I am very pleased to be able to tell you that the police have agreed that Lucy can proceed with her application.
They added, with a mild hint of menace, that she will have to have a driving licence before the time comes when they make offers to their chosen candidates, but she can at least carry on and keep trying in the meantime.
We are all very relieved about this.
In fact it was something of a pleasure to wake up this morning and not to have to worry about driving lessons. It was especially handy, because the weather has become seasonably chilly, and Mark needed to go and haul some firewood. He has not had time to do anything since last Thursday, which is ages ago, and we were down to the very last sticks in the shed.
Even then he could not do it this morning.
This morning we had got other arrangements.
The council, in their wisdom, have decided that all taxi drivers must go on a course to learn how to recognise children who might be at risk of being sexually exploited. This is because, contrary to what a lot of tourists seem to think, we have as much crime in the Lake District as there is anywhere else. People do not get up in the mornings, look out at the craggy mountains and resolve to be good for ever.
The course was running over several days, in order to make sure that we all go on it, even the ones who don’t get up in the mornings.
We don’t get up in the morning. Ours was at lunchtime today.
I always like events which involve taxi drivers. Collectively, we are possibly the most disreputable-looking collection of people I have ever seen anywhere, outside HMP Slade’s exercise yard.
The council chamber was full, mostly of night-time drivers, who leaned back unsmilingly in their seats, arms folded, and managing to exude a faint air of menace.
Driving a taxi during the daytime is a very different sort of job, and involves being friendly to old ladies who are being taken to the hairdresser. You have got to be nice to children, and to people who are taking their cat to the vet, and to people who are going to the post office to collect their pension. It is fairly unusual for a daytime customer to have taken so many drugs that they are leaking from their facial orifices, and on the whole they do not vomit takeaway curry under the seats or try to run off without paying.
Night time drivers are not nice to anybody. This is because if you are nice to people at nights, for some reason it just makes them wonder about sex.
I was amused, as always, to be reminded of the startling imbalance in the male/female ratio. There were forty men and three women, one of whom was me. Customers often ask me if I am scared to drive a taxi at night, and the truthful answer is that I am not, at all, ever. My experience so far has been that there are few customers who are more horrible than I am. Almost everybody can be intimidated into some semblance of civilised behaviour if I get cross enough.
The course was run by a lady from the police and a lady from Dr. Barnados.
It was not brilliant good fun.
Actually, it was grim.
We see abuse in our taxis often. We all know what it looks like and we have all tried, occasionally, to intervene in some of the worst cases.
I am awful for interfering. I have been known to interrupt perfectly ordinary couples who are just having a row. Indeed, just last week a couple got in, and the man said irritably to the girl: “What you effin crying about now, you fat bitch?”
The words slipped out before I had chance to apply my inner customer-service censor.
“She’s crying because you are a horrible human being,” I said. “Anybody would cry if they were with an oaf like you. Leave her alone.”
I don’t know which of us was more surprised, but he stopped being horrid, at least whilst they were in the taxi. He threw a ten pound note at me when they got out and told me to keep it, presumably so I would think that he was not all bad after all. The fare had been £4.50. I was quietly satisfied with this result.
Unlovely as this sort of behaviour is, it is not really abuse and certainly does not need reporting to the police. If I were to report every violent shouty oik we would need about a hundred police just in Windermere, instead of the six that we have got at present.
The six are not just for Windermere. They have got to cover all of South Lakeland. There are hardly enough of them to turn up when we have the sort of nightclub fights that turn into a bloodbath. We did not feel entirely confident that they would be able to do very much about an intoxicated teenage girl, dressed in her underwear and being spirited off to some horrible fate in a caravan somewhere.
It was not a nice course.
The police lady said that there would be some more police arriving soon to replace all of the old ones who have got sick of it and thrown in the towel. At least one of the latter was in the room with us, in his new, presumably less paperwork-cluttered incarnation as a taxi driver.
Lucy might be replacing him soon.
When we got home and Mark had hauled the firewood in he got on with painting the living room. It is nice to do normal things after something horrible.
Have a picture.
