Photo by Viktor Avdeev on Unsplash
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Twice over the past two weeks, I had the pain pleasure of needing a taxi early in the morning. To blame was a combination of a super -early start and return to office mandates with the usual options not being feasible for different reasons. In Uber’s hands then I placed my fate, a non-trivial decision given the long and storied history we have, the high point of which included multiple instances of their maps sending taxis down parallel streets and dead ends. To be fair, part of it has to do with the part of town I live in. Previously an industrial estate, a few maps are yet to be updated to reflect the new street names and houses.
For the first taxi, I had a Somali-born Brit in his fortieth year of living in the country. Having rightly inferred where I worked from the address I gave him, he proceeded to regale me with tales of yore, the good old days as he put it. Those were the days, it seemed, in which big oil had perks to throw around; free sodas, extra cheap food in the canteen and lots of international travel across the various sectors of the North Sea – Norway, the UK, the Netherlands and the lot. Ages before I joined the company though I must say. What things we mull over these days are the threat of exiting the UK sector of the North Sea in totality, whilst jobs move halfway across the world by stealth. As for him, three grand kids occupy his days, the taxi being very much his side gig.
I had the company of a Pakistani Brit for the second taxi. Not quite a grandfather (his twin sons work in IT, still live at home and are not particularly keen to deliver grandkids it seems), taxi driving was very much his second job, one which filled the time between his day job. I didn’t quite get the Spelthorne spiel from him, giving his primary direction was towards the airport.
As a microcosm of life in this country, a Somali, Pakistani, and of course a Nigerian do not raise any eyebrows. What it does though is underscore the things which bind us – hard work, pride in being (and choosing to be) British, and for some of us at least a legacy of Empire.
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