You will be pleased and no doubt relieved to hear that today I actually managed to do some dusting and hoovering.
It wasn’t very much dusting and hoovering, actually it took me about fifteen minutes, but it was a start and certainly made me far less plagued by a guilty conscience this evening.
Of course there was not much time left for hoovery dusty things, because today was the Day Of The Meeting.
I am sure you will not have forgotten about the all-important meeting, certainly you won’t if you are a taxi driver anywhere around here. My telephone has not stopped dinging since about eight o’clock this morning, with an endless stream of wittering from anxiously concerned taxi drivers, all wishing to make sure that I knew exactly why we ought to be concerned about a stream of unidentifiable, possibly unlicensed and uninsured reprobates hanging about Windermere, sleeping in their cars and taking cash from unwary travellers.
Obviously I am concerned, although I confess that from a personal point of view, my most pressing concerns are less for public safety than for the fact that all our prices are being undercut by a lot of hooligans who are not paying our licensing fees. I am also, when reduced to my most basic, a territorial ape and they are On Our Taxi Ranks, where they are very much not supposed to be, which makes me want to beat my chest and make threatening noises. As far as public safety goes, the general public, as far as I am concerned, get what they deserve when they call Uber, in the same way as people who go to Costa Coffee deserve a cup of noxiously unpleasant sugary stuff.
If nothing else, as has been famously observed by many greater minds than mine, the presence of a common enemy has united us like nothing has ever done before, rather to my amusement. Suddenly we are all friends, our small rivalries forgotten. It is quite splendid.
Anyway, the meeting was this afternoon, and I had to get out of bed early because of getting the usual dog-emptying and laundry out of the way first. I spoiled my walk for myself by obsessively churning Uber-related thoughts round and round as I stumped along, and completely failed to notice anything lovely, which was a shocking waste of living in the Lake District. Once home I changed into my respectable clothes and shoes, the latter make me hobble slightly so I packed my flip-flops for the walking part, and off I went.
Three of us had been chosen to represent the taxi-driving population, and we met up in a cafe to discuss what we would say. Syed has done most of the information-gathering, and I was entirely impressed by the effort he had put in. He had brought a monumental stack of written depositions, a petition that I guiltily remembered I had forgotten to sign, and some Action Plans in case our MP needed some advice about what to do next.
We gathered our small force and marched off to the MP’s office, where, rather to my surprise, he was actually at home.
We have met before, on several fairly inauspicious occasions, and he remembered me, albeit only vaguely, I could see it from his slightly uncomfortable expression. In any case, this made me mentally chalk a couple of points in his favour, because he must meet hundreds of boring people, all rabbiting tediously about things that he really can’t do very much about, and I mentally crossed MP of my list of Things I Would Like To Do When I Grow Up.
He listened with commendable patience as we painstakingly explained some of the finer detail of taxi legislation to him, although really he should have known it already if he had ever read some of the other dozens of grumbling letters I have sent to him over the past twenty years. He even did a good job of looking interested. Indeed, he made exactly the right expressions of surprise and concern, and I could not help but offer him a mental salute. He can’t do very much about naughty Uber cars at all, and he knows it, because the Labour transport secretary is not going to go out of his way to help a Liberal Democrat gain the popular vote, but he made the most gratifying noises at the appropriate moments, and I took my hat off to him.
After an hour of this, Syed asked him if he would make a short video expressing support for the Lake District taxi drivers, and to my impressed surprise, he did so, ad-libbing for several minutes about the interesting information he had been given and his sincere intention to do everything he could to fix our problem.
I considered this a very creditable performance, no wonder he keeps getting re-elected, it was a marvellous bit of spontaneous spooling, and I could not have done it myself in a thousand years. Actually I probably could have done, but I would have had to concentrate hard and had some rather more gripping topic than transport legislation as a starting point.
We all shook hands, and parted on good terms, and once safely outside I changed into my flip-flops and made the most of my trip to the metropolis by making a small foray into Marks and Spencer. Two birds, and all that sort of thing.
I have spent much of the evening explaining our visit to all of my new friends, being every other taxi driver in the Lake District. We are going to re-form our several-years-defunct Taxi Driver Association.
I don’t doubt that we will all have squabbled furiously within a few months, taxi drivers are worse than five year olds for that, but for the moment it is all rather splendid.
I am quite enjoying it.
