Saturday night too far away
Friday night too tired,
Saturday night too drunk,
Sunday too far away.
Taxi 66
We talked Route 66 and the USA all the way. The food, the cars, the motels, the people. I mentioned that I’m planning my own father-son trip along Route 66 next year. From the other side of the generation gap. Myself, my son and my daughter.
Colourful night
And then I was empty again, cruising the winter streets of the nation’s capital, just Chet Baker and I in a silver limousine, cool as you like in the late evening.
Virgin passengers
I looked in on the taxi rank. I could see that two planes had just landed, so I tailed onto the back, with about thirty cabs ahead. Unfortunately one of the planes was a Virgin flight, and the next to land (and last for the night) was another Virgin and as every cabbie knows, Virgin passengers generally ring up their rels to come collect them at the airport!
Short Shrift
Cool and misty day outside. Canberra’s winters always seemed to me, when I first moved here, to be clear and blue and sparkling. Cold, to be sure, with a frost every dawn, but rarely overcast. Nowadays, fifty-fifty. Maybe it’s indicative of my state of mind to see more clouds than sun, but I doubt it. [...]
Charles and Betsy
Friday it all came together and we swapped the patched-up Charles* for renewed Betsy. I got to drive her first shift as a reborn cab, just like I drove her first shift as a new cab last year.
A lonely hunter
The last houses disappeared and then we were on the Cotter Road and soon on Lady Denman Drive, past horse paddocks, bushland, the zoo and the dam. Not quite your howling wilderness, but neither was it a busy road. I started wondering about someone scrawling a name on a bit of paper and luring an innocent cabbie out into a deserted layby.
Driving on the other side
Trying to get back to the airport after a lamb burrito in Zambrero, I was approached by a couple of jaunty folk. “You free?” they asked. Avoiding the obvious riposte, I indicated that I was available. “EPIC,” they said. I agreed. Exhibition Park in Canberra. Not on the way to the airport, but a nice [...]
Foursquare follies
We’ve got a new game, my day driver and I. A game where cabbies shine.
Foursquare, funking off the iPhone’s GPS and social networking. It’s a scavenger hunt, it’s a map of your day, it’s a point-scoring exercise, it’s gathering facts and sharing info.
Wasted
I’m disgusted. I’m a night cabbie, and for the past year or two, ever since the last Commonwealth election, I’ve been driving home public servants, drunk and exhausted. I pick them up from Parliament, from government offices, from hotels. Long after midnight.
