I have got to start by saying that once again, it has been a very uneventful day.
I have got so little to tell you about that I could probably get a job reporting the progress of our divorce from Europe from outside the House of Commons. People who are employed to do this is have got to stand in front of television cameras for hours at a time and explain that nothing much is happening, and make it sound as though it is the most important thing in the world.
I am glad that is not my job.
All the same, I am sitting here on the taxi rank, wondering how on earth I am going to make ‘polishing a drum kit’ and ‘getting a picnic ready’ sound interesting.
I didn’t even take the dogs to be emptied around the Library Gardens. Mark did that because I was busy putting the washing on and emptying the coffee pot. Also I didn’t want to go very much really, because it has gone cold. The weather forecast was for snow on the hills. There wasn’t very much, and I only know about it because of people going for walks and telling me about it in the taxi, but it has felt like it, and this morning we lit the fire again.
It isn’t even as if last night was especially interesting. On the whole, everybody paid without much complaint, and although there was one briefly entertaining interlude, when a tiresome youth refused to shut up and buzz off, on the whole it was dull.
I will tell you about that anyway, because of a dearth of other exciting adventures. On nights like this, even a dull adventure is better than none.
The youth in question didn’t want to get in with Mark, who was in front of me in the queue, because he said, probably entirely correctly, that Mark never seemed very interested in anything he had got to say. Mark agreed afterwards that this was the case, and said the youth had once asked him what he had got on his sandwiches.
I said that I didn’t care about Mark’s conversational abilities, and that he was still first in the taxi queue.
The youth said that he was the customer and that I had to do what he said.
I was brief and Anglo-Saxon, and wound my window up, which is one of the lovely things that you can do when you are a taxi driver.
The youth tapped on the window and wanted to know why I wouldn’t take him.
I wound the window down and explained.
He reiterated that I must.
I explained that far from it, in our glorious free society, I did not have to do anything of the sort, and then added my personal, and very unflattering, opinions of him, because I could.
Mark got out to see what was going on.
We told the youth that he was both boring and unwelcome and was going to have to walk.
He preferred to stay where he was. He told me that he thought that I was offering the worst customer service he had ever come across.
I was prepared to accept that. He is not the first person to proffer that opinion, however I explained that since I had declined to accept him as a customer the description was technically inaccurate.
He threatened to report me to Auto Trader.
Then he looked along the side of the taxi to find out who my employers were. He said that he was going to report me to Hackney Carriage, and then I would be sorry.
I agreed that I would, and told him, in the sort of terms that I had better not reproduce here, for fear of upsetting gentler readers, that I thought he was a tedious idiot and wished that he would leave.
Mark said afterwards that I ought not to wind people up, but sometimes I can’t help it.
The youth declined to leave, but then some of his friends appeared and asked if he wanted to share a taxi to the nightclub.
He said he would prefer to walk, and so they all walked.
I told you it was dull.
Have a picture of the dog.
