Cool young men

Last night at work I took one of the doormen home, and he told me, with a mixture of relief and sadness, that it had been his last night. He was giving up on door-supervision as a career and living a life during the hours of daylight like everybody else. He is giving up on the moon and the darkness and he is going to get up early and go to work with a friend of his who makes things in the daytime.

I was stung with sadness. Raj has been on the doors for as long as I have been driving a taxi, we started at about the same time. Illogically, I always think of him as being a young chap, but of course he is fifty, and has been standing solidly between youthful nuisances and their potential prison sentences for thirty years. I am very sorry indeed that he is leaving, he was wise and steady and trustworthy and sensible, and a reassuring part of our night-time world. The remaining doormen are, of course, perfectly all right, but I shared Raj’s opinion that the nights are now full of children, and they can all look after one another without needing to trouble the grown-ups too much.

Of course he has become older and stiffer, as we all have, but he was a predictable, quietly heroic part of the night and I will miss him very much.

When I told Mark later we realised that there is now nobody left from our youth. Some have died, several of them, like Raj, have decided that enough is enough, and retired quietly, and now we are the last. We are now the grumpy old taxi drivers that we remember from our own youth. I remember them as being terrifying old men who were afraid of nothing and nobody, who laid down iron rules about how we all behaved, and woe betide anybody who challenged them.

Two nights ago I jumped out of my taxi and tore a strip off a new driver who was not observing taxi rank etiquette. I shouted at him until he went pink and looked away. He won’t do it again.

I have become the ruthless old horror who so scared me all those years ago. It is an odd thought.

We are a jolly long way away from the taxi rank now. We set off after we finished work last night, and by seven o’clock in the morning were so exhausted we thought we had better stop before something awful happened.

We have both fallen asleep at the wheel once or twice, although the last time was well over twenty years ago. We were young and desperate then, it is very nice to be grown up. I see that exhaustion in the faces of the young men now, the ones desperately trying to feed tiny children and a wife by sitting behind the steering wheel for sixteen hours a day. Somehow it gets better. I am not sure when it happened, but it did.

Certainly our lives have got considerably better these days. We have chugged all the way down the motorway today, marvelling at the excitingly foreign-sounding names on the road signs, like Basingstoke and Bicester and Princes Risborough,  and the millions of cars on the road. It is warmer here than it is when we travel to Scotland, but there are a very lot more people. It was interesting to observe how high the proportion of electric cars is in Windermere compared to everywhere else. Booths ethical car park is stuffed full of them, but there are not very many in the rest of the world.

It was an uneventful journey, Oliver slept for almost half of it, and I knitted and looked out of the window and felt happy. It is lovely to be with Number One Daughter and Number One Son-In-Law, and with Ritalin Boy, who adores Oliver.

We had a Chinese takeaway for dinner, with wine, which was ace, and Number One Daughter looked at my foot and said that it needs some sort of tape. She has given me some to try, and it might make it less fat and useless. She also said not to run on it, which frankly was a relief, normally the fitness advice you get is to do the most painful thing possible. I have been trying to run on it, but not very much because it feels like being kicked on the ankle by a very small donkey, it is nice to think that I can stop for a while.

Number One Son-In-Law has very kindly offered to take Oliver to the airport on his motorbike tomorrow. Oliver is very excited about this, because it is a truly cool thing to do.

I can’t think of a better start to his holiday.