The brief holiday is over and we are back at work.
It was a nice holiday. We watched two films on Netflix, the one about Henry the Fifth, and another which was a modern version of The Prince and The Pauper in which a chap with a big house swapped places with an impoverished schoolteacher.
In keeping with modern political thinking, obviously the aristocrat with his lifetime’s business management experience turned out to be a naughty rotter, and the virtuous schoolteacher who had never done any of it before made a much better job of running the estate and the household and the family business. I don’t know why they sacked him from his prep school, really, what they should have done was put him in charge of marketing and financial management and he would have fixed all their problems. As it was he just fixed the aristocratic family’s problems. This is not a spoiler because anybody who has ever seen any modern films knows exactly how it is going to turn out.
Anyway I liked it, not least because it did not pretend that the 1950s English aristocracy was full of black people, which somewhat surprising detail is increasingly becoming a feature of modern drama. I am trying to be a fashionable thinker but actually it irritates me almost as much as the patronising sanctification of the poor-but-heroic northern working-class underdog, or the dreadful film about Mary Queen Of Scots where we were expected to believe that she supported her footman in his conviction that he was a girl on the inside, as opposed to having him executed, which was the fashionable consequence for such uncertainties at the time.
It is probably as well that I am going back to work really. I don’t think I have got the patience for much more entertainment. It has been very nice, there is nothing as splendid as loafing around watching some large-screen spectacular, but really it is not good for me. It is very easy to sit in an armchair and criticise. It is much better for me to be sitting in my taxi trying to earn some money and to be entertaining on my own behalf.
Incidentally I am not managing much of the first, and you can judge the second for yourself. We have been here for ages and so far I have made a fiver. I think Mark has made one as well. It is January, and there is nobody here.
Having said that I have just turned a customer away. A family approached me, shivering in the January chill, and as they crossed the road, Father said loudly: I’m not getting in with ‘er, that’s the woman ‘oo ripped me off last time.
I have never, ever, deliberately overcharged anyone. I have few scruples in life, I admit, but charging anything other than the exactly accurate meter price is one of them, and rascally as I am, I do not do it.
His wife made shushing noises, and they opened the door to get in.
I looked up from these pages.
Go away, I said.
They were dumbfounded.
I’m not taking you, I added, helpfully. I don’t rip people off, and I don’t like being accused of it. I’m not taking you anywhere. Go away.
They blustered a bit, but they went away, probably embarrassed in front of their offspring.
I called Mark, just to make sure he got the message. When they got to his taxi, he told them to go away as well.
There are no other taxis out this evening. I don’t know where they were going, but I hope it was a long way away.
The moral of the story is, by the way, that not all northern working-class underdogs are heroic.
Some of them are just plain muppets.
