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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.

My Twittersphere Needs You

Bored.

It’s simple. I want you to lie more AND I don’t care if you are shit at lying either. Myself and my fellow Twitter brethren  are getting terribly bored lately and YOU are my problem, I Love being told a good story in the cab, I am not interested if it’s true or not, but it HAS to be good. I am a taxi driver, a stranger, someone you are unlikely to ever meet again. My association for bullshit is, like it or not, something I have to live with. So it’s ok, bring it on.

I used to get a lot of faux scientists that invented Jaffa cakes and smooth action tampons and people pretending to be fake doctors, when in fact most of them were still wearing their trainee nurse’s uniform under a coat, even had a guy pretending to be a famous drummer, which may have been true, he did have a stick. I also had a gold prospector that did his thing in his secret place in a wood nearby, he proudly waved a battery operated nail and metal finder thing from Wickes at me. Alas the tall stories have all but dried up.

It is true to say I sniff out bullshit and put it on the Twitter quite often, it’s not all rubbish, some tales are quite harrowing and treated with as much kindness and respect as I can. But COME ON! I need a bit of help here! My twitter page is not for talking about myself! Jaysus I’m dead boring me, I haven’t even got a hobby or a vice or a moany family to dribble on about. My life isn’t shit and I’ve not got any lurgies I want to share with you. I need my customers spouting bollox with regularity. If not to put on twitter but to at least keep me amused in my mundane work life that has me mostly sitting around taking pictures of lamp posts and judging cats size (NOT cats eyes btw.) there are some big pussies out there let me tell you.

Is Twitter to blame? Are you worried your BS will hit the Twittersphere via my internet-o-phone as soon as you get out of the cab? Er… well it will, AND if you are mildly famous, I have the means to get your golden bullshit into the actual papers made of actual paper. I knows people you know. I’m careful mind with the local townsfolk, I see a lot of dodgy behaviour from, quite frankly, supposedly respectable people and if I want to stay alive locally, I ain’t never seen nuffink, right?

So come on bring on the bullshit, don’t be afraid, the bloke that said he was a dog sterilizer, he went for it, he even had a squeezy bottle of bleach and a sponge (no, really, he did.) or the womanising eunuch. I don’t know what that is either, but don’t be telling me you are a porn star, male or female ‘cos that’s getting real old now.

I am @mr_taxi_man on Twitter, you can follow me if you want, you may get bored, waiting for a tweet from me is like waiting for a cab, a lot of nothing then ten come along at once.

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.