The Tiny Yorkie Dog Incident.

It’s a heady, stuffy warm mid-August late evening. The smudged painting of a blue-pink and yellow sky and low sun makes for a truly beautiful vista. As I drive along a quiet seafront road, I’m chatting to an articulate, engaging and funny story teller. This entire visual feast combined with good conversation is a rare joy.

As my eyes click open and shut and in the split second of a blink, a small pair of dog’s bollocks slide across my windscreen. My entertaining passenger is silent and opened mouthed. I’m also braking to a stop, a very quick well practised screeching, sliding, tyre smoking safe full stop.

I pull over just in time to see a middle-aged man and woman lifting something up from the beach below. At the end of what I thought was a rope, is a dripping wet and worryingly limp tiny dog that has now instantly explained the flying dog’s bollocks my brain had photographed a minute earlier.

I think the rest of this sorry tale can be told from a better perspective. So let us look at this from the point of view of the middle-aged couple standing near the zebra crossing.

The couple are deep in conversation unaware the extending lead with a tiny dark yorkie dog on the end was reeling out to its fullest extent onto a Zebra crossing. The little dark dog is now having a shit on the black part of the crossing nearly all the way to the middle of the road. The man holding the lead has heard a car, my cab. He realises where the straining shitting little dog is, he sees me in my cab at full national speed chatting away to an equally smiling passenger. I am not going to stop; I can’t see a small dark dog having a shit on the black part of the crossing. The middle-aged man pulls on the lead and in one quick urgent jerk, a sea angler would be proud of; the little dog that is about the size of a kitten has suddenly gone from a squatting position to a flying one.

As the dog brushes across my windscreen and my mind takes the picture of the tiny dog’s bollocks, it continued its journey at a pace through space over the heads of the middle aged couple, passes the railings and ends up landing in a pool of sea water on the beach below and to all intent and purposes is now dead.

I gingerly enter this arena of death and tears as the couple are pulling the dog up from the beach by its neck onto the promenade, both convinced it was an ex-dog, shifted this mortal coil, gone to meet its maker, you get my pythonesque drift. I attempt to get involved in their grief and lay some of the shame of this event on my shoulders, when as the middle aged woman tries to give the dog mouth to muzzle resuscitation the little bastard thing came back to life and bit her face and shits itself. (Although involuntarily this time) considering in the last minute, this little dog has been strangled, thrown at a speeding taxi, chucked in the sea, hanged and his owner tried to eat his face. I would be shaking and bearing my teeth too.

where's my fucking pills?

 I quickly left them there on the promenade bemused, confused, bitten and covered in reanimated dead dog poo.  I got back in the cab and took my customer home, whom, within moments of driving away also nearly shit himself laughing about the whole debacle.

I’ve now added this event to my burdensome checklist of things I have to look out for whilst driving the cab, these include looking out for pedestrians on crossings, sleeping drunkards inbetween parked cars that tend to stretch out as I drive by and then run over their arms.  Included on the list also are driving around fat blokes lying in the middle of the road and having to remember the give way to the right rule, I also now have to add a quick careful look for little black or white dogs having a shit on zebra crossings.