I take people home; drunken middle aged men. Drooling and dishevelled, shovelled into their suits and sporting ties like a hangman's noose; watch them waving their keys at keyholes, as if the key was a slippery silver fish; sometimes, they stand in the open door and wave. I wave back, drive off and listen for the clang of the frying pan as it hits them on the back of the head. Waiting For Godot. I deliver inebriated women to various addresses, listen to them belch, wetly and pungently, and worry about them vomiting in the back of the car, or worse, on the back of my head. Students, with more drugs in them than the local pharmacy, laugh hysterically at their own drunken wit, as I take them home. Some of them are on Katamine, which is a horse tranquiliser. It is the drug of choice for many, and not just vets and our equine friends. Young people use it to dance. Horses, not having access to banging tunes, just use it to sleep, though it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if someone had slipped it into the nosebag of Shergar just before a race; and then stuck on ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by the Bee Gees, one of whom, at least, bore a close resemblance to a horse.

On any given night you can get random people throwing random objects at the car, bottles, stones, shoes; whatever their small vegetable like brains can get their hairy palms to grasp. Out of the darkness it comes; smashing or bouncing off the vehicle. It is well below the wit of Noel Coward, or even Noel Gallagher, but it seems to amuse them. Some people, whilst inebriated or possibly coked up, maybe even with amphetamines ricocheting around their empty heads, run up and kick the car. They chase cars like dogs, only dogs don’t leave dents; well, not unless you stop suddenly and they don’t.

On Saturday, charmless ladies with fat arses wedged into short skirts, with legs that wouldn’t look out of place on a rhino stand in the middle of the road, calling you a ‘Paki bastard’. This is what you get for applying your brakes in order to avoid hitting them. They stagger drunkenly into the middle of the road but assume it’s your fault that they are too drunk to look before they waddle into the road with a bottle of beer in one hand, and their handbag in the other, stuffed with Kleenex, Tampax, aspirin, mobile phone, lipstick, perfume, condoms, keys and breath mints.

Taxi drivers get offered blow jobs, hand-jobs, threesomes and sloppy kisses; and that’s just from the men.

These are some of the joys of being a taxi driver. Over the next few months or years, maybe, according to whatever surfeit of time, inclination and energy I have, I'll be giving you a glimpse into this particular life...


So, I’ve mentioned some of the hazards of driving a taxi, but let me tell you about one of the less obvious ones.

I pulled up outside The Atrium, a sort of hotel/apartment building. It's actually on a bit of a slope which is usually fairly imperceptible. At least, I never noticed it until this particular day when there was a delicate crust of frost over the city. I pulled on my handbrake, got out of the car, and went inside for my customers. There were two of them with big fat bags stuffed with post holiday debris; or drugs. I don’t know. Let's just say they were heavy, as if they had done a spot of last minute shopping and picked up a couple of reasonable priced anvils and a brace of horseshoes along with a pair of Sumo wrestler's underpants. All I know is that when I tried to lift them, one of my kidneys popped out with the strain, and smacked the concierge on his little bald spot.

The customers sat in the back of the car whilst I struggled with these two bags, one in each hand, each arm growing longer as if I was on a rack and Torquemeda was cackling away in the background saying repent, repent. I certainly repented offering to carry the luggage to the car. I cracked the boot open and then hefted one of the bags in. The car lurched forward, almost imperceptibly. No matter. I took the second bag/anvil and with a final grunt, lobbed it into the boot. The car moved some more, slowly forward. For an instant I took it to be an optical illusion brought on by the strain of lifting my own body weight, which had presumably been condensed into hand luggage by an industrial car crusher. As I reached up, and slammed the boot down, there was suddenly no doubt. The car was moving. It was moving down the little slope toward the busy intersection. I grabbed onto the tail of the car, which did nothing to arrest its forward movement. All that happened was that I slid forward with the car as if this was a slow motion replay of a stunt in which a car is involved in a pile up while Charlie Chaplin holds onto it whilst rather uncharacteristically shouting ‘shiiiiiiiiiit!!!’

I looked to my right, and there was a wino standing there watching me, bottle held in stasis just before the grizzled hole that was his dry mouth. And what did he see? A man pushing a taxi without actually moving his legs. Lord Almighty. Why do these things happen to me? Can’t I just have a normal day for once. Through the back window, I saw the passengers stop talking and then look back at me, rather puzzled.

‘Handbrake!,’ I shouted.

‘Pardon?’ one of them said, muffled by the window.

I took one hand off the boot and made a repeated handbrake movement, which gave the impression that I was simultaneously skiing behind the car whist doing the hokey cokey.

Thankfully, one of the passengers reached forward and applied some more leverage to the handbrake. He then rolled the window down, put his head out and said, ‘sorry mate, but are you actually going to get in, or are you going to push us all the way to the airport, only we’re in a bit of a hurry.’

Panting from exertion and panic I said, ‘oh, okay then. I just thought you’d like a bit of privacy.’

I got in the car.

Took them to the airport.

The conventional way.

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