John.

Twenty-five years in the navy, he is 73, smart and smells fresh and clean he has just visited his lady friend in the caravan that’s in the nice park just north of the town. It has just gone eleven and the meter trips over to the night rate at exactly that time; I notice he noticed that the meter is now on the enhanced night rate and ask him about himself. He tells me about the boatloads of alive and dead souls he has seen in all of the oceans of the world trying to flee from oppression. He has holed and sunk gunrunners and their cargo, he tells of lovely weather and death in the same sentence, always just an able seaman, never promoted and was happy with that. We arrive and I stop the meter total, he is sighing as he is counting his change. I laugh and joke and wish him a good evening, I even get out of the cab and open the door for him , stand to attention and salute, he laughs and walks off, I notice his shiny brogues, good ones. You can tell.  He did not notice my sleight of hand because I didn’t take his money, it wasn’t that much. After twenty-five years protecting this country, it was just a little thank you from me.

Broke Back Mountain Bike

A Bike. Not broke obviously

It is another warm summers evening, humidity is high and I have parked my cab by the beach, my eyes are half closed and a waft of charcoal smoke from a nearby barbecue combined with the dappling of shadow and light from the gently swaying trees are having a sleepy hypnotic effect on me.

Whilst in the cab with my windows down, relaxing and enjoying this sensory massage, there appearing in my sleepy gaze is the torso of a man, silhouetted against the low sun walking toward me as if in slow motion. He is carrying upon his large shoulders a mountain bike.

‘Can you get this in?’ he breathlessly asked. I snap into action quickly and I am out of the cab surveying all that was before me. I agreed to carry him and his large swinging package that he has now placed in my hands. ‘You sit in the cab and leave this to me’ he did not hear me as he was already reclining in the front seat; his long tousled dripping hair was draped over the back of my seat. Extreme exertion had beaten him.

Put the back seats down quickly, so I can lay this large load down was my objective now. He lazily half-asked me if I needed assistance getting it in the rear. I declined; I wanted the challenge of getting it in myself. I spend too long fiddling with small knobs that seemed to do nothing, and in one almighty push, the back seats went down. I stumbled and slipped behind him; he turned, looked down and gazed at me. He turned back and shut his eyes with a slight satisfied smile, perhaps knowing I was in control.

With the back open wide, my next objective was to get this huge thing in the rear. It will be tight, so tight.

I slid it in and it just flopped about. His seat was too high and proud, so I slapped his leathered saddle hard a few times and it eventually complied. Next was the front half, which was at an awkward angle, it meant I had to put my arm around and give it a good yank a few times, it succumbed to my powerful grip and in no time the front half was pointing toward me.

I slammed and rammed it in hard at least a dozen times before it went fully in. He stirred in the front as my suspension jumped up and jiggled. I gently told him not to worry as I finally squeezed it in behind him.

I climbed in the front and sat next to him, he looked exhausted and I too was breathless, my heart pounding more than usual. We finally set off towards a sun set low in the sky and thirty minutes later, we arrived.

We both got out and I pulled his bike from out of the rear, it came out easier than it went in and I handed it to him. I climbed in to pull the back seats up. ‘It’s bent!’ he said as he was gesturing behind me whilst I was still on all fours. ‘And broke’ he continued; ‘My saddle, it’s torn too!’ As I climbed out, I reversed into him. He stumbled back. ‘This cost me two grand!’ he exclaimed again and again whimpering almost, he now even had that dribbly slack jawed look about him. The bike DID look a bit bent, broke in fact.

He got increasingly angry and redder; I told him it did not help that he just sat in the front and left me to get on with it.  I REALLY do think short tubby fair weather bicyclists with limp greasy long sweaty hair should buy a cheap bike to learn and get fit on instead of being a big Mr Flash Bollox, and go out and buy an expensive carbon and aluminium lightweight fragile one.

I couldn't find a pic of a big bloke on a bike

I gave him my insurance details and I left him and his broke mountain bike.  In my mirror, I could see his yellow sweat stained Lycra top had now slipped over his rotund beer belly. His face was redder than the setting sun. I was fifteen quid better off and my insurance company was £2,500 worst off (new for old) the wanker didn’t tip me though AND he got a new bike out of it. Bastard.

NB: By the by, only the white carbon composite (apparently, yawn…) bicycle was bent in this article if you catch me drift and no other males sexuality was harmed during the process of writing this bollox except mine. Yes, in fact you can say I, er…took one for the lads.

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.