I am rather nonplussed to find myself not yet at work, although it is six o’clock in the evening.
This is because Mark is knitting my taxi back together in the alley at the back of the house.
I have not had an accident but it is due to go for an MOT tomorrow morning. Mark did all the pre-MOT checks and discovered that there was a hole in the exhaust, several holes actually. If I am honest it sounded rather like it had been manufactured by the people who design teabags.
He could not get a new exhaust to fit so he has bought one that is more or less the same shape and has sawn it up and nailed it together along with the non-perforated bits of the old exhaust.
Whilst he was occupied with this we had a terrifying phone call. It was from the MOT station telling us that their exhaust emission testing machine was not working.
I am sure that such information would not make you go pale and choke on your cornflakes, but I can assure you, we both gasped in horror.
My taxi’s licence plate expires on Tuesday, one week from today. We have been in receipt of several threatening letters from the council in the past, warning us that applications needed to be in At Least Three Clear Working Days before the old plate expires.
As perhaps you know, we are going away this weekend.
Well, said the MOT man, it’ll be fixed tomorrow, but we’ll have quite a backlog of cars to do then. We won’t be able to do it right away, you know. It might take a fortnight.
But you can’t, I squeaked, trying to shape the words around the lump of horror forming in my throat. We have to have it MOT’d by tomorrow. Otherwise it won’t be three working days from the expiry date and my taxi will go off the road and I won’t have any money, we’ll have to cancel Christmas and starve to death.
Once the council cancel your licence plate they won’t reissue another one unless your car is less than four years old, which mine isn’t.
I could hear him shrugging over the telephone.
Dearie me, he said, with the tone of somebody who has got so many problems of their own that they truly don’t give a hoot about yours, and then he hung up.
I telephoned the council, whose taxi licensing department don’t answer the telephone. They will only talk to you by email. This is to make their workload lighter, since quite a few taxi drivers can’t read or write.
I left a message for somebody to call me, which they didn’t, and some hours later found an unsympathetic email in my Spam folder, telling me that they didn’t care, and if I didn’t have all of the paperwork Including An MOT in by Tuesday then they would take the vehicle off the road and I would no longer be a taxi driver.
I emailed back and this time they said that I should have put in the paperwork not three days, but two weeks early. This is because they have merged with some other councils. Since April they are no longer South Lakeland District Council but have become Westmorland and Furness Unitary. In the meantime they have changed all the rules. They haven’t told us what the new rules are, because obviously we can all find out when we check the new council’s new website as part of our bedtime reading every night, especially the drivers who can’t read or write.
I was cross anyway, because I put the paperwork in two weeks early some years ago, because we were going away for Christmas, and they sent it all back and said that it was too soon.
I sent them all of the paperwork this afternoon, although Not Including An MOT, and rang the Town Hall and paid for it. Then I sent another email to them. It did not say Dear Westmorland, FU, although I would have liked it to. I told them I had submitted all the paperwork and that the MOT would get there as soon as the garage had done it, and that I meekly hoped that this would be acceptable.
Then Mark rang the garage and spoke to the owner’s son. They used to race Land Rovers together in their lunatic youth, and he was very understanding.
He said not to worry and he would get it through as quickly as he possibly could and send the paperwork through to the council in the blink of an eye.
Mark nodded and went off to make a very belated start on exhaust-welding, which is what he is doing now and which is why I am late for work, because I really do not like driving his taxi.
Sometimes it is very complicated to be a taxi driver, I can tell you.
