Cashless society

You will no doubt by mildly mystified by the inclusion of the menu which features as an illustration to this post.

I have put it there not because I am planning to go there for Christmas, or even before Christmas, we are most certainly not sufficiently flush to consider dining out at the moment, and on the Big Day itself probably we will go to the Indian restaurant just as we do every other year.

I am putting it there because they are Jolly Good Eggs and if you decide to go for a midwinter break in the Lake District then they have earned my heartfelt gratitude and admiration, go and eat Christmas Dinner there. Not on Christmas Day, obviously, because they will be shut then, you will just have to go a few days early and pretend.

It started last night when I picked up two cheery, albeit somewhat rotund, gentlemen on the taxi rank. They were brothers, they explained, and one of them was going on to the Brown Horse and the other continuing on to Kendal. The Brown Horse one remarked that I had picked him up before and he was unwell but managed to leave the taxi in the nick of time, adding rather to my surprise that an hour or so afterwards he had conceived his baby daughter, now eight months old.

I didn’t really remember, unwell gentlemen are not sufficiently unusual to make a dent on my capacity for recollection, but I nodded and smiled and congratulated him, and took him to the Brown Horse. He offered to pay for the taxi but his brother waved his cash away and said he would happily cover it when we reached Kendal.

He chatted all the way to Kendal, telling me about a house he was buying and about some military service he had once had, and when we got to Kendal he said his cash was in the house and he would just nip in and get it.

Alas, I am very sorry to say that he promptly disappeared down a little back alley, never to be seen again.

I waited, and got cross, and eventually gave up. I was cross with myself for making the basic mistake, usually I am the most suspicious of suspicious people, and usually I can tell a villain at fifty paces. We know when somebody is not going to pay, there is an unease about them. This chap was polite and chatty and confident and appeared decent in every possible way, but he had stolen his taxi ride.

Of course it was my own fault. Somehow I had misread the signs, I had failed to see something. Nobody is that good at deception, and when I thought back there were a dozen little uncertainties that I should have seen: nothing significant, but enough to have made me more careful than I was.

I got back to the taxi rank in a huge temper and called the Brown Horse, which, unsurprisingly, was closed. I left a long and irritable message on their answering machine explaining the disgraceful behaviour – not even of one of their customers, but of one of their customers’ relatives, and hung up.

I was even more disgruntled when I told Mark later and we realised that the same chap had done exactly the same thing to him last spring. We marvelled at the chap’s immense plausibility, growled at the loss of a second thirty five quid, and tried to forget it.

Before you even think it, the police will neither thank you for telling them, nor do anything at all about this sort of crime. We are honest because we like to be, not because the police enforce it. I can assure you from many bitter cashless experiences, the police will absolutely not lift the tiniest of fingers to help you bring wicked taxi-robbers to justice.

I had lost the fare, wasted an hour of our busiest night, and I was cross and unhappy, because we are very broke at the moment.

We were woken up this morning by the telephone ringing.

It was the Brown Horse.

Hotels and restaurants are never helpful about this sort of thing. It is too difficult, taxi drivers are in any case only a very small step up from pirates in the general respectability stakes, and on the whole they shrug their shoulders and ignore you.

The Brown Horse had not.

They had thought about it until they had worked out who the chap’s brother was, hunted him out at breakfast, told him all about it, and suggested that the money was added to his bill if he did not Jolly Well Sort It Out.

The brother, who had not in any case been a wicked robber, was humiliated, horrified and abjectly apologetic, and announced his attention to pay a visit to his brother, possibly incorporating some domestic violence.

Five minutes later the money was in my bank.

I called the Brown Horse back, effusive with gratitude.

We don’t like behaviour like that, they said. It isn’t nice. We are glad to help. We want the world to be a decent place.

They have made it a decent place today. Without them sticking their necks out I would be even more broke than we are already.

They have been heroes. They have cheered me up no end.

If you are looking for a jolly nice pub to visit in the Lake District I can wholeheartedly recommend the Brown Horse at Winster. They are a bit remote and you will have to get a taxi, but, well, it’s all part of the fun.

They are magnificent.