In 1989, I was working in a factory and, although the pay was good for where we lived, there was little money left over at the end of the week for those little things that made life so enjoyable so my wife and I agreed that, for a short while, I would work part time driving a taxi.
It was the days before deregulation so the number of cabs on the road was restricted by the local authority and, unlike modern uber drivers, I actually passed the local hackey test and had the appropriate police and medical checks.
I worked Friday and Saturday evenings and still had saturday afternoons and all day Sunday with my family but it was a steep learning curve and I quickly realised why so few potential cabbies fell by the wayside after a few weeks as, in those first weeks, I had several runners and aggressive encounters and basically obnoxious people but I was big and stubborn and soon lost my naivety.
In 1990, something devastating happened and it changed my life forever. I won't go into any more detail about it than to say that I felt like everything had to change. We sold our house and bought another, bigger one, just five miles away and I quit my job in the factory.
If you've ever worked on a production line then you'll know that the only way to keep up is to completely switch off from what you're doing and, the moment that you think about what comes next, you're lost so, in effect, you become the automaton that eventually replaces you. The result of this is that your mind wanders; if you're lucky, you have a group of people around you that you get on with and can spend a lot of time talking trivia but, an eight hour day shift or ten hour night shift leaves you plenty of time to dwell on your problems so it was either leave or go insane.
That's how I became a full time cab driver and, although the hours were longer and the rewards less, it worked well for me as having to have a degree of concentration on the road and the chattering of passengers was enough to distract me for most of the time although I'm not sure that the long hours were really beneficial to my homelife. Swings and roundabouts.
The majority of the people that I picked up were instantly forgettable, mainly people going to and from pubs and restaurants and those returning from work or late shopping trips, but some became so familiar that they almost became friends and I was constantly amazed by how open some would be with a comparative stranger but maybe that was why they felt that they could be so open.
To be honest, people changed during the thirty years that I drove a cab, it became the 'ME' society with everyone constantly taking photos of themselves as if the world cared, young women became even more vain, shrill and self obsessed and young guys continued to think that their best football shirt and bell end haircut made them god's gift to women.
I've got dozens of anecdotes about those thirty years; some funny, some shocking, some violent and some just plain bizarre but, of course, the ones I want to talk about are the naughty ones.
It was Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning and our local nightclub was about to spew out the usual motley crew of drunks. I'd work my way to the front of the rank and I was watching for who would approach my cab.
I'd been doing the job long enough to be able to spot an arsehole by their expression and the way that they walked and I was always ready to turn away anyone that looked in the least way dodgy ( better to get the unpleasantness out of the way early rather than in some remote country lane ).
The door opened and a woman stepped outside and paused on the doorstep, looking left and right as if expecting to see someone and this gave me time to observe her quite closely and she looked distinctly out of place coming out of such a meat market. She was about five feet five or six, mid thirties, slim with a pretty face but her shoulder length brunette hair and makeup looked far too perfect to have presumably spent several hours in a sweaty disco and her navy blue jacket and knee length skirt looked more like she'd come out of a boardroom meeting instead of a sticky carpet nightclub.
She looked up and down several times before strolling over to my car with a careful, unhurried stride and, pausing at my passenger window, she asked me if I could take her about twenty miles and, of course, I said "Yes".
