It is warm, and grey, and I am in the taxi rank after an uneventful day, most of which I seem to have spent asleep.
Obviously this is because I don’t really count the bit of it that happened very early this morning, when I was awake and everybody else on the planet, except for the clientele of our local nightclub, was fast asleep.
Other people were awake as well as taxi drivers and revellers. There were the police, and the bouncers, and a couple of tired-looking ambulance men.
There are some new bouncers on the nightclub door. You can tell that they are new, because they are still nice to people. They have not had time yet to develop the weary cynicism that comes with dealing with an intoxicated youthful public after bedtime every night.
Two of them came up to me last night and asked if I would be very kind and take home a tragic youth who was asleep in a bench in the road. They were worried about him, they explained, it was cold, and he was very drunk.
I was not in the least worried about him. It was not terribly cold, at least, not death-from-hypothermia cold. We get a couple of these deaths every year. People, almost always young men, are too drunk or too broke to get taxis, fall asleep and then freeze to death. This is unusual in July, so I failed to become alarmed on his behalf, and said so.
The bouncers were young, and determined to be upstanding citizens.
They implored me to take him home.
Eventually, reluctantly, because the milk of human kindness is absent from my bloodstream at nights, I agreed that I would, if he had any money.
It turned out that he did, and after I had relieved him of fifty quid we set off to Kendal.
The first time he was sick was before we were even out of sight of the nightclub.
I am sufficiently experienced in driving a taxi to recognise the symptoms, and so he was not sick in the car. The door had been opened and he had been shoved out into an unceremonious heap on the pavement.
He was not very well.
After that he was obliged to travel with his head sticking out of the window, like people’s dogs always like to when they are allowed to stand on the seat.
He had a couple more episodes before we got home.
Today, Mark rinsed the side of my car and we decided that it would do.
It does not really matter very much any more.
My taxi is going to be replaced on Monday. I will have a new one.
I was not expecting to feel excited about this, but actually I am.
You are not allowed to have a taxi which is over ten years old in the Lake District. The council will make exceptions for something that is in exceptionally good condition, which mine is not. In fact, exceptionally rubbish would probably fit the bill better.
It has got black smoke and stained seats and something wrong with the turbo, which means that the engine turns itself off if I go above three thousand revs. Mark has not fixed this because he says that it is not entirely a bad thing.
In short, it is a tired taxi.
Despite it being tired, I like it very much. It has got a very handy shelf above the windscreen on which I can store my flask and my picnic and my library books, and the computer on which I write these very words. It will go at almost a hundred and twenty miles an hour, as long as we are going downhill and it has got plenty of time to work itself up to it, although if my mother is reading this I would like to reassure her that obviously I have never tried this. It has got an enormous boot space in which I have put a comfortable dog bed, and Mark has put an extra-bright light in the roof so that I can still read at nights even though my eyesight is rubbish these days.
My taxi is important. I drive hundreds of miles in it every week, about six hundred at this time of year, and these are not motorway miles, but actual driving, around roundabouts and traffic lights and side streets. It becomes like an extension of oneself.
I do not at all want to lose it.
As it happens I am not exactly going to lose it.
Lakeside Taxis have offered to sell us the very same car, just in a slightly newer model.
I haven’t seen it yet, but Mark says that he has seen it around the village, and that it is black. I am going to collect it on Monday, and I am really excited.
This has turned out to be jolly good fortune for last night’s unwell gentleman.
If I had already been in my exciting new car then he would have stayed asleep on the bench even if he had had enough money and it had been minus ten outside.
I don’t have a picture of a taxi, it would be dull anyway. Have a picture of our grapevine. We are very pleased with it
