Goodness me, what shenanigans we had last night.
For some completely inexplicable reason somebody in an office in Carlisle has decided that taxis must no longer be allowed to wait for customers outside the nightclub in Bowness. This stretch of road is a crescent, running between the lake and the churchyard, with nothing on it at all except a nightclub and some geese. It does not have an official taxi rank on it. It has had an unofficial one for thirty years.
Nevertheless, Carlisle has decided, it is unofficial and therefore should not be allowed. All taxis should henceforth go back into the centre of town, which is half a mile away, and wait there for people to walk back to us at the end of their night of clubbing.
I am quite sure that you don’t need me to point out the obvious flaws in that plan.
The police were instructed to clear us all off and send us away.
They were not especially delighted about having to do this.
The doormen on the nightclub were not delighted either.
The taxi drivers had a short but brief meeting with one another and the police, mainly conducted in Anglo-Saxon, and then with one accord we all buzzed off home.
There were three hundred people in the nightclub and no taxis outside it.
I don’t know what happened to them all.
I do know that it took a very long time to clear up the mess this morning. Apparently there were litter bins and traffic cones and flower pots and roadwork detritus chucked about all over the roads everywhere. Some people must have been very bored on their five mile walk home.
I went home feeling very miserable, because most of our income comes from intoxicated nightclub customers, and without it we have something of a difficulty. Actually that is an understatement. Without that we will be bankrupt in less than a month.
There was another taxi driver standing in the alley at the back of our house, smoking and looking anxious. Ten minutes later Mark came home and another taxi driver appeared at the back door.
We had a small middle-of-the-night conference.
We bolstered our resolve to stand firmly together and not go back to work, with a glass of wine, so that more driving would be impossible.
Instead of earning a living I wrote an email to our newly-elected nice boy councillor, squeaking with panic.
Then we disbanded to go to bed, with less than half a night’s takings and horrid churning pangs of anxiety.
I woke up with a headache and an agonising school-fees nightmare. We sat in bed drinking coffee and wondering what on earth we might do now. It is not very nice when somebody tells you that you have got to stop doing the thing that you do to earn a living.
Our nice councillor had written back already, promising that he was on the case, which was a tiny bit cheering, and we contemplated what we could do instead if our gainful unemployment were to collapse about our ears.
We had not thought of anything much when the phone rang, and it was the police. They had had a determined email from our nice councillor and a busy night full of drunk people who couldn’t get home.
They said that they had been thinking a bit, and felt that it might not be a good idea to have a nightclub without taxis.
We thought they were probably right.
Of course the police do not make the rules, and if they have been told by somebody important in Carlisle that they have got to do something then they have to do it.
They have decided to have a meeting with all of the nightclub taxi drivers at the police station on Tuesday afternoon. We are going to sit down together and see what we can do to make the problem better.
We accepted the invitation with relief, and so our contemplations of alternative sources of income have been shelved again.
For now.
I took the picture whilst I was at work this evening.
