More taxi tales…

We had an inadvertently late night last night, which was a nuisance because I had a lot to do today, being a day of lectures.

We were just contemplating going home when Mark whizzed off with a job to Kendal, and so I hung about on the taxi rank for just a bit longer, because you never know, and after a few minutes a girl got in.

She was going up into Windermere, along one of the side roads, and since she wasn’t exactly sure where her guest house was, we went past it and had to turn round.

We were just turning round when the car that had been following us pulled in front of us, blocking the road, and stopped.

A chap got out. He was sturdy and muscular and had shaved his head.

I do not even pretend to hold any truck with the modern fashion for non-judgmentalism, I am entirely and ruthlessly judgemental, and it is a practice that has saved me from some very horrible difficulties during my night-time career.

This chap had Just Out Of Prison written all over him, and so I locked all the doors.

I wound the window down a bit, and he explained that he was looking for his girlfriend, who had wandered off, as girlfriends do, and become lost, so he wished to see if she was the customer in the back of my taxi.

Both the customer and I assured him that she was not, and being unable to help him further, pulled around him and drove away.

He leaped in his car and followed us back.

We had just reached the passenger’s destination when he pulled in front of us again, with a screeching of brakes, and dived out, coming stomping back towards us.

Hoping to calm him down, I would the window down again.

He was much crosser by this time, and insisted that we must know where his girlfriend was, which we didn’t. He did not believe this, and insisted that we must be telling naughty stories.

We couldn’t help him, and then he got cross. I mean furiously cross. He started shouting and demanded to use my telephone to call his girlfriend, a request which I politely – well, fairly politely – declined.

He started yelling and pounding on the window, poor battered window, I hope he didn’t get blood poisoning from last weekend’s idiot. I wound it up and pulled away. Obviously, under those circumstances, I had no intention of letting my passenger get out, and we drove off.

He followed us, headlights on full beam, nose of his car against my bumper. Then he suddenly put his foot on the accelerator and shot away up a side street, This street curves back on to the main road, and I realised that he was going to try and overtake me and come back to block me in, so I accelerated as well.

I am a very practised driver at high speeds, almost thirty years of taxi driving after the police have gone to bed has taught me this, and in our younger days we used to race. Hence I had no fear that he would overtake me, and by the time he could possibly have got anywhere near the main road again, we were gone. I called Mark, who rang the police, and we went up to the station to wait for them.

The police came and went to look for him, although since I had neglected to take his registration number, of course they weren’t going to find him, and they didn’t. They came with me to take my customer home, just in case.

When we talked about it afterwards, Mark told me that his customers had been two girls, who had run and jumped in his taxi and breathlessly told him to drive away, quickly. They had been in Tesco, and seen a chap who had been the ex-boyfriend of one of them, and whom she had left after what sounded like a lot of nasty abuse, a court case, and possibly a prison sentence.

The other girl, who was rather intoxicated, had confronted him in Tesco, announcing loudly and drunkenly to the world that he was a violent sex offender and should not be allowed to be among civilised people.

Unsurprisingly, he had taken umbrage at this. I do not know what umbrage is or where one might take it from, but I like the phrase, so we will use it.

He had dashed out of Tesco and they thought he was going to wait for them and attack them, so they rushed off and got in a taxi. Given his history of ungentle horridness they thought they were in some considerable danger, an opinion with which, having met the chap, I wholeheartedly agreed. My own experience had made me entirely convinced that really he should not have been let out of prison, hurrah for Chris Grayling and his utter destruction of the Probation Service.

I think he wanted to use my phone because his ex had blocked his number.

It made for an interesting night, but we overslept this morning, and I had to rush to get over the fell with the dogs before my lunchtime university class started.

Did I tell you I am doing a Master’s’s’ degree at Cambridge? Well, I am.