We were so jolly pleased to have gone to work last night.
As you know, we almost didn’t bother because of Lucy’s dance show.
Then as we sat here among the falling snow, a few fluttering flakes became a thick veil. Winds started to curl around us, whipping the fallen snow into little drifts, and the temperature fell terribly.
The roads disappeared beneath an icy white shroud, and froze hard even as the snow continued to fall.
Almost with one accord, taxi drivers quietly switched off their telephones and struggled home whilst they still could.
These would be the ones without school fees, obviously.
Neither Mark nor I mind driving in snow, and we are both reasonably accomplished at it, being of the ‘keep your foot hard to the floor’ school of motoring.
By ten o’ clock there were a handful of taxis left in the village, and pubs bursting with people.
Almost every taxi company had switched its telephone off and closed.
We cleaned up.
It was not an easy night.
It was so cold that the melted snow on the windscreens turned to icy lumps on the windscreen wipers as we drove, and we had to keep stopping to break them free. The screenwash froze, and doors froze shut even whilst we were driving. The roads were sheets of terrible white ice, and the winds flung the fast-falling snow blindingly hard into the windscreens.
I don’t mind telling you that I had some very scary moments, hurtling sideways around corners and fighting with the steering. One of the few remaining taxi drivers crashed, quite badly, enough to write his car off and somebody else’s, and a neighbouring wall. This was on one of the better-gritted main roads. The night was savage.
We did not stop at all. Desperate people were flagging on every corner, cold and exhausted.
This is not great on a night out.
The worst couple that I picked up – and there were many – were in a state where I might easily have just taken them to the hospital. Dressed only in a strapless mini dress and high heels, the girl might as well have been completely naked in the bitter winds, her husband in a short sleeved shirt. Her heels made it impossible for her to walk in the drifting snow, and when I stopped for them she was white and sobbing quietly, her makeup smeared over her face in great black blotches.
They had been waiting for forty minutes.
She was too frozen and shocked even to talk when they got in the taxi, and her husband had to help her get out. I told them to go and get hot baths, and felt irrationally angry with them for such life-threatening stupidity.
They were not the only ones dressed so completely inadequately, although they were the closest to calamity. One young man, who was shivering so badly that his whole body was rigid with it, told me that he had set off in a jersey, but had left it at his friend’s house, because obviously he would not have wanted anybody to see him in it. I could not count how many women I saw, frozen and desperate in the blizzard, barefoot apart from crippling, high heeled sandals, bare legged, bare shouldered, dressed to look beautiful for their evening out.
Sometimes the idiocy of the human race leaves me lost for words.
Some people were lovely, smilingly relieved to be rescued, but a surprising number of people were not grateful at all. They crawled into the back seat and spat out drunken anger at taxi companies who had given up and let them down. One couple were so venomous that I told them that if they said another horrible word about my colleagues and friends I would take them back and leave them where I found them, which made her cry, and him bluster indignantly.
In the end we pulled into our own back alley at four in the morning, tired, but jubilantly flush with cash, and miraculously undamaged.
What a jolly good job we had come back.
I didn’t take a picture. Have another snowy one of the dog.
