I am having a very cheerful day.
This is a spin-off from a small but unhappy crisis last night.
At about half past ten last night some chap on the taxi rank stopped me and importuned me to take his extremely intoxicated friend home. Back to Carnforth, in fact, which is a jolly long way away from Windermere.
At first I refused, because extremely intoxicated often leads to extremely nauseous, but the chap seemed relatively harmless, and when his mate shelled out a large quantity of cash up front, I relented, and took him back.
A few hours later the mate reappeared back on the taxi rank, with some other intoxicated mates, and asked if I could take them all back.
I warned them that this was going to be considerably more expensive than the first journey they had paid for, because of it being much later at night, and they didn’t seem to care very much and hopped in.
This was when I made the colossally stupid mistake of forgetting, this time, to demand cash up front, lulled, perhaps, by their easy payment of the last fare. I can’t remember how I didn’t think of it, but I didn’t. Hence everything that followed was largely my own stupid fault.
I must have been having an early Alzheimer’s moment, because I always demand pre-payment for anything further than about a mile, especially once we have reached Drunk Idiot time. Even if people are not of a villainous inclination, there is a considerably increased chance of them having accidentally spent all of their money and then forgotten.
I told them how much it would cost, and they eventually worked out that they did not have enough money between them, and we stopped at an ATM on a garage.
We were a long way away by then.
I watched the chap take out a hundred quid. He got back in the front seat, and we set off.
That was when it started to go wrong.
His mates were snoring in the back, and we were a long way down a deserted country road when the chap in the front started to make obscene suggestions. I am never troubled by this sort of thing, it happens so regularly that I really don’t care in the least. I didn’t care this time, but I knew he was trying to scare me, so I started to pay attention. This is always a warning sign of trouble to come.
I am not easily scared. I do not have to pretend that I am not scared, because usually I am not, and I wasn’t. I didn’t even get cross until he started putting his hands on my shoulders and generally being a nuisance. I barked at him then, warningly, and he told me, with some excitement, that he had been in trouble with the police for touching women before. Then he looked at me, and with an outburst of breathtaking brainlessness, said that he wasn’t going to pay for the taxi.
Probably, I think, he was trying again to scare me, having failed so far, but I can’t imagine what he thought would happen next.
What happened next was that we stopped, very quickly.
He maintained that he was not going to pay.
We had come a long way, so I had no intention of booting them out to have had a free ride so far. We did a U-turn and set off at some speed back the way that we had come.
He did not like this. He started hauling on the handbrake and knocking the car out of gear. He grabbed the steering wheel, and I had to fend him off. Then he started shouting, his face right next to mine, demanding to be let out, along with lots of threats about what he was going to do to me if I declined.
I think we got about four miles like this. It went on for a long time, at very high speed. Sometimes I wish the police were around to chase speeding cars and investigate what is going on.
Eventually he wrenched the door open and started trying to jump out, and so I had to stop.
With a final burst of obscenities he rushed away into the dark.
Remember we were on a dark country road in the middle of the night, miles from anywhere.
His mates in the back were bleary-eyed and drunk. I took them to the nearest petrol station, which was closed, and dumped them out, and the taxi that was parked there called his head office to warn them not to accept them as customers. I do not know what they did.
I do know that once they had all gone I discovered, to my surprise and happiness, that the first drunk chap had foolishly leaped out and left his mobile telephone behind.
He was on his own, miles from anywhere, walking home, completely unable to call for a taxi or to ring anybody to pick him up. He had left his vape as well.
I thought he had about fifteen miles to go, without even a smoke.
This cheerful thought sustained me for the rest of the evening.
Today I investigated the mobile phone and found one of his mates’ numbers. I rang him and explained that I had the phone and would be only too happy to return it in exchange for the unpaid taxi fare.
This evening a young man called me. He said that his boss had left a mobile phone in my taxi and had asked him to drive up to Windermere to collect it, and pay the unpaid taxi fare. He added that his boss had paid him well to do it, so he was very happy to come up to the taxi rank and wait.
An hour later I had got the taxi fare after all.
I am very pleased indeed.
The moral of the story should never be forgotten.
Cash Up Front.
