Whoever planned that my tour should be in Barcelona on Saturday and Nottingham on Sunday wasnÂ’t really thinking of the logistics of what that meant. And admittedly, neither was I when I agreed to do it. It was of course physically possible to get from one town to the next, but at this stage of the tour and as tired as I was it was gruelling and positively dangerous.
I suppose I could have flown back to the Midlands, but then I am on tour for the next week and need my car and didnÂ’t want to take a massive suitcase to Spain with me, so it meant getting up at 8am to get a plane to get me home by lunch-time. Then packing and driving to Nottingham. Every time I tour I say I will make sure I donÂ’t do this kind of thing again, yet every time I forget and the nightmare journey becomes worse.
I had hoped to write on the plane, but instead had tried to sleep and get over my absinthe hangover. When I arrived at Heathrow I decided to damn the expense and get home as quickly as possible, so I got a black cab.
The queue at Heathrow was being operated by a couple of women from Eastern Europe, who asked me where I was going. “Shepherd’s Bush” I told them, as this was the truth. A famous actress whose name escapes me, but who has fantastic cheekbones and might have been in “Sirens” was ahead of me, looking skinny and glamorous. But I wasn’t interested in her. I just wanted to get home and was trying to work out if I had time for an hour’s kip.
I got in the next cab. I told the man my address. “Which way do you want to go?” he asked aggressively. I hate it when they do this. It’s their job to get you where you’re going and if they’re any good at their job they should know the best way. “I don’t know,” I wearily replied, “Through Chiswick? Or whatever you think is best.”
“Have you got a cab from here before?” he barked.
Assuming he was expecting me to furnish him with directions, I said “Yes, but I don’t really make it my job to note down what route the driver has taken.”
“No, it’s not that,” he came back, his eyes flashing at me in his rear-view mirror, and then I thought he said “Why did you tell them you were going to Brentford?”
“I didn’t. I said I was going to Shepherd’s Bush,” I told him. He looked furious and I didn’t think I had done anything wrong.
He babbled a little bit about Brentford and I couldnÂ’t really understand what he meant. Finally he managed to get across to me that the system that operates with cabs at Heathrow is that if a driver is going locally, the girls in the queue give the driver a chit which means he can return to the rank, but if the driver is going beyond Brentford then they donÂ’t get the chit and have to leave a certain amount of time before coming back to the airport. So what heÂ’d actually been saying is that I should have told the women I was going to Brentford, as this would have helped him make more money.
This made a lot of suppositions: that I as a person who had taken a cab from Heathrow should know this (I have done many times, but no-one has ever said it before), that I would know that a cab driver would rather come straight back to Heathrow (I am not sure they all would, though obviously this was the one place he liked to work from) and that I was prepared to risk telling the women on the rank one thing and then the driver something else. What if I had got a driver who insisted that he was going to take me to the place I said I was going?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said grumpily, “No-one’s ever told me that.” I felt that him getting angry with me for inconveniencing him was a bit rich. I was about to give him £50 for half an hour’s work and whilst it may be annoying to him that I don’t know the ins and outs of his profession, he can hardly have expected me to. And being angry about it just made me immediately hate him and worry for how the rest of my journey was going to be. I wanted to get home fast and I didn’t have time for this kind of aggression.
He was quiet for about a minute and then said “Well now you know, don’t you?”
Yes I do, now. But then I am not sure that I am prepared to lie for the convenience of a cab driver, who might not actually care about coming back to the airport. But I have passed this information on to you. If you are at Heathrow and travelling beyond Brentford, tell the women in the queue that you are going to Brentford and then on the off-chance that you get a driver who only works the airport (rather than one who works everywhere and has just dropped someone off here) he will be grateful. Not so grateful that he doesnÂ’t charge you a huge amount of money for your journey. But grateful nonetheless. Also you might be risking infuriating a different driver who doesnÂ’t care about this issue who will be confused about why you lied.
I have done my job. I have passed the info on.
The taxi driver was quiet for a bit, which was a relief to me. I was fairly sure he was a little bit crazy. You always take this chance when getting into a car with a stranger. He was from Manchester and looked just like Dave Spikey, but in a long brown wig. It took me til later to realise this, but now I wonder if I was part of some new hilarious Channel 4 hidden camera show.
Suddenly after twenty minutes the previously aggressive cab driver was all matey. “I’m thinking of jacking it in today and going for a beer,” he told me.
So why had you got so upset about me spoiling your chance of going back to the airport if you were finishing your day anyway?
“Sunday afternoon, deserve a cheeky beer or two, don’t you think? Are you going out for a beer now?”
“No, I’m working tonight,” I said, reluctant to get into conversation.
“Working on a Sunday night?” he said incredulous, as if that was impossible. Even though he was a cab driver and some cab drivers work at that time.
I told him I was going to Nottingham and that I had been in Barcelona last night. I don’t know why. I was getting dangerously close to telling a cab driver that I was a comedian. An awful mistake, which means that you are inevitably asked to “Tell us a joke then” and asked if you like Roy “Chubby” Brown.
“What do you do?” enquired the insane schizophrenic driver.
“I’m a comedian,” I stupidly said. Why did I do that? This was the worst person in the world to say this to.
But he didn’t say anything. He carried on driving. Four minutes later he said “What part of the media do you work in?”
He has misheard me. I had an escape route from the road to oblivion, but still something compelled me to be truthful. “No, I’m a comedian” I reiterated.
He left and his crazy Dave Spikey eyes looked at me in the mirror, “Are you? You don’t look like one.”
And so the nightmare had started. Though he amazingly resisted the compunction to ask me to regale him with a joke he did ask me if I liked Peter Kay and Bernard Manning. I honestly told him that Peter Kay was too broad for my tastes, though I thought he was a good craftsman, whilst I thought Manning was rubbish. But he wasnÂ’t listening. He wanted to tell me how funny he was and how funny his mate was and about how he was girl crazy and unmarried and how great his life was. At least he wasnÂ’t angry with me any more. And he soon got me home, without killing me or flipping out on me. I was back in ShepherdÂ’s Bush. Not Brentford. And heÂ’d arranged with his mate to go out drinking, so it didnÂ’t matter anyway.
Soon enough I was on the M1 heading to Nottingham, feeling as tired as I ever have whilst driving (and I have driven in a state of exhaustion many, many times) I stopped for a coffee and some sweets to wake me up and somehow managed to get to my hotel in one piece. Along the way I had been constructing a scenario in which I fell asleep and died in a crash and the bookers at Avalon were called to account for following a Spanish gig with one in Nottingham and how they agreed never to do anything as stupid again, in my memory. But tragically for the good of comedians everywhere, I failed to die and so will be faced with something more ridiculous next time.
I got a cab from the hotel to the venue. The driver recognised me. “You used to be in a double act?” he enquired and I told him I was. “Where’s the other one?” he inevitably asked. “I’m not entirely sure. We’re not working together any more.”
He couldn’t remember the name of the shows, so I had to tell him, but he had liked them so it wasn’t too bad. “You used to have a really funny beard didn’t you?” he told me.
“It wasn’t meant to be funny,” I said.
“It was though. The way it grew and not all over your face.”
ItÂ’s good to be complimented in this way
“It was a long time ago,” I commented. “Don’t!” he replied, “You’re making me feel old. Looking at you with all your grey hair.”
I don’t think he had been to charm school, this one. But he was only the second maddest cab driver I had had today and I liked him well enough, even when he told me that he had had an impressionist who might have been Jon Culshaw in his cab and had proceeded to frighten him by doing some dangerous manoeuvres and also an actress from Coronation Street another time, who was really fit and if she hadn’t been with an ugly female companion he would have kidnapped her. I think he was joking. “Don’t worry, you’re all right,” he added, implying that I was too ugly to be worthy of kidnap. Way to build a fella up pre-gig.
He dropped me at the address I had on my contract, which is where I had last played a “Just the Tonic” gig, but it was all locked up and no-one around. I checked my text messages and realised that the promoter had given me a different address, but I had nowhere of knowing where it is. I rang the number the promoter had given me, but no-one was answering, so I asked a passerby where I had to go and was instructed to walk down a hill. For the second night in a row I found myself wandering blindly through the street, looking for a venue, this time carrying a box of programmes and feeling so tired that I was considering lying down and dying. Luckily I managed to get through to the venue and wasn’t far away and soon I was in the dressing room.
I had imagined that I would be too fucked to give a good performance, but it was a packed room and the audience were properly up for it and it was the best show for a good while. A slightly mad heckler and a mobile phone interfering with the sound system just added to things and by the time it was over I didnÂ’t feel too tired at all.
Insanely I ended up telling the cab driver who took me back to the hotel that I was a comedian and he was the third cab driver of the day who informed me that that was something he would like to try. But luckily he didnÂ’t elucidate too much, though had I been on the ball I would have told him to tell me a joke. Except then he would have done.
I fell into bed, finally able to sleep, hoping I wouldnÂ’t wake up to find this had all been a dream and that I was still on the M1, about to crash into the barrier.
