I'm going to change the world
Welcome.
Anything left in the cab is yours: drugs, babies, contraband, used condoms, newspapers, etc. Stop sobbing about it. Take what is useful and throw the rest into the Thames.
Lastcard, piss on Hadrian’s wall for me. It’s the American thing to do. Thanks. I owe you a few pints.
The American thing to do would be to dump his car battery on it.
The wallet people were drunk, but usually they're either old, or disoriented tourists, or those people who go through life not caring. You see them stepping out in the road all the time, blissfully unaware of oncoming traffic, normally dragging a toddler behind them. I almost envy them, sometimes.
I did briefly consider throwing this one in the Thames. But I have this pesky conscience, like Pinocchio.
I never meant to be some boy about town. Knightsbridge, Chelsea, St. James. It must be something within me. Or rather, some sick conjunction of random events. To Homerton. E9. I went to Seaham Wetherspoons on holiday, Seaham being a defunct mining town on the Durham coast, where Uncle Wilf came from, but Hackney Wetherspoons is just as rock bottom. £2 a pint LOL. Cutting edge, Scott of the Antarctic hipster frontier. Check out A Path Through Haze radio show. Totally authentic. Maybe more on that later. An excellent meal. You can tell where the bombs fell in Hackney.
how much does a pint cost elsewhere?
Wetherspoons in Victoria is £4.90, and in Enfield is £2.70. My local, which is just off Sloane Square, is £6.70.
How common is it for you to get fares going across a huge segment of London?
For no good reason, the idea popped into my head of you rolling up at Heathrow, somebody jumping in, and giving an address in the East End.
I’ve taken a few taxis in London; I paid them off with large sacks of Gold Coin; Tip included.
If I ended up in the wrong saloon, I would have to find a job just to get a buzz on.
How common is it for you to get fares going across a huge segment of London?
For no good reason, the idea popped into my head of you rolling up at Heathrow, somebody jumping in, and giving an address in the East End.
Had one from Paddington to Tooting Broadway a couple of weeks ago, and maybe on the same day, Nine Elms to Golders Green, both about £50. Maybe a couple of those a month. Although I have dropped off at Heathrow many times, the examiner who gave the talk on the day I got my badge said she'd never picked up from there because that's a too complicated other world, and what happens to them is they lose their Knowledge.
Yeah, also went in The Gun in Homerton (£6.30). I prefer my 1860s pubs not to have large, neon signs in them, and to retain something original: the bar, the windows, the ceiling... something. But that's perhaps not the hipsters' fault and at least they're keeping it alive. It's David Lynchian inside; wrong, but yet not wrong. A pile of free
magazines on one of the tables, and terrific music, suggestive of a whole ocean of great music I've never heard, namely the radio show. What the cool kids are up to.
Make sure you have enough cash to get a blow job from some crack whore in the East End to top off the evenings frivolities!
Tell a lie, I get more long jobs than that. Today, Beckton. The most obscure, the most extreme part of the East End. London was the busiest port in the world. I had been there only once before, in the 1980s, as a despatch rider, although I cannot imagine why. A place you go once and it imprints on your mind. Grey, dusty, archetypal. Row upon row of cubical, terraced, gardenless, movie set dockers' houses and nothing else; no trees, colour, street markings or outsiders. All gone now, according to my passengers.
There are beggars at some traffic junctions. This young guy in Aldgate the other evening, apparently possessed of a cheerful disposition, has got one leg. The other amputated, no doubt, owing to injection of drugs, or what passes for them, in the doorways and alleys of Whitechapel. And that didn't stop you? What kind of mad childhood leads to that?
Or else he’s ex squaddy. Plenty of broken ex military on the streets.
Charles Dickens wrote about this years ago. Not much has changed.
Charlie, can you help with a ruling?
This has been causing some controversy. To me the cabbie did nothing wrong and I’d have done the same as a private car driver but this guy seems to think otherwise (I also don’t agree he was slamming his brakes on).
Yes, I think I can help. He's pulling over to let a fire engine on its way to put out a fire through, FFS.
And if there's one part of the Highway Code I would like to be made compulsory in schools, it's that you can stop on a box junction when turning right, and only oncoming traffic is stopping you turning right.
. People don't do this all the time. They stop before the box junction and block the traffic behind them, because they think you can't ever stop on one. Drives me mad.
Yes I know. The cyclist tweeter is complaining that he shouldn't have pulled over into the cycle lane for any emergency vehicle, which seems completely wrong to me and I think many of us would instinctively pull over as soon as it was safe.
However, the law seems to back him up, which is why I wanted your opinion.
Some enforced days off. The cab is in for its yearly overhaul and relicencing. Time for some culture. There is a long queue outside the National Gallery, but round the corner is the recently refurbished National Portrait Gallery. Some are familiar, some are very skillful, and some are inimitably of their time. I like Meredith Frampton, but I feel like a tourist, and I think I prefer drinking beer up the road in Wetherspoons for £3.49 a pint during the day. It's October, right?
Neatly combed hair goes a long way towards making a favorable first impression.
I never understood the connection between appearance and competence, beyond personal hygiene. Something I remember about being 18. I'm aware that's a minority view, but I still do a job where appearance is irrelevant.
Similarly, how does wrapping some colored fabric around one's neck make one a better worker?
Seems like that's mostly died off in USA#n, outside of government jobs.
