By a very fortunate chance of fate I filled my taxi up with fuel and wrote in these pages very early yesterday, because it turned out to be a busy night.
It is very quiet here for an Easter weekend, but last night we were very busy all the same.
Indeed, I was belting down the hill back to the taxi rank at half past eleven when I was flagged by an intoxicated-looking youth who wished to be taken to Blackpool.
I had no wish whatsoever to go to Blackpool in the middle of the night, so I explained that it would be a very, very lot of money, and that he would find it considerably more economical to find himself bed and breakfast accommodation for the night.
He insisted that he wished to return home.
I told him that I was a full-meter-price taxi and that he could probably get a lower price if he phoned a private hire company, or went around the corner to the taxi rank to see if he could haggle somebody inexperienced and desperate down to a budget fare.
He was determined that he wished to go with me.
In the end, with more reluctance than I can describe to you, I accepted a vast sum of cash from him as a down payment, and then insisted that he transferred the rest directly into our bank.
This is quite an important thing to do if you are not sure about a customer. It means that you have a point of contact to give to the police.
I was not at all sure about him. He spun me some utterly improbable story about visiting his grandmother, as if he were Little Red Riding Hood, and being too drunk to drive back home so he was going to leave his car and come back tomorrow.
I did not believe a word of this, and later on we decided that he had probably had an unsuccessful blind date, probably with another chap.
The end result of this was that at one o’ clock in the morning I was completely lost on a maze of Blackpool council estate, but three hundred pounds wealthier. It felt very unusual to be chuffing around Blackpool in the middle of the night, especially without the camper van.
The chap had slept all the way back, and we had a brief, and fairly bitter, argument at the conclusion, when it appeared that he did not know where he lived, but I did not care, and raced back at breakneck speed to arrive before the nightclub closed, which I did.
I got a fare going to Milnthorpe after that, which is also miles away, although not quite on the same scale as Blackpool. It was after four in the morning when I chugged into the back alley, feeling very pleased with my evening.
The cash-generating spree continued even into today, when Number One Son-In-Law called us from his oil rig. One of his houses had developed an excitingly catastrophic leak, which needed plugging before some people arrived on Tuesday to have a holiday in it.
We were still not entirely functioning, but after some coffee Mark hauled himself off to go and investigate, and when it was fixed, quite unnecessarily, Number One Son-In-Law put some grateful cash into our bank.
We had not expected this, and were very pleased.
Hence, although today we are still sitting on the taxi rank, we are doing so with the blithe unconcern of those who know themselves to be already adequately equipped in the cash department. It is a very pleasing, and fairly unfamiliar, sensation. Already we can afford to take Oliver back to school and we can even afford to refill the jelly babies before we set off, which is no small consideration, they have gone up in price most shockingly.
It is a happy evening. I am enjoying the sunset and the birdsong.
I have even stopped minding about the tourists.
