Coming Closer

A fine house on Tritonville Rd

The Met. office a large pyramid building

"Tattooed Lady" a New York bus doing a Rock and Roll tour of the city.

The computer is on the blink and my computer whiz kids don't want to help me. So I have to type and cut and paste. Perhaps next year I will read the”idiots guide to computers”if there is such a book. Then I will be able to help myself.
I have been tidying up and I found my PSV driving license.
It is the size of a credit card and was under a pile of letters in my room. Well that will save me a massive e250 fine if I get stopped. The fines that they have introduced are very high in relation to the offense.

I found a copy of the Taxi Times magazine from last year.
A piece was printed from the Evening Herald 13/09/07.
A drunk got into a taxi so drunk he could not speak(Sounds familiar)
He directed the taxi driver through grunts and ran up a bill of e62.00 and then refused to pay.
He came up with a cock and bull story about how the taxi driver got lost!
Judge McMahon said “I don't know how taxi drivers go out at night and put up with some of the treatment they get around the city”.The passenger Clive Naughton had previous convictions and was ordered to pay compensation to the taxi driver and told that if he came up before the judge again he would do time in prison. He must have been watching Judge Judy, the law is often blindly on the passengers side.
I had a guy in the car last week who just grunted the same way but we found our way to Ringsend where he declared “too much drink” and he trotted off.
As they say “He was so full of drink that if he stooped over he would spill”
Party time is the time for amateur drinkers and I dread to some of the sights which are coming up.
2 or 3 girls going home together 2 get out leaving the third on to go on, her completely wrecked. Drink is one thing but some are drugged out of their minds. I have spent manys an hour at Garda stations while they try to slap them back to conciseness. It is very important that you do not shake or touch them where they pass out. Sexual assault charges would surely follow.
There was a case a while back where a taxi driver brought a woman home in a very drunk state.
He carried her into her house and put her groceries into the porch.
She collapsed behind the door and got sick, choked and died.
The judge told the taxi driver that he had a duty of care towards his passenger!
I would have said that the bar owner would have been more at fault than the taxi driver.

In America there was a similar case where a woman froze to death outside her apartment building.
In that case,after deep investigation it was found that she had been given the wrong coat as she was leaving the night club. Her keys were in the pocket of her own coat and it was a fur coat, so if she had her own coat she would have been OK on 2 counts.
I try to go that extra mile.
I will direct the car headlights up the path to the front door and wait until a lady passenger makes it through the front door, time was that they would wave goodbye and thank you, but I notice that that aspect of good manners is mostly gone.
Perhaps now that the Celtic Tiger is gone away common courtesy will return.

A Judge was saying that in divorce cases he would often be dividing up the assets of the couple.
Now he is being asked to divide the debts, one couple had debts of 2 million euro.
That is a tough one! Some couples decided to buy out their partners share of the house, the price was fixed at last years prices and now the same house has devalued by 40%
I have never lived beyond my means by much, some people just don't know when to stop spending.

While I am on the subject of houses.
Remember the beautiful 6 bedroom house in Oakley Rd. Ranelagh for e12 million?.
Posted on the blog Mon 30 June.
It has been sold!!!!
Now this is how the deal was done.
The Canadian government had a house on 9 acres on Strathmore Rd.Killiney beside Bono's house, the house was hard to keep, needed 2 gardeners etc. but it has development potential for sure. The house had been for sale for e17 million, but there were no buyers, so e3 million changed hands and a swap of the two houses was made.
Now the Canadian ambassador can now jump on the Luas and head into town in a few minutes.

I picked up 2 guys outside the Merrion Hotel a while back, they were buying high priced property.
I was asked by an estate agent to take them down Clyde Rd, Raglin Rd. Aylesbury and Shrewsbury Rd. All high priced roads.
After that the estate agent paid me and asked me to drop them at the hotel.
Much talk between them about the houses they had seen.
Then they asked me to wait and drive them to the airport, which I did.
On the way the discussed the merits of different properties, they agreed that the market was right to make a killing!
Around the point where we passed Christchurch cathedral they fell asleep.
When they woke up driving up to departures (You open the windows for a few seconds) one of the guys said,
”You seem to have taken a very long route to get here”
I forget what the exact fare was, but I said “Since when did you get two people to the airport for less than e25”
They took their exact change and receipt. And sure why not?

An estate agent told me a couple of weeks ago that the top end of the market has done very badly in all this.

SERVES THEM BLOODY RIGHT.

I know tipping is a sore point, I was told today just to give back 5 cents giving me a 5cent tip.
Now I know my worth.
That old git Tommy Cooper used to push something into the cabbies top pocket and say “Ave a drink on me mate” When the driver looked in his pocket he found a tea bag.

An actor was being given advice by his father who had been an actor all his life.
“Introduce yourself to your driver, call him by name and tip him well, he will think well of you in return. Speak to the stage hands and the doorman and they will share their knowledge with you.”
To illustrate the point the son once told the doorman that he had a lot of learning to do as his lines had been changed. The doorman told him not to bother, as the play had been pulled and another show was coming in on Monday. The theater manager had been afraid to tell him the truth.

Or as my daddy told me “Be kind to the people on the way up, and they will be nice to you on the way back down”Good old dad.

I spoke to Santa Claus the other day and he said that he would bring me a video camera as long as I am being a good boy. He said he enjoys looking at the blog up there in the North Pole and would like to see more of Dublin..

Speaking of which!
A customer in the taxi who works in international trade told me about COLD.
I had a guy in the car who works in Minsk, he spoke of how the police round up drunk people and deal with them very severely. You see when it gets cold they would freeze to death in a matter of minutes.
He told me he was very far north, Murmansk and a colleague walked another business college to his hotel a journey of 10 minutes. He was well wrapped up but had no gloves on. He came back to his hotel, went to bed and was woken up with a burning pain in his hand.
One of his fingers was black and it had to be taken off.

Now that is cold.