I have just taken my favourite customer home.
He is the customer I like best of all. He is a dog called Murphy, and he usually comes with people attached.
It wouldn’t matter if he didn’t. Murphy would probably be happy to travel by himself. Indeed, his owners have often offered to leave him in the taxi for me to drop off at the end of the night.
Murphy does not particularly like people, but he appreciates the taxi a great deal. In the boot there is a dog bed, which smells pleasingly of all the dogs who ever travel in the taxi, and Murphy likes it very much. He leaps in and curls up with a contented sigh, and generally refuses to get out at the other end.
I wish all my customers were as satisfied.
You will have guessed that we are back on the road again.
Mark made it to work just after half past two this morning.
He joined me for the final, and generally fairly rewarding, hour of ferrying drunk people away from the nightclub and back to their own places of safety where they could vomit and pass out at their undisturbed leisure.
He made thirty quid, so all was not lost.
The rain started in earnest about an hour before he had managed to finish hammering bits of taxi back underneath the bonnet, and he finished the last bolts whilst lying in a puddle. When I came to do the washing this morning I discovered a heavy pile of sodden clothes piled up next to the back door, so he must have stepped inside the house and just undressed on the doormat. I was not sorry they had not made their way on to the carpet. There was a very oily boiler suit, a filthy jersey, and a bright orange gilet that proclaimed, untruthfully these days, that he was in the employ of one of the oil giants.
I do not like putting oily clothes in the washing machine, but I did anyway, and it seemed to turn out all right. When I checked the washing machine afterwards most of the oil seemed to have either been washed away or stayed on the boiler suit, there were no oily smears all over the drum.
You will be pleased to hear that the taxi worked perfectly, or at any rate as perfectly as it ever does, which is good enough. Mark told me lots of nail-biting stories afterwards about bits almost being forgotten, and things not quite fitting back where they should, but on the whole it was without incident, and we are now in possession of two functional taxis again. These will be very handy when it comes to paying the Autoparts bill, which is the next inevitable chapter in the gearbox story.
In fact we ended the night with the same customers, or at least two halves of the same group. They were going back to Ambleside, which turned out to be rather nice, because not only did it pay well, but my customers were actually civilised and pleasant to talk to. This can be a happy surprise at three o’ clock in the morning.
In the end it took ages, because my customer, who was a youthful teacher, and full of enthusiasm for life, stayed in the car telling me all about a special programme he has designed to do orienteering with primary school children. I was not listening closely enough to be able to repeat any of the details, but I sat listening to his interest and his excitement and enjoyed his zest for life for a little while. It is lovely to carry happy customers, and liked him almost as much as Murphy.
It is a massive relief to be earning money again.
Have a picture of my hanging baskets.
