I do not at all like having to be in Mark’s taxi.
It is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Everything is in the wrong place, I could not find out how to switch the headlights on, there is no handy overhead shelf, and it has a truly annoying dinging noise that I can’t switch off.
It dings all the time. Fortunately I have got a spare seatbelt buckle that I can plug in so that it thinks, mistakenly, that I am wearing a seatbelt, because that is the sort of thing that it dings about frantically.
It dings every time it goes backwards. This annoyed me enormously when I discovered that what it was doing was telling me that I am close to other things. Obviously I am going to be close to other things. I am driving a taxi.
The great Lie told by taxi customers is that of course there is lots of room to turn round at the top of their drive. This is because they have forgotten that when they are turning round there, their own car is not parked slap-bang in the middle of the turning round space. They are usually too drunk to notice anyway, and slope off leaving the taxi with the choice of reversing back down their right-angled drive, or performing a thousand miniature shunts in order to get out.
After a quarter of a century in the job I am very good indeed at reversing, and having a tiresome dinging noise chirping away helpfully in the background is making me long for a sledgehammer.
The seat is wrong and the window winders are in the wrong place. In my car they are on my left, next to the gear stick. In this car they are in the arm rest on the door. I must spend half of the evening flapping my left hand about uselessly, trying to adjust the ventilation so that I do not have to inhale unwashed customers or revolting take away pizzas.
I am not pleased with my world.
The problem is that my car needs lots of expensive things doing to it, and Mark has come home from work to start to do them. I do not know what any of them are. I took it down to the Eastern European chap in Morecambe to have some second-hand tyres fitted today, and called in at the scrap yard whilst I was there, to get some more bits.
The chap who had the scrap yard was called Kenny Allen, and he has died recently. I am sorry about this, because he has been there for ever, and his son-in-law, who has taken over, is not nearly so clever or knowledgeable or interested in scrap.
Nobody ever could be. Kenny Allen knew absolutely every trivial detail about every tiny bit on every make and age of car. He was a truly astounding fount of fixing-your-car helpfulness, and now he is gone. There is a notice up in the scrap yard telling us that a petition has been sent to the council asking to change the name of the road to Kenny Allen Road. I hope they do it. He deserves to be immortalised.
I had to face down the not-very-interested son-in-law to get the bits, and in the end a teenager, who looked to have promise of growing up into Kenny Allen, offered to get them for me.
Fortunately I was in my own car at that time, obviously because it was having the wheels changed, and so I did not mind any of it so very much, it would have been awful to have to go all the way to Morecambe in Mark’s irritating car. I went to Asda afterwards.
We will not talk about that.
Just as a later note, you might be interested to hear that Princess Kate, eventually to be Queen Kate, has been visiting the Lake District today. She did not need a taxi, so I did not see her, but I saw the helicopter and heard all about the security parade of half a dozen Land Rovers and Daimlers and things.
I hope she had a nice time. At least the rain stayed off.
