All right, Lads, now the casuals have left, make a bit of room in the middle so everybody can hear. And somebody pass my glass up. I can’t talk with a dry throat, can I? And somebody throw a couple more logs on the fire.

Now I’m what? Let me think. No, you’re going soft in the head, Stan. I’m nowhere near eighty, not for two going on three years. Elle’s about two and a half years older than I am and she’s not eighty till next month, but don’t tell her I said that. Tonight’s offering is from my cab driving days. We were still struggling then. Lived in a rented place barely big enough to keep a ferret in, but it was dry and we managed to stay warm, but nothing was easy.

Yeah I know, but I’m talking about before you were even born, Eric. Nobody gave a damn then. Not that I’m sure they really do now.

The kids spent a lot of time after school and at weekends ratching round for wood and other stuff for the front room fire. Elle was a student nurse and I’d gone back to university. We were both still casualties of previous relationships and starting again. Between us we had eight kids, seven of them mine with three different mothers, so cash was tight.

I drove a cab seven nights a week and did all my studying during the day at weekend. If I had a choice I took the rural jobs that none of the other drivers wanted. I did that to take advantage of the road kill which kept the wolf from the door many a time. We lived on pheasant, rabbit, hare and even a deer a couple of times for years. Elle cleaned for the local vet two or three days a week and when she had time off did the odd shift serving in the local chip shop.

What’s that Alf? Nay, we didn’t have the cats then. Could barely afford for us to eat, never mind cats.

Both our families had turned their backs to us. I was a bit of a loner and was too busy to have time for any friends I might have made in those days. The only help we had was from other members of a single parent organisation Elle had joined a few years before I met her, they were mostly blokes single parenting. If you ever want to try tough, try that with daughters. Elle looked after their kids when they were working and they looked after ours when we both were. I know things were hard, but in the main they were happy times. We were warm, dry and ate, though the kids hated Mondays, cos Monday Lobby was leftovers from the last week threwn together and served with chips.

Now, early on the evening in question, I picked up a young looking, middle aged woman from the conference centre of a local motel. With the name from the office and the face I recognised her immediately as a deputy chief constable of a local police force, but said nothing. She wanted a forty mile ride which was worth a lot of money to me, but copper or not I told it had to be cash going that far and she agreed. She wanted to chat and eventually she turned the conversation to law and order.

After we had talked about the hazards of being a cabbie for five minutes or so she said, “You don’t seem to be the average taxi drive. Most don’t listen to Mozart and are not particularly articulate.” I can’t remember what the tape I had playing was, but it was Mozart and barely audible.

I know Geoff, and I still listen to classical music, I’ll be damned before I damage my hearing or sanity listen to the crap you listen to.

I told her, “I’m a mathematics PhD student, my wife is a student nurse and we have eight children between us, but we are just two folk trying to get by. If my views are better expressed than those of others that isn’t surprising, but I don’t claim they are any different from those who can’t articulate them as well as I.

Articulate means putting it all together in sentences, Geoff. It's the speaking equivalent of joined up writing. See, I told you that’s what listening to pop music does to you.

We talked, serious conversation that she led deep into law and order, and I saw she was stunned when I said, “I drive getting on for a hundred thousand miles a year, so it is not surprising I don’t like the police. I’ve had my taxi licence pulled by a copper when I was parked up for only having ten not twelve safety pins in my first aid box. I don’t think I’d ever opened it before from new. That cost me two days when I earnt nothing with which to feed my children. The joke there to me is that I carry a first aid box because the law says I have to, but I’ll never use it because I’m too concerned that if I did something wrong I’d be prosecuted and sued out of existence. Still I suppose a copper at the scene could use it and be sued instead.

“No doubt pulling my plate was in the interests of public safety, but I’d have preferred he’d gone and arrested a criminal. Still that might have been dangerous, eh? To me drivers are a sitting target for the average copper, who is a jobsworth I would sack and make do honest work. There’s the odd decent one, but they’re rare. I’d make them all live in the community they serve, then maybe they’d remember they serve the public who pays their wages.”

Yeah, yeah! I know Alf. Your granddaughter rides a motor cycle for plod down Devon way and I’m sure she’s a wonderful girl. She probably gives pennies to the poor too, but I’m talking generalisations here. I’m not having a go at Sylvia. Get him another pint to settle his nerves, Stan.

I continued and told her,“What is really frightening is that my great, great, great auntie Margaret who is a hundred and three doesn’t trust the police any more and she was reared to. The police at the very least have a serious image problem, for they are seen to have no interest in prosecuting the far too many criminals in their ranks. They will get no help from the general public till they put their own house in order. Robert Peel said they’d do the job by public consent, but those days seem to be long gone.” I could see she was taking all I had to say on board, but admit I thought it would make no difference at all.

Robert Peel was the prime minister who started the police, Alf. They used to be called Peelers.

At no time did I admit I knew who she was and as I found out many years later she had no suspicions that I knew. When she paid me, in cash as I had told her I wanted when she got in the cab, she said “Thank you. That was a most interesting conversation.”

My thoughts were not profound, after all, “Up yours you stupid plod bitch,” is hardly illuminating.

Years later, I read she had been passed over for promotion and had taken her case to a tribunal on the grounds of sex discrimination. I think she won her case, but I’m not sure.

Another round, Gladys, please. Good lad, Geoff. Put these on Geoff’s slate, Gladys.

Decades after our conversation, when I’d left lecturing and was doing a bit of teaching to fill in the time before I retired, I’d had to attend an in service training day. The were invented by a minster for education called Kenneth Baker, and were often referred to as Baker or B days. However they were often spelt by the irreverent as b i d e t s.

At this bash, which was held in an expensive suite of conference rooms at a local racecourse I had to listen to an ex-headteacher with the gift of the gab who had been knighted. He had been head of the biggest secondary school in the area where the deputy chief constable had worked. More nonsense from someone who thought he was a night club entertainer. Most of what he had say was about as useful to the average teacher as a packet of broken biscuits for dunking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he was lying. I’m sure it worked for him with his personality I could see that, but for any one else? No, forget it.

Course I’m sure, Alf. Could you bullshit for hours like I do about ordinary stuff that every body knows about and get a laugh and free drink? No of course not, but I can. That’s what I mean it’s about personality. I’m a bullshitter, you’re not.

Back to business. In an educational context he told the tale of a chief constable who had been picked up by a cab driver who had illuminated her as to the feelings of the populace at large. His point was that teachers too had an image problem. I recognised the events, barely, and at the halfway mark told him the real events and said, “I was the cab driver. She was not a chief constable then, but deputy chief constable based round the corner from your last school, and at the time I knew who she was.”

For all the difference I made I might as well have kept my mouth shut or talked about soap operas. He clearly wanted me to talk further, but I walked away because I wasn’t going to provide him with more money making entertainment. I attended the rest of the event but have no memory of it, so it couldn’t have been anything spectacular.

I can’t think of any else, Lads, so I think I’ll call it a night at that. What’s that Pete? Making compost with stuff that’s hard to rot? There’s a load of nonsense talked about that too. Forget it all. There’s only one thing worth knowing, Lad. If it’s organic bury it, preferably where it’s free draining so there’s a chance of a bit of air getting to it down the worm holes. I do it when I start a raised bed. I throw all the organic rubbish in a shallow trench, maybe six inches deep, including pallets and trees up to a foot in diameter and build the bed up around it. By the time the bed needs rebuilding the stuff will have rotted, and chances are you will too, cos it’ll take at least twenty years. Good night, Lads.

After the tale teller had gone, Alf asked, “How much of what Sasha tells us you reckon is true, Stan?”

“Who knows. Some of it I know is true or near enough. Over all these years, I’ve never caught him out telling an untruth. What he told Pete about compost is right enough. It’s called hügelkultur. It’s a German word meaning hill culture. They’ve been doing it for centuries. I read about it in Amateur Gardening magazine couple of years back. It's getting popular with the permaculture people.

“You’ve got to remember to him it’s just entertainment. We get entertained and he gets free drink. It’s a fair exchange, and beats the hell out of paying twenty quid for a lousy seat at somewhere like the Apollo. With Sasha, you’re right up close, can get a decent pint, not some watered down rubbish, and you can walk home without having to pay a fortune for a cab. I don’t doubt some of it is stretched to the limit and probably beyond. He says he never tells lies, but admits he never lets the facts get in the way of a good tale. He calls it creating the new truth. Face it, listening to Sasha in the tap room, with a good fire and a few decent bevies beats the hell out of whatever rubbish is on the idiots’ lantern. He doesn’t need free drink. He’s got more money than we’ll ever have, but he told me once he believes folk don’t value what they don’t have to pay for.”

“Idiots’ lantern?”

“It’s what Sasha calls television. He’s never had one. Always said by the time he’d enough money to afford one he’d lost interest. Elle tells it a bit differently, but it boils down to the same. She told me once he enjoys telling tales, and he’s told some of his tales so often she doesn’t think even he knows what actually happened any more. He makes up bedtime stories for his grand kids as he goes, and Elle reckons there’s no difference to him between telling the kids stories and telling us stories.

“Unlike him, she doesn’t say much, but I know he had a brutal childhood and a pretty poor time of it till he met her. She’s a nice lady and I’ve never met a couple who protect each other’s backs the way they do. He’s a clever bloke, used to be a university professor, but he’s done his share of hard graft like the rest of us. He’s not at all uppity, just don’t ever get to drinking shorts with him, cos he can sup it like it’s water. Stick with ale.

“I’ve known him for well over forty years, and he’s been a good friend. I owe him a goodly few favours. When he moved here and was doing the farm house up and sorting out the land, I’d been made redundant from the steel works six months before, and there was no work to be had. We got to talking when I was trimming my front dyke, and from that he employed me casual like when he needed a day’s labour.

“He knew I was still signing on, but he still paid a decent rate, cash in hand at the end of every day, and threw a midday meal in as well. He’s never said anything about it to any one and I know he does decent stuff for others too, but never says anything about it. I still put in the odd day at his place. It’s eighty-five acres and he doesn’t do much with it because he doesn’t have to. Most of it he rents to Peabody for grazing. He bought it for the privacy and the lack of neighbours, cos he is the neighbour from hell. His words not mine.

“Elle told me two of those seven kids of his were his sister’s. She died before she was thirty, and her ex-husband wouldn’t take the kids. While the rest of his family were still arguing about the kids and his sister’s money, he took em home and set adoption proceedings in motion. She told me he will lie, but prefers to tell things so he obscures the truth, deliberately misleading you. As she put it, ‘You do the lying to yourself.’

“I think he does it to protect folk. I know he was an officer in the KGB for a while, I’ve seen his ID and dress uniform including his ushankas, one red and the other black. You know the Russian fur hats with the ear flaps? I think the officers wore the red ones, and I’ve seen his badge too. He shewed me himself, but never said what he did. He wears a ushanka when the weather is cold and that fur coat he wears is real. God help him if the local conservationists and do gooders find that out!

“Anyway, what’s it matter how much truth is in what he tells you? What’s on the telly and in the papers is mostly lies, and at least with Sasha you get a laugh. I’m off for a bag of chips on the way home. You coming?”

“Aye. I’ve to pick up a fish for Ellen.”