The last customer of the night turned out to be a villain.
I went back past the nightclub on my way home, just in case anybody was left, and there he was, hanging about and smoking.
He flagged me and jumped in, but he was so rude that I ought to have known better and just left him where he was. By that time of night my sensitivity to rudeness is so flattened anyway that I didn’t take any notice. I had already declined several intended-to-be offensive propositions, ignored insinuations about my parenthood, sexuality and marital status, and agreed, without interest, that I was a wicked thief who ought to be reported, arrested and then publicly executed.
We got to his house, and he told me that he had no intention of paying the fare because he considered it to be too expensive, and proposed to give me half of it.
I was unimpressed with this, especially as I could see that he had a wallet full of cash.
One of the nice things about drunk people is that they don’t think these things through very thoroughly. If I had intended to make such an unattractive offer to a taxi driver, I would have got out first.
He hadn’t, which was foolish of him, and therefore was taken by surprise when I turned the car round, rather smartly, in case he had already worked out where the door handle was, and set off back down the hill to return him to his nightclub of origin.
It took him about a mile before he worked out how to find the door handle.
Obviously as soon as he did, he opened the door.
By that time we were going quite quickly.
He told me, menacingly, that he intended to leap out, which would then, for some reason probably coherent to people who have consumed a great deal of beer and cocaine, be my fault.
I thought that I would have been quite pleased with this outcome. I assured him that he was welcome to do so, and increased my speed to forty. There are some members of the public who would not be sadly missed, not by me anyway.
Disappointingly, he didn’t jump out. He shouted about it a lot, and used up his entire collection of rude words, but he stayed where he was.
We drove the last mile with the passenger door wide open, and him making unsuccessful attempts to wrest the steering wheel from my hands and steer the taxi into the lake. Drunk people do not generally have the competence to manage this sort of thing, and he was no exception.
By the time we got back to the nightclub it was dark and empty. I stopped there, and encouraged him to get out, which he did. He was not very pleased about this, and told me that I had failed to recognise an offer which would have been good for me.
I had to get out as well, because he stomped off into the darkness without closing the door, and as I climbed back into the driver’s seat he came rushing back again and opened both the passenger door and the back door again.
This is the sort of game that could go on all night, so I accelerated away without closing either of them. I would have liked to run over his foot or something, but he jumped out of the way and so I didn’t.
I stopped after a safe distance, and closed the doors. Then I telephoned Lakeside Taxis, who were the last taxi company likely to be still awake, and explained that I had had an encounter with a nuisance. They agreed that they had also had enough nuisances in their evening, and would not pick him up either, so I drove home contented in the knowledge that he had a long, uphill walk to round off his evening.
When I got home Mark said that the young man in question has been a nuisance in his taxi in the past, and generally refuses to pay, leaving his friends to make up the deficiency on his behalf.
I hope he remembers me, because misfortunately I have so many nuisances in my working life, I will undoubtedly have forgotten him before I see him again.
Have a picture of Windermere.
