Something ghastly happened on the taxi rank this evening.
A young man was trying to drive down the road, and a fat man in a big four by four was coming the other way and wouldn’t reverse to let him go past.
There were taxis parked at the sides of the road, because the centre of Bowness is not an official taxi rank, only the place where everybody looks for taxis, so of course we all go there to wait.
Instead of politely reversing, the fat man pulled forward to block the road, and everything jammed up. Then he and his wife started shouting horrible things at the taxis, who were trying to get out of the way, but couldn’t, because there were people trying to get into the front one.
They were awful, rude and loud and abusive to all of us, and then they said to one of the other drivers that ‘this sort of people’, meaning taxi drivers, were a big local problem.
One of the taxi drivers shouted back. I secretly admired him for this.
When they went away Mark told me that the fat man was Windermere’s mayor.
I don’t know who chooses the mayor, but it is not at all nice to think that he has such a dreadful opinion of taxi drivers. I don’t think I am a local problem, because generally I am fairly polite to people and keep the garden reasonably tidy and pay my council tax. At any rate, I hope I am not. It was not at all a nice thing to happen.
Of course you might observe that I have got absolutely no business whatsoever to mind people shouting, because yesterday I was rude and unkind as well, to the Chinese man who parked across the middle of the junction and buzzed off into a restaurant.
This is called a Double Standard. I can have one if I like.
As it happened we were all deep in local gossip anyway, because the pub at the bottom of the taxi rank has just been closed down by the Environmental Health.
I have never been in there, apart from once, when I was trying to investigate someone who had been sick in a taxi who had said he worked there. This means that I have no need to fear whatever vile bacteria the Environmental Health think that they have been brewing in there. Its closure has caused a great deal of grumbling amongst some of the more disreputable local taxi customers, who don’t seem to mind the odd rat in their beer, because there is a pool table and live music.
I am not surprised that there are rats, because it is right on the edge of the lake, which is where rats like to live. I once fed a starving rat in our garden on purpose during a terribly cold winter, because it might have been a rat, but it was desperate and frozen and did not ask to be born a rat. I expect it would have preferred to be a cute puppy if it had been given a choice.
All of this excitement has made the evening a very full one, on top of which I have had another customer who wanted to pay with a card into my new card machine.
That is the second one. I am still enjoying this very much. All they do is put the card into the machine, and I press some buttons, and money flies out of their bank account by magic. Some of it flaps away by itself before it settles itself into mine, but this doesn’t really matter. It is much better than being somewhere like Coniston at four o’clock in the morning, and then discovering that your customer has spent all of their money on rat-flavoured beer and has none left for the taxi.
I am a newly technological business.
Have another picture of the Lake District.
