I was obliged to go to work in Mark’s taxi instead of my own.
This was very horrible. It is not easy to describe the unsettling feeling of being in the Wrong Taxi.
When you have driven a taxi for a while it comes to feel like an extension of oneself. After a couple of years of driving a hundred miles or so every day in it, not on motorways but through villages and around country lanes, you get very used to the way your taxi behaves. You recognise the smallest change in the sound of the engine and notice unexpected clunks straight away, although on the whole you ignore them, like you do with red flashing lights on the dashboard that say STOP. You know exactly when you need to brake in order not to skid, probably after you have got it wrong a couple of times when racing your own personal speed record at four in the morning. You know how wide it is, how fast or otherwise it will accelerate, and when to change down a gear in order to get around the corner at the maximum possible speed.
You also have all of your own little ways.
There is a place for your glasses and your flask of tea, a little slot for your computer, a place on the dashboard where you know your phone does not slide about, and a place in the door pocket where your chocolate buttons are in just the spot where your hand expects to find them in the dark.
It is not very nice at all to be in somebody else’s taxi.
The buttons to open the windows are in the wrong place, and even though it ought to be nice to be in a taxi where the heater works, I keep forgetting and suddenly realising that I am not having a hot flush, merely that the blower does not need to be turned up to Full to get any heat out of it at all.
It is very trying indeed.
I am in Mark’s taxi because mine did not pass its MOT resit.
It has a broken clip that we had not noticed, and the MOT man was very rude about it.
He is not the usual MOT man, but a new one that I have not seen before, and whom I hope never to see again. He was so unhelpfully rude that I might find somewhere else to go for MOT tests in future.
I can be unhelpfully rude as well, but usually the people I am being unhelpfully rude to either have their noses stuffed full of drugs or they are very drunk. I find civilised communication to be something of a waste of effort under these circumstances.
I was not drunk or wagging about in drug-induced euphoria, although it might have been nicer if I had been. I had just brought a car in for an MOT, and I thought that he was horrid.
I rang Mark and told him, and we decided that the best thing I could do would be to leave my taxi for him to mend, and I could go to work in his, since he is not driving a taxi but a Rural Broadband Pickup Truck. Hence I am sitting in the Wrong Taxi feeling unhappy, waiting for Mark to come home from work and weld up the broken clip in order that I can relax and settle comfortably into my own taxi nest.
It is more comfortable than mine, but this does not matter. It is still Wrong, and I am feeling disconcerted and troubled.
LATER NOTE: It turned out that the clip was not broken at all, just not properly clipped, and the MOT man could have just pushed it back on if he had not been being so rude and unhelpful. Mark fixed it in about three seconds.
Also he ordered a new part for my heater.
I left the car at the garage after work tonight and will go and collect it in the morning.
Have a picture of the lake.
