It has been another Day.
We have flapped and hurried and panicked, but I can tell you now, in order to avoid any further unnecessary stress, that we are now the proud owners of a newly MOTed car.
This development was not at all easy to achieve.
I took the dogs for their morning emptying over the fell whilst Mark dashed off to a scrapyard in Blackburn for a replacement part that our aspirant taxi needed, in time for some last-minute surgery before its MOT appointment at two o’clock.
He had reached the scrapyard and was frantically trying to pay for the part when he discovered that his mobile banking thing would not work.
There was no reason for this at all. There was loads of cash in it. He called me to ask me to pay over the phone and mine wouldn’t work either. The phone had wiped the telephone banking off and I had to re-load the whole thing, including showing it my fingerprints and my face and giving it a sample of me talking to it, whilst the scrapyard man waited impatiently, drumming his fingers and wondering if we were villains.
After that I had to get the taxi clean.
It had been pristine when we bought it.
Several weeks in a very sawdusty shed had jolly well sorted that out, I can tell you. It was more than obvious that it was owned by somebody who had not managed to wipe their feet, possibly not for some months, after wandering in a muddy wilderness which also happened to be populated by some muddy dogs.
It was dreadful.
I hoovered and scrubbed and swore, and then had to dash off to take it into Kendal. The taxi was meeting Mark at the MOT garage for its last-minute repairs, and I was going to attend the council committee meeting to listen to them discussing gripping issues of a licensing nature.
It so happened that today was just about the worst day for travelling anywhere in the history of the Lake District, probably considerably worse even than before roads and stout boots were invented.
We will start with the local difficulty, which is that of the two roads between Windermere and Kendal, one was completely closed and the other had traffic lights on it causing a massive tailback. We are taxi drivers and so we had both separately moved the road-closed barriers and just driven through anyway, but even that was not enough to avoid the problem.
Even then you couldn’t get to Kendal. There had been a fire on the motorway, which had decided to close for the day whilst it recovered, and all of the motorway traffic was being re-routed through Kendal. This would have been terrible anyway, because of being the major route to Scotland, but it was a special nuisance because today was the day of the County Show, which fills the roads with tractors and horse boxes, exhibitor trucks and coaches of schoolchildren, not to mention hundreds of curious spectators and tourists.
I tried to go around the back roads, but a misfortunate chap in a massive tanker had followed his satellite navigation and got stuck in a narrow bit, so that was that. I had allowed over an hour for the ten minute journey, but was still on the last minute.
Mark called and said that the bypass was jammed with traffic. He also took a rural detour around it, with more success than me, but I did not see him. I dumped the car and dashed off to the council meeting.
The Weather Gods saw an opportunity for some amusement, and the heavens opened.
I arrived at the meeting completely sodden. Water was streaming down the back of my neck and dripping off my nose, dissolving my optimistic attempts at sophistication. Instead I looked as though I had misfortunately forgotten to undress before my morning shower.
It was not a well-attended meeting. Most of the councillors could not get through the gridlocked traffic.
The meeting was mostly the usual council waffle of agendas and minutes and apologies and throat clearing, but then there was an exciting climax.
A chap from Uber had turned up to plead to be allowed to operate in the area.
Uber have been operating here for months and know perfectly well that nobody can stop them. They also know that the Government is about to make a new rule which says that they can’t just completely ignore licensing rules in places like the Lake District. By this time next year they will be obliged to stop doing exactly what they feel like, and either follow our licensing rules or go away.
They have no intention of going away.
I will not go into tedious detail about the meeting, because I know perfectly well that I am the only person who thinks that taxi legislation is really interesting, so I will cut to the chase. Nobody wanted to give Uber the licence to operate, but everybody knew perfectly well that they had got to. The council is not allowed just to refuse licences because they don’t like somebody, otherwise there would have been plenty of times when I would have been chucked out for being too stroppy.
They sighed, and muttered and grumbled, but they had to grant it.
Uber will have an office in Ulverston and we are absolutely stuck with them. They do not have to use local drivers. The council can’t force them to. They will go on employing desperate people from hundreds of miles away who will go on sleeping in their cars because they are not charging enough to be able to afford to live in a house.
Uber should be ashamed of themselves.
Despite this, I had a very interesting time talking to councillors, and to the licensing officers, all of whom I rather like, and to the journalist from the local paper, who was about thirteen years old and was actually eating a lollipop. I think perhaps you get sent to cover local councils talking about taxis when you are the most junior person in the office, probably even outranked by the cleaner.
I even talked to the chap from Uber, who, I am sorry to say, I loathed on sight. He insisted that there were only ever two or three cars from Uber in the area, which was a total fib because there are about thirty, so I said some very sharp things to him and he had the decency to go pink and look the other way.
We were exhausted when we got home, but we had a car with an MOT.
The council have promised that they will look at it and decide about giving it a licence soon.
We were too tired to go to work. Instead we cleaned the house.
This made us feel considerably better.
After that we ate a very lot of chocolate and drank some gin, which frankly was an absolutely spiffing end to the day and my stress levels have vanished like an Uber driver when the licensing officers turn up.
Life is looking up.
