I am, rather pointlessly, on the taxi rank. I have been here for just over three hours and have made a fiver.
Actually it has been rather nice, a bit like being on holiday in the Lake District. Obviously I have not been anywhere much, but I have had a happy sit by the lake with my pretty china cup of chai, and a long talk to some other taxi drivers. I liked this. It is nice to be sociable.
I planned to come out to work at three o’ clock, but discovered that in the fine old tradition of working for a living, I was hopelessly late.
I looked at the clock at half past two, and knew that there would be no possibility whatsoever of being Done by three, and put my inner clock back a little to aim for half past. Then I recalled that I had completely forgotten to saw up or bring in firewood, and halfway through doing that, I thought that I had not cleaned my taxi.
Cleaning the taxi was not lovely. I do know which bit was worst, the boot where I have been carrying logs and bricks and bags of moss and tree bark, or the front, where I have been carrying the dogs and my own muddy self.
The only thing that could be said for it is that it was considerably better than Mark’s taxi. I am having nothing to do with cleaning that. He has made that particular disgracefully soiled bed, strewn with sandwich wrappers and empty cement bags and old car tyres, and he can jolly well lie in it.
In any case, I cleaned it the last two times.
It took ages. If I had been a potential customer I would not have been worried about bat flu as much as Black Death or possibly E-coli. There was black mould and spiders, dust and sticky and spilled tea, wood clippings and sawdust and crumbled bricks, and under the seats squatted a long-abandoned bag of library books. It is hardly credible to think that a modern government has forbidden libraries, but they have.
Really I suppose that it was a bit over-ambitious to think that I would be out by three in the first place. It was a busy day. There was all of the detritus of a journey to the North Pole and back again to be cleared, and Oliver’s newly-empty bedroom to be cleaned and disinfected and generally buffed up back to its shine. I staggered up and down the stairs with armfuls of clean sheets and washing, and the newly-functional hoover.
I might have been a bit more successful if I hadn’t got off to rather a slow start. I was ambling back from emptying the dogs when the phone rang, and it was the local newspaper.
I have been harassing the council to increase taxi fares, for two years now, and been resoundingly ignored. It is hardly possible to express the thoroughness with which they have taken no notice of me, but they have, despite the series of increasingly acrimonious emails that I have dispatched to anybody I thought might listen.
Taxi fares were last increased in 2014, and I think it is time they were increased again.
A few weeks ago I decided that the best way forward might be to be an embarrassing nuisance, and wrote to the local newspaper.
Gratifyingly, this morning a youthful journalist, presumably the one most junior and therefore not able to wriggle out of it, rang me up to see what I was going on about.
This took absolutely ages, more than two hours actually.
I filled him in, with endless tedious detail about the functioning of taxi meters and the workings of the pricing structure. I could practically hear the chap’s eyes glazing over as I spoke. Then I forwarded to him all of the emails that I had written to our local twerp of an MP, who had promised to help but not bothered, and to the council, who had loftily told me to get lost. Then I rang some other taxi drivers and gave them his number, with the suggestion that they put the boot in as well.
There is going to be an article in the paper tomorrow.
I hope that the chap manages to make it sound more interesting than I did.
I am pleased with my fiver. I am a contributing member of the household again.
All the same, I might give up and go home soon.
