Taxi plate wanted

The new monument beside Store St. Garda station.
"the shard beside the gards"

Press photographers wait to snap the latest e15million Lotto winner.

"Floridita" a little bit of Cuba in Dublin.


I am still looking for a taxi plate to buy from some one,no luck so far.
I will have to buy a new plate so.
It is a pity because taxi plates are set to become non transferable soon, so guys who were thinking of throwing in the towel will not even get back the price of their plate back.

If this new rule comes in a widow will not even have the dignity of getting back part of the money that her late husband paid out to become a taxi driver.

Non refundable payment.

Sad news of a taxi driver dying violently.

A young enough guy 31 stabbed to death in front of his partner and 2 year old kid.
A lot of this story has to come out yet,he was doing a freebie for someone he knew.
Latest is that they have caught the suspect.

Truth is that as I sit here I realize that NOT driving a taxi is not such a bad thing after all.
I know of taxi drivers who rob their passengers blind.
They don't complain to the regulator or to the Garda, but they tell me.

Then I say did you get a receipt? or did you get his roof sign number?

No they say.......But they think that all taxi drivers are robbers.

I see the Garda using foul language when they pull in a taxi, then ask for help from taxi drivers who may have been in the area who witnessed this or that.

It is no surprise to me to hear that a Garda was caught in a raid in relation to stolen vehicles last week.
I hear drug addicts tell me how they are robbed of cash and drugs by Garda on a regular basis."They just stop us and take the gear and our cash and go away"

That can't be right.

Wise up boys in blue.

The criminals are on both sides of the thin blue line.

You don't have to pick on guys dropping off a fare to fill up your penalty book.


Now we go to something different.

10 years ago or there abouts I was visiting a friend in Edgware near London we were flying out from Stanstead so I asked this old guy in a taxi rank how much it would cost for him to drive us and the price was OK.
So he said he would turn up at the appointed time.
When the appointed time came round he was there.

He was over 80 then and a cabby all his life.

His life story was rich in things that had happened in his life.
He told us about the D day landings at Normandy with his mate from Dublin, getting lost and wrapping themselves up in their ground sheets, only to be woken up the next morning with.
"Heres another 2 bodies over there"
They had landed after all the action in the dark, so with nothing to do had slept in a battlefield of dead bodies.
"A few hours earlier and we would have been sleeping with them forever."
He lived beside Covent Garden which had had a bomb alert on the day when we were going there.
The IRA were doing a lot of harm to the Irish at that time.
Lets call him Bob.
Bob had worked for Thames television in the 60s & 70s. His job to collect Bruce Forsyth, Bob Monkhouse and all the names of the day, including Tommy Cooper.
What a complex man.
Tommy Cooper was so shy, hated people looking at him. I had to tell his wife to turn on her clocks 20 mins. I would ring the landlord of his favorate pub to turn on his clock 20 mins as well. I was dragging him out to get to the studio.
In those days everything was live and I as the driver was responsible for having him there on time.
He told us of one time Tom went to New York to appear on the Ed Sullivan show.
On the way into New York he told his wife to go ahead to the hotel, he was going to Tannins magic shop and would meet her for dinner later.

When he was having coffee with his fellow magicians he confessed that he had made a mistake.
He had forgotten to ask his wife where they were staying.
So he slept on sofas of friends until he met his wife again at the TV studio 3 days later.

Typical of the man.

I think Bob went on to be the oldest cabby in London, he only worked out in the sticks because the traffic had become hell in central London.

Here is the clip of the fantastic landing in crosswinds. Watch how the left wing strikes the ground.

Parking can be hard. Imagine what it would be like if it was fun

I hope you didn't see that it had a link to a porn site!

Just one last request to slow down over the weekend


Happy Mardi Gras