The place where I’m working this week is a 15 minute walk from a small suburban train station in East Birmingham. It’s not a good area, and the client is located on an industrial estate which is rather dark and lonely. I don’t mind walking through it in the morning, in fact I quite like a bit of exercise to clear my head, but in the evenings it’s slightly less fun.

One of my colleagues was commenting on it yesterday and saying that at the place where she used to work, I would have been told to take a taxi. In fact she told me to take a taxi and that she was sure the manager would reimburse it. At her old firm, they took the view that they were liable for staff getting mugged whilst walking to and from client premises, and that they would rather repay people the extra few quid for a taxi than have them become a victim of crime. She reckoned this particular manager we were working for would think the same, and possibly she would – I don’t know her so I couldn’t comment. But this girl annoyed me because she went on for half an hour about how dangerous it was for me to me wandering around an area like this in the dark carrying a laptop

Yes, I know it’s hardly ideal. I look about sixteen and it’s blatantly obvious that there’s a computer in my bag. I’m scared of the dark too, and I actually have quite a horror of industrial estates. But how I get to and from work is my business and when I’ve psyched myself up to be able to cope with it, it doesn’t really help if other people make an unnecessarily big deal out of it and harp on about how *they* wouldn’t even walk around here on their own at lunchtime in case they got murdered.

Sometimes people with cars can be so terribly snobby and get the whole concept of walking totally out of proportion. It’s less than a mile, it’s not that big a deal, and no I don’t want to go to all the hassle of getting cash out of cashpoint, finding a local taxi number, waiting around for them to pick me up, wondering if they’re a weirdo who might abduct me, collecting the taxi receipts and begging a manager to reimburse me. Yes, I might get the money back but that manager will remember and perhaps not want to book me on her jobs again because I’ve caused a problem, and next year when it comes to my annual appraisal there’ll be a comment about me causing disruption and not having a proper regard for the budget. I can do without more black marks to my name. The whole problem will be solved during the year when I learn to drive. In the meantime, I intend to continue to take my chances walking through industrial estates the length and breadth of the country But I am very grateful to the random lady who gave me a lift, and it is noticeable that the colleague who objected so much to my walking drove off at half five without so much as a backward glance, never mind offering to take me to the station herself

The point of this post is actually not to sound like a manic depressive, although I still feel like one, but to talk about taxis. I had to get a taxi from the station at High Wycombe to my present location, and I had a rather interesting experience. There were plenty of taxis in the rank when I arrived at station, and I got into one belonging to a local firm which I’ve used before. We were about halfway to our destination, totally in the middle of nowhere, when my taxi driver mumbled something incoherent and pulled over into a layby. I was a little perplexed and asked him what was going on. He mumbled something else, then before I knew what was happening he had opened the passenger door at the front and someone else was climbing into the taxi.

I should clarify at this point that I was sitting at the back. I would actually be interested to conduct a survey of taxi ettiquette and determine whether the majority of people, when using a taxi which is not a black cab, go and sit in the front with the driver or sit by themselves in the back. I always without exception sit in the back as I am a slightly nervous user of taxis and like to be as far away from the strange man to whom I am temporarily entrusting my life as possible.

Meanwhile, I was somewhat unnerved by the situation which was unfolding in my taxi. A rather unpleasant looking man who reeked of fags and booze was now sitting in the passenger seat and demanding to be taken to the station. It hit me that darkness was falling, and I was sitting in a taxi with two strange men by the side of an isolated country lane, several miles away from human civilisation. It strikes me that a normal person would not be unnerved by this situation at all… in which case I guess I have to conclude that I am not a normal person and move on. There are reasons why I get nervous in some circumstances, and taxis are a circumstance which I don’t like.

Anyway, of course it all turned out to be fine and not a cunning plot to abduct me. I’m not convinced my taxi driver was behaving very professionally by stopping to pick up another fare whilst he already had one in his cab, but he dropped me off at my destination first before taking the other guy to the station, and if I did end up with more on the clock for the time he spent messing about with the other guy’s luggage, this was a taxi which will be reclaimable on expenses so it isn’t ultimately me who will be footing the bill. That is my attempt to look on the bright side.

On the not so bright side, I just feel upset and would like a hug. I was further upset when I got to my room and found it was already occupied by a woodlouse. Summoning all my courage together, however, I managed to successfully exterminate it and I feel this is a measure of the emotional progress I have made over the last two years. Last time I found a woodlouse in my room here, I was less well equipped to cope with it. Hmmm. I think I must sound a bit deranged At any rate, there is no one to give me a hug until I get home on Friday night, so it is lucky that I had the foresight to bring Jaffa Cakes instead. Jaffa Cakes can solve most of the world’s problems, and only contain one gram of fat per cake