Lulu.

She puts on her own seatbelt and waves goodbye to the staff at the centre who have put her in my cab. I have taken Lulu to and from the centre for many years now. She shoves polo mints into my mouth and waves ten pound notes in front of my face to pay me when I’m driving. She cries when I hit potholes and is beside herself when there is a delay or traffic. ‘What’s your name? Is something she has asked me once a week for the last 14 years.

Today though is a special day. Today she has had a celebration. Lulu has had a party.

She has a phone, she likes the beeps and whistles it makes. She makes a call; ‘Hello? Hello? Its forty years today! Yes! I had a party! Forty years in the home! Hello? Hello? The line is dead. Ten seconds the call lasted, to her sister. Busy I suspect, our lives are busy after all. ‘What’s your name?’ She asks, I am already new to her yet again and after searching her cardigan pocket she shoves a hairy polo mint into my mouth.

See you next week Lulu.

The Extremely Agitated State of the Short Distance Driver

I’m rather...

Annoyed that I told you to put out the cigarette, but you had to have the last drag in the cab, inhaling deeply like it was your last breath and blow it in my face, you’re smiling at the rebel in you that’s saying “Hey dude! I just dumped my shit on you! Ha!” Cunt

Angry that you think that even when you are politely told to please not eat in the cab, you think it’s “The thing” to carry on eating and deny you are even doing it. Permeating my clothes with the smell of your deep fried and reheated meat, my workspace stinks, my twelve hour imprisonment in this three square yards of tin and plastic. Fuck you and your wet greasy mouth and fingers that you have just wiped on my seats.

Disgusted that pumping your girlfriends pussy with your fingers is ok for me to watch, smell and hear. You feel the smug master of your moment over a female and me, the fateful me that is meant to be grateful. Bastard. I don’t want to touch your gonorrhea’d shilling.

Incredulous that your cursing and wildly gesticulating diatribe and droplets of spit hitting my face, my open mouthed face, my trying to reason with you face, all the while drinking in your projectile spit. Why? It’s costing you fifty pence too much. Your £400K house is nice with great kerb appeal as I sit outside it, grateful for any money at all for my work, my £5.70, my time, my fear. You strut away like a gladiator, walk away you imbecilic fool, I am less of a man now, another bit of me chipped away, humanity draining job of mine. I dream. Daydream in the dead of night with rain and fog as ever-constant companions. The indicator ticking away my soul. I dream of killing you. For fifty pence, yes, killing you, thinking no more of it and having a cup of tea as my prize. Fuck you for making me feel this way. Fuck you to hell.

You make me feel dishonest, my betrayal of mind, my betrayal as my phallus reacts to your grinding in your seat and fumbling at my crotch. Your breasts ample and willing to give, you’re playing the game, I don’t want to play the game and feel your anger of being rejected. My own being has betrayed me. My mind thought about it, even willing me on. My life could have been in tears. Your wetness can fuck off, I hate you for making me betray my path of love for my beloved, guilt ridden still for casting away your willing temptation. My bastard erect betrayed me. Fuck off whore, wife of another, teacher of children. Fuck off.

I won’t thank you for making me tearful. Your wife soon to depart with ovarian cancer eating away, with itself not caring that its own cancerous demise is coming soon. I won’t thank you whilst you pour your tear sodden grief into my soul. I sit with you and hold your hand. My mind is blessing you and your children. You should not have gone out to be cheered up. 

You shouldn’t have gone out at all.

Blah, Blah and um...Blah...

I would love to say, simply, I have taken a sabbatical from writing to enable me to refresh and regroup my thoughts on all that I commit to my published columns and blog but alas, this is not true. The real reason is because I have simply nothing to say, no real thoughts or musings to convert to electronic ink. Further, I am distracted by the conversations on the twitter with bloggers and columnists, writers and TV script jockeys I have been fortunate enough to get to know. Talented all, in fact so talented I feel, at times, totally overwhelmed by them.

I fell through the gaps of no hoper's and the ‘Not worth picking ups’ a long, long time ago. At the tender fresh faced wondrous age of five I was already dodging the splintered cane from ageing nuns for not being able to speak correctly or for not remembering ‘The Capital In Front Of The Words.’

At home aged five, I was often punished for not being able to spell or pronounce correctly. In fact, my little sister and I walked up and down the living room hand in hand towards my mum and if words like butter were not said properly a slap was dispensed and we were sent back to the end of the room and made to walk towards the inevitable. Fear took care of the great pronunciation fairy interjecting and putting the right way to do things into my still growing empty little cranium. Today I say butter like any good cockney should. Sorry mum.

The fully stocked small library at my junior school was always shut, the pride of the school, the nuns showing it off only to the visiting whoevers. I recall vividly a storm brought everyone in from the playground. Colder than the usual deep mid-winter they threw us out in, normally without our coats. Amazingly this ‘holy’ library was opened to the children it was designed for that day. I was then seven and I picked up the first book that didn’t have Janet and John or the holy cross on the front cover.  The book was about astronomy by my lifelong hero Sir Patrick Moore. The photos were beautiful. My true indescribable heart jumping euphoria that these swirling galaxies, colourful gaseous expanses and very detailed pictures of the moon were even real and indeed even existed beyond the Roman Catholic bibliotheca was truly a shock to the little me.

I managed to steal that book. I took it for the knowledge that was denied to me. I treasured my illicit gains. I may search for that book again one day and put it on a shelf, maybe put it near the front.

I was encouraged to read the bible for readings in church, in front of mum, BEFORE church and in class at school as part of daily lessons up to the age of eleven. I’ve not looked at a bible since, I won’t even pretend to mouth the words at weddings or funerals like we all do. Not interested in a revaluation of it, or a discussion that merits or demerits it. I am truly not interested. I refuse to be characterised as an atheist, a gnostic, or some other form of dissentious label. I have knowledge of spirituality and being that is still forming the real me. An on-going process through life, as it should be.

I have dipped my toe in all belief systems. Cherry picking wisdom I can drag around with me on my journey through the mud of life and I habitually discard so much other people faithfully believe in. I am presently now enjoying my journey as a Kabbalist. I cherry pick nothing. Everything makes sense. No religious dogma. No preaching, just gentle explanations about my life and the world. For me it is peaceful and thought provoking reading and meditation.

My kabbalah interests stemmed wholly from a book given to me by a friend when not surviving my bowel cancer was a distinct reality. She is a surviving Babylonian Jew. She and her whole family, of some I have known since a child, are a miracle of survival and it was her absolute certainty that this book would heal me, her sincere unwavering belief and the look of ‘help me to help you’ moved me like never before. The healing part for me was the absolute certainty it gave ME that I would survive, my only reading material was this pre-religion fountain of knowledge, a knowledge that has been plagiarised by some of the greatest thinkers, philosophers and scientists that have ever lived.

The local authority cane and the matriarchal punch combined to make me rebel against any form of learning, so I actively did not learn a thing for the duration of my short secondary school education. Hormones and girls, running away from home, living rough in Soho and getting a job at fourteen took care of any chance of a teacher trying, albeit usually badly to educate me. I was married at nineteen, having two beautiful girl babies along the way, life took over and was the only wage earner for the next eleven years and that exhausted me.

Living alone near London Bridge, newly divorced, missing my children and my little sisters death still fresh and raw, I had rare time on my hands to read my first ever book fully. I was thirty, it was a Steven King something or other, dead pleased with myself I even finished reading a WHOLE book. I then read at the rate of one book every two days or so, everything he ever wrote, I then ploughed through his contemporaries. Then I stopped. I did not read another book for pleasure for the next eighteen years.

I don’t know why.

I follow some pretty cool people on the twitter, there is in fact a core of thinkers and commentators on some if not all of life’s curmudgeoness I am proud say I have gotten to know and indeed some I have even met. They have introduced me to music, books, and fresh thinking. I say ‘fresh’ because there will be not a cliché used between them, original words from original thinkers.

On watching a conversation between two authors on the twitter, they mentioned the American author and poet Charles Bukowski sufficiently to garner my interest. I read Ham on Rye by Bukowski in one sitting and quickly clicked on the big shop in the cloud and bought EVERYTHING this all round son of a bitch of a genius has ever written. Read them all, back to back, I sucked in the very breath of the man. I know how he smelt and he stinks trust me.  It is incredible that you can read a man’s literary work in a little over a week. His life’s work in fact. A life, a WHOLE LIFE in a week. Think about that.

Learning as a child brought associations of pain and regret and even dare I say torture. I have a mind trained not to absorb too much superfluousness. I read newspapers very rarely. I recall the Steven King books and those from his contemporaries, dozens and dozens of them.  I cannot remember a single word or phrase from them. Still even now illogically certain that my time was wasted, even though I think I enjoyed them at the time, maybe.

In my past, I have been a disappointment to most of the people I have touched, sensing my bright mind they somehow always expected better of me. I have not been a good husband, father or lover, selfish in most of my endeavours. I am terribly flawed much to the chagrin of many.

I have yet to write anything of worth, but this one thing drives me on. It is the certainty in knowing that I will. I may lie, steal and deceive to get your attention on paper and in life just as I did on a grand small scale when I was seven in the oft-locked school library and if I am ever invited into your home and one of your books goes missing, I may have stolen it. Be satisfied what you have already read and absorbed is about to teach me something.

You will never get it back.

Crisis? What Crisis?

Donald Trumps Big Green Ballbag

What is this I am hearing about a financial crisis? I have never heard such bollocks! My customers are enjoying the best available to them. Wrists are still heavy with the best watches money can buy and when I get them home, their drive has all the latest and newest vehicles, my boot is always full with shopping fresh from Milan, Monaco, New York and Leeds.

I meet and greet men dressed in the finest Zegna suits, unfortunately, the amount of times I see the ‘handmade in Italy’ label still attached to a sleeve and the pockets still stitched up is on the increase, new money I suspect. I can forgive the new young executive for not being aware of such things and wanting to make an impression on his peers but walking through duty free and spraying everything on to your new Italian finery and present yourself to me smelling like a tarts handbag is quite frankly atrociously unforgivable to me and woman kind.

I have a regular customer that owns a golf course in the beautiful Sussex countryside; it has become an academy of excellence for the tuition of golf, it is full to capacity all year round with eager fellows with their brand new sets of golf clubs arriving from all over the world. Still freshly reeling at the excess baggage cost getting them into the country I can often kill a conversation by mentioning that it would have been cheaper to buy the golf clubs here and give them away when they have bent them on our frozen greens.

Women do not escape my critical but forgiving eye for detail either.  Consider impossibly large handbags that are in vogue at the moment, (You now, the ones you can put a medium sized fluffy dog in and all of its latest Burberry outfits.) I have recently seen one carried by the most diminutive of women wearing a 1950’s Chanel two-piece she probably procured from a disgustingly expensive vintage shop in Paris, perhaps hoping that lime yellow dogtooth check will come back into fashion one day. (Let’s all hope it doesn’t eh?) These bags are not fashionable when a woman is about four foot eleven; she looked like a toddler carrying a laundry sack. 

The only real crisis I encounter regularly are the well-travelled and well-heeled failing to grasp the concept of the UK being aggressively intolerant to smokers.  Lighting up big, long, elegant Cohiba Corona Especiales cigars when in my cab is now, not allowed by my delicate lungs and the big nasty government. My polite request to extinguish the cigar is awkward and often culminates, sadly, in it being lobbed out of the window. In fact, on one occasion a whole box of them flew out of the window by an enraged ruddy faced large American completely dressed from head to toe in beige. He would have blended into a sand dune in the Sahara, yes, I know, THAT beige.

Beige rich American. For illustrative purposes. Obv.

So listen up, there is no crisis. You fashion worshipping, cocaine sniffing, tax avoiding, cheap fag buying gadget fiends. Ok?

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.