hotel premises during their working hours. They had, fairly inexplicably as far as I could see, agreed to go back to his hotel room with him. I left them standing on the hotel steps arguing about how they might get past the night porter unnoticed, and whether or not they should go back to their rooms for their pyjamas. I thought that this might turn out to be a wasted exercise but forbore to comment, and they were still quarrelling, rather drunkenly, when I drove off.
Hearing fragments of dozens of stories every night and never finding out the rest is one of the inevitable elements of this job. I never find out if the couple having the terrible row get a divorce or not, or if the disappointed girl got an explanatory call from the man the next morning with a satisfactory explanation for his absence.
I don’t know what happened to the man left standing in the pavement, bawling that he was going to go back to his mother’s whilst his wife sobbed her way home alone in the back of a taxi. I hope he stamped his anger away on the long walk back and crept quietly into bed beside her as the dawn was coming up.
I will never know if the Messiah finished up facing charges of being drunk and disorderly, or if more serious drug misdemeanours were laid to his account. I don’t think I want to know what happened next between the guest and the chambermaids. Some things are best left shrouded in mystery.
I was made terribly sad tonight to see a poor, flattened hedgehog in the road outside the Marina. I was pleased to hear the barn owl hooting even over the din of the nightclub. I was mystified, although not surprised, by the sheer absence of intellectual capacity on behalf of the very beautiful young girl on the arm of the rather stout but beautifully groomed elderly gentleman. I was entertained by one of the doormen at the nightclub telling us about the youth with the borrowed ID passport who knew the birthdate and details inside perfectly, but could not tell him what star sign he was, being clearly unaccustomed to an August birthday.
The picture is nothing whatsoever to do with taxis, because I forgot to take one, and as you know I am not not in Windermere driving a taxi tonight, but have embarked on a Number Two Daughter Collecting Adventure. We are in an hotel at Manchester Airport, sitting on a rather nice white-sheeted bed, full of wine and good cheer, and I will tell that story tomorrow when it is complete.
The picture is a seasonal autumn one, which is not even remotely relevant to the subject matter of today’s diary entry, because I have written about last night, which I thought you might like to hear. It is relevant to today, though, which has been still and beautiful and delightfully autumnal. I stood at the farm breathing in the gathering evening tonight and thought that it was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, leaves and berries and the faintest hint of woodsmoke drifting across the fells.
Life is ace.
