Taxis

We are trying so hard to get the camper van finished that Mark did not come to work during the day today. Instead he went over to the farm and got on with the camper van until the early evening, and came out to work then.

As you know, Saturdays in the summer time are our very busiest times, and usually we just stagger out of bed and go back to work. I more or less did that really, except for making a picnic and hanging washing out and feeding children and cleaning the taxi out.

I should clean it after Saturday rather than before really, because on some Saturdays there is a burger van outside the nightclub.

This is such an appalling nuisance that I can hardly explain it.

Of course I don’t at all mind somebody hanging about in the middle of the night trying to extract as much money from late-night revellers as can possibly be found in their pockets. Obviously I think that is perfectly reasonable.

The nuisance bit comes with very intoxicated people with uncertain fistfuls of hamburgers and chips, all of which are liberally drenched in lavish squirts of tomato sauce.

These are not in the least the sort of people you want collapsing into the back of your nice clean taxi at four o’ clock in the morning.

Obviously I ask them very nicely to wrap it all up and save it until they get home, but as I am sure you can imagine, I might as well be saying: “warble warble warble” for all the notice than anybody takes when they have had six pints of beer, six Jaeger bombs and half a gallon of WKD.

Therefore I have become resigned to waking up on Sundays to discover the back seat of my taxi lavishly besmeared with chips and ketchup-soaked crumbs.

In many ways this has been a very good experience, in that I am never, ever ever tempted to eat a similarly scented diet. There is nothing quite like that revolting smell when I open the taxi door, and I can’t think of anything more vile than actually having to eat it.

Obviously that isn’t true, I have got a fairly fertile imagination and can think of lots of things more vile, please accept that as figurative rather than literal speaking. The thing is that it does not encourage in me a wish to eat burgers and chips.

Therefore I am pleased to note that contrary to most people’s experience, in fact the presence of handy junk food easily available in my workspace has actually improved my diet rather than otherwise, which can only be a good thing.

It appears to be a Saturday night not only tightly packed with drunk people, but also with squabbling taxi companies. I was fascinated to discover tonight that not only have Bowness Taxis had a quarrel and are no longer talking to one another, so also have the very nice Eastern Europeans who had all banded together to form their own exclusive company, which they called, for some arcane Eastern European reason, G Taxis.

I am unexpectedly disappointed about this. Our own English companies are always getting cross with one another and divorcing each other and not wanting to play together any more. I have even known it come to fights and people getting punched on the nose: but the Eastern European chaps are young and smart and polished and friendly and somehow I had thought they might behave better.

Obviously they don’t, maybe it is catching.

Apart from being sorry to see them being cross with one another of course it is the most exciting thing that has happened for weeks and I was full of gossip when Mark finally turned up at work. I had caught up with Jacek at the garage and eagerly waylaid him to demand an update straight from the taxi’s mouth. He told me about it, with much shrugging and arm waving and eye-rolling and all the talents that make foreign storytellers so exciting and incomprehensible.

They are not talking to one another. Half of them have taken the company name off their top sign, and scraped the phone numbers off in order to emphasise their separation, like taking your wedding ring off and leaving it on the dressing table. It is very sad to see. They were good friends and it is not easy to run a taxi company, especially in a foreign language.

It is not all right when nice people quarrel. I wish they would stop it and be friends again. I wish they could get on and run their taxi company all together and be smart and efficient and well organised and make the rest of us all feel a bit inadequate and scruffy by comparison.

The thing is, I know they won’t.