Born To Be Riled by Clarkson Jeremy

Author:Clarkson, Jeremy [Jeremy, Clarkson,]
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2010-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

Born To Be Riled

Minicabs: the full monty

Book yourself in for an operation and you’ll have no idea who’ll be wielding the knife. But you’ll know with absolute certainty that he’ll have a raft of qualifications and no history of muscular spasms.

It’s the same with restaurants. You may have no clue about who is preparing your food, but it’s a fair bet he’ll understand that you can’t put Tabasco sauce on sherry trifle.

And yet, when you want a taxi you’ll summon the services of a minicab which may or may not have brakes. And it will be steered by a man who may or may not have learnt to drive in Peru.

One thing is for sure though. He won’t come to your door and ring on the bell. What he will do is pull up in the middle of the road and lean on his horn, signalling that it’s time for you to stop whatever you’re doing and run outside.

This is unfair. He may have taken five hours to get there and in the meantime you may have met the girl of your dreams. Or you may be my wife who, having said goodbye to everyone at a party, will sit down again and give everyone a blow-by-blow account of her life.

Whatever, you will climb into the back of the cab whereupon you will be overcome with a wave of nausea. ‘Can I smoke?’, you’ll ask. To which the answer will be no, on the grounds that tobacco leaves a lingering odour, thus making the car harder to sell. WHAT? Tobacco would improve things. A giant fart would improve things. Smearing the entrails of a dead dog into the seats would improve things.

Minicabs have a smell all of their own, a smell that could not possibly be replicated even in a laboratory. It’s a smell that doesn’t even exist in a businessman’s pants. It’s not stale sick or even the driver’s shirt. And nor is it a mixture of the two. No, it’s the smell you get from those Christmas tree air fresheners. And it’s obscene.

To take my mind off the problem, I usually try to guess what sort of car I’m in. Obviously, it will have beige, pleblon seats, and obviously it will have been made in the Far East. But is it a Toyota or a Nissan?

I can understand why minicab drivers buy used Jap boxes – they’re reliable and cheap to run – but who buys these cars when they’re new? And why do they treat them so badly?

By the time Minicab Man is falling in love down at the auction the wheels are always square, and if you look hard you’ll note that whenever you’re going along in a straight line the driver is having to turn left. And what is that noise coming from the stereo? Why is it that minicab drivers listen to radio stations I’ve never even heard of, and how can they appreciate the wailing of the sitar when the controller back at base never shuts up?

I was once picked up by the fattest man in the world in an FSO Polonez.

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