One thing you notice when you are a driving instructor is how certain groups of drivers behave on the roads. Taxi drivers, for example, fall into two categories. The official **˜black & whites’ – that’s the big cabs you can legally flag down – stop anywhere they want, and the more incovenient or dangerous the spot, the more likely they are to stop there. Private hire cabs – the ones you book by phone – typically drive everywhere at 50mph, even when they’re executing one of their familiar U-turns in heavy traffic on a main arterial road without the use of indicators. It saves fuel, you see.
So perhaps the one I encountered this evening ( well, 20/08/08 – I was moving the blog) needs to go back to Taxi Driver College. I was with a pupil and we were driving through a set of traffic lights – the kind where the single lane becomes two on the approach and then becomes one again after you’ve gone through. It had rained quite heavily and there was spray, and it was fairly dull. The pupil was driving at 40mph and the lanes were just merging back into a single. We’d had the usual rush of VW Golfs and Corsas determined to get past just so they could sit in front of a learner instead of behind one. But right at the last minute a taxi comes flying up and slams his brakes on just in front of us, and then spends the next two miles tailgating the cars in front, resolutely refusing to make eye contact. It was dangerous enough for us to have to swerve and brake harshly. This, of course, is standard taxi-driver behaviour, but when the road eventually became a dual carriageway he sped off at around 80mph in a most un-taxi like way. I suspect he was probably embarrassed by what he’d done and was uncomfortable driving around those who’d seen him do it.