I am on the taxi rank, but I am not in my own lovely familiar taxi.
My taxi might not be the most impressive vehicle on the market, it isn’t even the most impressive vehicle on the taxi rank, but it is mine, and I like to be in it.
It is brilliantly organised just for me. In the glove box there are spare peppermints, because I am over fifty now, and headache tablets for moments of nervous exhaustion, for the same reason. A customer begged me for some of these the other day, and I gave them to her, which I regretted when I discovered afterwards that she had dumped their foil wrappers on the floor in the back, along with some used tissues and a cigarette end, the next customer who has a headache can get lost.
I keep some hand sanitiser there, in case ever I have to touch anything vile left behind by a customer, or worse, in case any of the more revolting ones ever touch me. There is one lady whom I think must wee in her dog’s basket, before emptying her ashtray in it and then settling down there for a night’s sleep.
There are tissues and a spare handkerchief, some toothpicks and some antiseptic. There is a lead to charge my phone, and a bag of library books in the boot. Also, Mark has glued a special case to the dashboard so that I never, ever lose or forget my glasses, and I can change reading glasses for driving glasses in one seamless manoeuvre whilst the customers are still falling over the sills to get into the back and dropping their phones down between the seats.
I am in Mark’s taxi, which has none of these things, and considering it gets cleaned out every bit as often as mine does, it is not at all nice, I think he must bring a bag of dust and crumbs in to work with him every night and empty it all over the seats.
There is nowhere to put all of my things. My taxi has a handy overhead shelf, and a special box beside the handbrake. I like this very much, it has a sliding lid like a garage door, and it will hold two flasks and a water bottle, a computer and a couple of books, and then I can shut the lid so that I don’t have to listen to customers asking if I have got tea in my flask or if it is whisky, ha ha ha. In Mark’s taxi I have got to jam my flask underneath my seat, and it is, as Lucy used to say when she was small, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
The reason that I am not in my own clanking but much appreciated taxi is the unsurprising one that it has broken down.
It did this last night.
We knew that it was going to. It was making a funny noise all night, which Mark said was something like a thrust bearing, although I forget exactly, and that I was not to put my foot on the clutch any more than absolutely necessary.
This is a difficult thing to do.
It turns out that I put my foot on the clutch absolutely all the time.
Fortunately last night it made a funny noise every time. did it, which served as a little alarm reminding me not to. I hurtled around the village until the gears were screaming, so that I could change directly from second to fourth and skip a gear change, and I had to be careful with reversing, because it turns out that I do that by dipping my foot on and off the clutch. You have to reverse a lot in a taxi, because customers fib about there being enough room to turn round at the top of their driveway.
By an act of monumental kindness, the Engine Gods held it all together until I was making my very last journey of the night. The skies had become grey with the morning, there were no more customers, and I had just turned up the hill to go home.
It went clunk-clunk-clunk-BANG, and then wouldn’t go anywhere any more.
Mark said that it probably would, and very kindly drove it home for me, without changing gear, I suppose.
It has got to have a new clutch, but it is Sunday, and so we can’t get one.
Also since it is Sunday we did not wake up until one o’clock in the afternoon.
Lucy did not wake up either, because of working late as a hired thug all night.
She had got to go back to school today. This was delayed by her car battery having gone flat. She knows now that the peculiar buzzing noise when you turn the engine off means that you have left the lights on.
I am glad that my car lights turn off by themselves.
Mark was supposed to be starting to take my car to bits this afternoon, but he didn’t because there wasn’t really much afternoon when we had finished waving goodbye to Lucy. Instead he took the dogs out and then came to sit on the taxi rank whilst I went to the gym.
See previous entries about having become excessively portly for my smart dress.
I will draw a veil over my gym-related misery.
It might be easier just to buy a new dress after all.
After the gym Mark went home to start taking my taxi to bits, and I came to sit on the taxi rank, which is what we are doing now.
Mark took the picture whilst he was walking the dogs. It is the Library Gardens, and I think it is lovely.
