Why is it that I am convinced that every cab driver, in any foreign country, is intent not on delivering me to my hotel; but is, instead, determined to drive me to a patch of wasteland, fillet me and turn me into the basis of an elaborate shrubbery?
There’s a passage in Alan Bennett’s brilliant “The History Boys” (originally in his diaries, I think: I’ve certainly come across it previously) where the schoolmaster, Hector is describing the joy of realising that something that you have always thought to be your own, lonely perspective is shared by a great artist: you read on in amazement and awe, feeling and reveling in the connection.
I think Hector is referring to Thomas Hardy, the second-rate novelist and first-rate poet. I, of course, am referring to the no-less illustrious Angelina Jolie, Denzel Washington and Queen Latifah.
“The Bone Collector” was one of those films which, for me, epitomised “horror”. Anything with Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan or (God forbid!) the pair of them, accounts for the others. The taxi driver who takes advantage of a visitor’s ignorance of the city to deliver them to a desolate place where they will be buried alive made such a powerful – and unwelcome – impression on me, that cabs (once the source of so much pleasure to me, to the detriment of my bank account…) have become foul-smelling pods of doom, with all the pleasurable associations of Charon’s ferry.
If it were as simple as “Hop on a bus, then, tit-face!”, I would, but late into an unknown airport in a foreign country makes that less feasible than it is at home (London).
The most recent, Jakarta-based, experience was exacerbated to no small degree by the fact that the cab was CLEARLY being driven by someone other than the man whose identity badge was displayed, in all its official glory to the dashboard.
The man who looked out of the laminated documentation on the dashboard appeared to have stopped off en route to a bleeding edge fashion shoot: hair artfully distressed and waxed. Face: handsome and youthful, de rigeur sneer creasing his expression. He wore a sky blue shirt that probably cost the same as the cab I was in.
The driver was quite clearly not this man. Perhaps he had been unwilling to go to the expense of having a photograph taken, and had, instead, simply raided the pages of Indonesia’s “Dazed and Confused”, but I think he could have looked a little harder for someone who was a closer match to his own appearance. Ella Fitzgerald, for example.
Of course, all ended well and after the briefest of those unsettling bomb-checks, when staff with angled mirrors on sticks check under a car that you’ve been in for a good hour, he drove me through the gates of the hotel where I enjoyed a night of freezing-cold air-conditioning, because I was too addled to work out how to turn it off.
