I’m one of the few taxi drivers that didn’t take up the offer of free HGV Class I training offered a couple of years ago (had to have appendix out, long story).
So I stayed.
But it’s true, the calibre of work has gone right down the pan these last few years. I’m lucky enough not to get abusive passengers (touch wood) but runners and pukers and generally not feeling safe with who I pick up is definitely making me reconsider working nights these days.
In my opinion, people these days are just angry and entitled. Lockdown has been years of being told what we can’t do, and where we can’t go, and we’ve had enough.
So I get it. I get why.
But it’s a vicious circle. If people are assholes, then taxi drivers don’t want to work at night. And if there aren’t enough taxis, people get angry and competitive.
I had a young man in my taxi over the weekend. I would usually refer to a young man as a gentleman, but he was not.
I immediately got the impression that he was quite unpleasant and rude, from the way he slouched into the taxi, simply barking out the part of town he wanted to go to without a please or thank you, and how he immediately started eating his kebab in the backseat without even asking my permission. Simply put, he was a horrible dickhead.
When we got to where he lived, he paid the exact fare, not a penny more, not a penny less, and slouched off to his house. Incidentally I never expect a tip, so I expect this was just par for the course for the individual in the back of my car.
I was quite relieved that the journey was over as you can imagine.
As he walked away I casually looked over my left shoulder and spotted the mayonnaise drizzled blue takeaway fork on the back seat. Once again, it was no surprise to see it there.
Image not to scale, and not including mayonnaise.
As this was my last job and I was heading to ASDA to do a bit of shopping before I went home, I just drove off with the blue fork on the backseat. I would dispose of it when I got there.
When I got to ASDA I opened the back door to remove the blue fork, and was fairly unsurprised to see the abandoned kebab on the floor beneath where my passenger had been sitting.
You can’t beat a kebab after a night out, unless you are beating it over the head of a drunk person for being a dickhead.
Muttering something under my breath expressing my opinion of my passenger, I closed the kebab box and removed it from the floor of my taxi.
It was at this point that I noticed a long, flat, oil stained, brown paper bag beneath where the kebab box had formerly been.
I observed that the paper bag was quite warm so I slid the contents out to discover a couple of rather gorgeous looking onion bhajis nestled in a polystyrene tray.
Rejoicing in the positive turnaround of events, I climbed back into the front seat of the taxi with the onion bhajis, with the intention of enjoying the fuck out of them.
The onion bhajis I found did not look as nice as this, but you get the idea.
The first onion bhaji went down a storm. Crispy and warm with just the right amount of internal moistness with a feathery texture, I was feeling quite pleased with myself.
Raising the second onion bhaji to my mouth I noticed that it looked a little different to the first one, with a slightly different colour nearer to light brown than gold, with a marginally different surface texture. Perhaps it was a different type of onion bhaji?
As I bit down I noticed how softer the second onion bhaji was. Around the same time, my tongue informed me that I had bitten into the surface of the sun, taste wise.
The second onion bhaji was fucking HOT. Like a vindaloo or a phal curry.
One of my soon-to-be-deceased taste buds.
After drinking a litre and a half of pop to extinguish the inferno in my mouth I disposed of the second kebab rather than attempting to eat it.
I can only conclude that my passenger had similarly pissed off the people in the kebab shop, so they left him a little present, in the form of a “modified” onion bhaji. Modified with the hottest curry paste on Earth.
Before I disposed of the onion bhaji I broke it in half to discover that there was quite a lot of brown curry paste mixed in with the ingredients.
Unfortunately due to the level of alcohol he’d probably consumed he had forgotten about his onion bhajis so the karma that was headed his way ended up in my mouth.
I picked up two gentlemen from a rock pub in Morecambe. One of them was quite sober (Mr S) and chatty, the other it quickly became apparent, was utterly and completely wasted (Mr W).
The Bath Hotel, Morecambe
I could tell Mr W was in quite a state because the only conversation his comparatively sober friend was getting from him were grunts, burps, and the odd random – “GARGGHH!”
Mr S got dropped off first, paid his contribution up to that point (£6) and left me in the scintillating company of Mr I.M. Wasted, Esquire as we continued our journey to Lancaster.
During the journey, Mr W achieved the following goals:
Falling asleep vertically and snoring
Proclaiming “GARGGHH!”
Growling
Waking up and trying to give me shoulder massages
Lying down on the back seat to sleep
We finally arrived at our destination, a street of lovely old houses facing Lancaster Castle (which I have yet to visit.)
Lancaster Castle
The fare had advanced another £13 so I woke up Mr W, and thus began the debacle of trying to get him to pay his fare.
He looked in both of his wallets (I could only see one wallet,) fished out his debit card and I passed over my card reader (as he did not have contactless payment.)
On the screen of my phone I could see that his PIN consisted of 7, 5, 3 and 9 digits, until he finally keyed in the correct 4 digit PIN, and his card was declined. I wasn’t frustrated at all, honestly.
The nearest ATM was the Spar on The Marsh, which is about a mile downhill from The Castle.
As you can see, the ATM is on the left. There are bollards, a bin, and left of the ATM is a drainpipe.
Mr W put his card in the machine, tripped on the bollard to the left of him, and managed to wedge himself next to the drainpipe. I imagine he looked a bit like this:
That’s right, my friends, once wedged in, he had a little nap. I reversed my car a little so I could watch the ATM give up waiting for his PIN, and swallow his card.
Finally he awoke, flipped out his willy and started messily pissing into the corner.
At this point I’m afraid I had run out of patience.
So I left him. I cut my losses and drove off. He was too busy pissing to notice. I imagined him attempting to drunkenly climb the various steep gradients during his walk home. Maybe fall asleep in a garden. Get pissed on by a dog.
Half an hour later the guilt started to kick in about leaving him stranded, and that Karma would pay me a visit at some point.
My next passenger was really lovely and gave me a £15 tip.
I live three floors above my lovely neighbour. I work nights. Everyone in the building knows I work nights. I like to have my bedroom window open when I sleep.
Every morning for the last three weeks, my neighbour has been doing carpentry in his garden, listening to various 90s pop, and rap, singing along in his Jimmy Savile-like voice.
“I said maybe-e-e-e-e-e-e”
I used to leave my toilet flushing until I got up, as my turds falling 60 feet inside the waste pipe would, I imagine, be quite noisy as they passed ground level at 3am. I used to wait. Now I flush.
The hammering and Jimmy Savile singing has stopped.
An individual that attempts to pass themselves off as a loyal friend of a taxi driver by only ever making contact when every taxi company in the area is telling them they will have to wait an hour for a taxi – for example, on bank holidays or New Years Eve.
Now that the yuletide festivities are almost over, I would like to draw attention, now that I’ve had a chance think about it, to the state of Morecambe’s Christmas Illuminations.
Let’s look at the first one. There are a few identical examples of this one around Morecambe – and I am concerned. Concerned is the wrong word, what I mean to say is, I am completely confused by the following illumination.
What confuses me about it is this:
Clearly, it says it is from Morecambe. But is it to me? Is it to Morecambe? Is it to visitors to Morecambe? Do we still have any? Particularly at Christmas?
What does it mean?
As each of the signs is hung above a main road facing the promenade, I can only conclude that each sign is directed –Â quite literally – at Grange-over-Sands as they face us across Morecambe Bay. This is a nice sentiment, but unfortunately unless you have a very powerful telescope and a clear day with no heat haze, one would be completely unable to see the signs from Grange-over-Sands.
I am joking, of course, but not about being confused.
Being perpetually confused is my default setting as I get older 😆
Clearly, this sign is not one of Lancaster’s cast offs from last year, but it is clearly an example of something that has not been thought through very well.
On a serious note, I’m bringing these to your attention so hopefully they are not reused again like they were this year. We can do better, surely?
So, in the tradition of saving the best till last I show you my second and final example of the exquisite quality of Illuminations lavished upon Morecambe for Christmas 2015.
This is a perfect example of something which, once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee.
This illumination, my friends, I like to call the “Fabulous Sex Octopus.”
Just picked up a couple who were drunkenly fuckin’ ‘n’ jeffin’ yelling at each other at the taxI office as I pulled up.
After a sneaky “Now shut up, you bastard” out of the booze-slick side of his mouth to his Mrs, the husband told me their destination and off we went.
They were like male and female Shane McGowans while he was on his last remaining choppers slurring niceties to each other for my benefit, with the guy breaking off briefly to tell me it was safe to pull out at a t-junction.
By the time we got to their destination their quarrel was forgotten and they began contemplating more amorous pursuits. Well he was.
“You know you when we gerrin?” he ventured.
“Yesh?”
“rrrrrRrrrrrowwwrrrrr!!!” (think Roy Orbison)
I think she coughed vomit into her own mouth as they left.
See. Romance is alive and drunkenly rutting it’s piss and gin-soaked way into 2016.
The Dave Price Blog 