Last Saturday evening marked my first shift as a taxi driver since early August 1998. In the event I was covering for Crazy Uncle John, who had asked me if I’d pick up a license for doing so earlier in the year to help out when he wanted a night off. It’s not something I thought I’d ever go back to, but with the amount of debt I’ve amassed in the past year it seemed like a good way of earning some extra cash.
It was quite an alien feeling getting in the diesel with my change box again, but within an hour of starting I’d done just two hires and those eleven years dissolved with the once familiar feeling that it was going to be a long, arduous night behind the wheel. Fortunately it would pick up later on, and the nine or so hours in the car went by quite quickly with the highs and lows that come with driving those mean streets.