I have just spent the last half an hour on the taxi rank, listening to a taxi driver, who for some reason long since lost in the mists of time, is called Swampy.
This is not his actual name, obviously, no mother would do that even after a very difficult birth. Swampy has a series of intense and diverse interests which he talks about from time to time, and tonight the topic was the final years of the railway in Morecambe, backed up with some videos of the last train leaving.
He has missed his way, he truly has, somewhere in the world there should be a role for somebody with such a profoundly detailed and obscure collection of knowledge.
I listened politely, and with genuine awe, although I regret to say that I am not greatly interested in trains of any description, except as a means of transport, albeit one of my favourites, especially the sleepers. If you have never travelled by sleeper train, you should, it is a satisfyingly archaic and pleasurable experience.
I helped myself to some of his taxi cards whilst I was at it. Swampy works for a friend of mine, and it is jolly useful to have some cards to hand out with a telephone number. These can be handed to anybody who either would like to get a taxi later on, or who wants to complain about me.
This is not an infrequent occurrence for all taxi drivers, there is inevitably an occasional customer who feels hard done to and fails to believe that almost none of us have an actual boss. Even those few who do are never going to be sacked, even if they have actually punched the customer, or something awful, because of unemployed taxi drivers being almost impossible to find. We all carry supplies of one another’s taxi cards to hand out to dissatisfied customers, it makes life more entertaining.
We did once leave an answering machine message on our taxi telephone, in the glorious days when we had a taxi company, which gave the mobile phone number of the grumpiest driver in the company as being our customer relations manager, to be contacted in the unlikely event of a complaint.
Of course we completely forgot that we had done this, until one evening many months and months later when I was in the driver’s car chatting, and somebody interrupted with a telephone call.
He listened for a few moments, responded with the most gloriously brief Anglo-Saxon phrase, and hung up.
“Seems to happen a lot,” he said vaguely.
We left the message as it was, it seemed to be as good a way as any other to deal with dissatisfied customers.
We have been at the farm, for almost all of the part of the day in which we were both awake and also not at work. The picture at the top details my progress, it needs all sorts of things doing to it, not least the stonework setting properly into the step. Mark observantly pointed out that this was wrong: but another few days and it will be done and I can move along.
Mark spent the day fitting the pipes for the new heater, the one out of our old London taxi, which will heat the back of the van as well as the cab. This has to be installed before the carpet goes down and the seats are finally bolted in, because the pipework has got to run through the cab. It will be a splendid improvement when it is running, it used to get chilly in the back on long journeys.
Only the wings to do and I can start doing some inside bits. I am starting to plan the skull and crossbones for the pirate bathroom.
Watch this space.
