Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 29

That’s not ‘old drivers of black cabs’. There is nothing wrong with the elderly (although see OLD MEN IN GYMS). Wisdom and experience are good things, and should be harnessed. No, what is meant here is ‘drivers of old black cabs’. For some reason, really old taxis – the smaller ones, with the snub nose, that you see in 1960s films – are quite possibly haunted. Or maybe it’s just because they’re old.

Whatever it is, you should never hail one. Ignore the fact that they’re curiously keen to stop and pick you up. Never mind that shiny new cabs keep not stopping for you. Old black cabs – and their drivers – are a little bit too much on the Stephen King side of life.

You give in and hail one. It wheezes to a halt accompanied by what sounds like (and may even be) a saucepan full of old bolts. After several minutes of struggle in which firstly the driver can’t hear you because he can’t get his window down, and then you can’t get the door open, you are off. The cab lurches forward as though the engine was about to be sick. You are thrown about the cab. The driver, who looks like the late Sir Anthony Blunt, tells you to mind the upholstery.

Your journey begins. The taxi takes no route you have ever seen. Perhaps it is relying on some mental map of the past, when it was happy and roamed the streets with its taxi friends. Perhaps it is the driver who thinks it is 1958. Either way, you are lost, late, and about to drive into the river.

Finally, after much swerving around corners and falling to the floor, you reach, if not your, then someone’s destination. You step out, visibly rattled and quite possibly crippled. You offer the driver the fare. He is enraged because there’s no tip.

After a mental debate, you do tip him, not because he is right, but because you don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and see a pair of headlights glaring at you malevolently from the foot of the bed.