St. Valentines day

Dublin has a special link with St.Valentine.
Whitefriars St.church has a relic to St.Valentine,so pop over give it a rub to get a boost to your love life.
Restaurants are jacking up the prices to take advantage of the night thats in it.



An ad for hair colour !
Never could have guessed....

An ad for Guinness.. Never could have guessed it either.



So today I wanted to take a rest then I heard the rain on the window and shot out of bed and worked through the day.
I was very tired and when exhaustion hits your thinking gets bad.
I got a call to a place which was not on the sat.nav. arrived late and she was heading to the other side of the city.. I tried to get her there as best I could..

If she had given me a landmark I would have hit it straight on, but all the comments I got were that she didn't know any of the landmarks where we were.
Then she said the magic words.."Its beside Dundrum Mental Hospital."
You can go over theese things 100 times in your mind to see where you went wrong, believe you me things just do go badly wrong from time to time.

Perhaps tomorrow in a moment od doubt I will ask "Where is it near?"

Yesterday I was heading down by Fairview when I was flagged down by a girl from Lithuania, she was just going to a solicitor who was in Ballybough around the corner.
She was talking on her phone to her friend so much that I feel she missed one vital piece of information.
Her story was that she is pregnant and when her boss found out he sacked her !
When you go to law you must have the right guy by your side, not someone from the golden pages.
I met this guy once he seems red hot. www.hrdoctor.ie  John O'Neill in Bray.Employment law.

I am totally blown away when I see how hard the "New Irish" work.  Without them our progress would be very slow. I had a great looking Turkish doctor in the taxi the other day. Wow if she married my son the fusion of Irish and Turkish would produce fantastic looking kids.
If people were brave enough to marry for love rather than for class or religion or money there would be no wars, because we would be forced to make an effort to understand each other and we wouldn't let anyone hurt our grandchildren either.
The wars in Africa, Gaza and Syria must have the Angels in Heaven in tears.
Yet no one down here cares ?

Taxi drivers in Paris and Marselles are up in arms


Taxis are very scarce in Paris and minicabs are starting to appear.
A taxi licence costs €200,000 and you have to jump through many hoops to get a Taxi plate but the hackney cabs are not regulated to the same extent and operate just outside the law.
In London  the minicabs are robbing loads of people at train stations and outside night clubs every day and the regulators office are doing nothing about it...
A few weeks ago in Dubli a customer from the ferry told me how a minicab drove her around the houses making her late for the train and  then late for the boat, he demanded £40 for what should have been a £15 journey.What I don't understand is why she didn't call the police. After all Euston station is always crawling with police.

I picked up an ex taxi driver the other day he was going into York St. He spoke of the good old days when he went Cosy (like a tea cosy the other driver kept the car warm) with another driver. His guy was a great skin and they got on well. I tried to Cosy once myself but my guy could not get his head around letting me work on Mondays he insisted that my days off should be Monday Tuesday and no other days.
He was a bit stuck in the mud in his ways and a few months later the option of a hackney car came along. Calls were booked in a call center and sent by radio to the radio hackney cars....
My passinger told me that he was at the big meeting in the National Stadium the day degulation became a realityand they were being addressed by the leaders of the taxi union..
"I can tell you that this law will neve come into force as long as we lead this union and as long as we stand together"
Loads of cheering until one voice piped up
"What are you talking about? I was issued with one of the now licencs this morning"
All hell broke loose the value of the permit had dropped from £80,000 to £1500
And the number of taxis in Dublin rose from 2500 to over 12,000 today
So if you were one of the 2 1/2 thousand looking for work
Today you are one of the 12,000 so your work load is much smaller.

Latest I heard is that a New York taxi plate(Medallion)would cost $590,000plus transfer fees

Anyhoooo.

The first book I read about a taxi drive was called "Life in a rear view mirror" By Donal Ruane A Dublin taxi driver.Gill & Macmillan
Then another one by a London taxi driver which was really interesting but I forget what its called.
Peter Franklin wrote the "Gabby Cabby"
The Melissa Plaut a blogger from New York wrote "Hack"
How I stopped worrying about what to do with my life and started driving a yellow cab.
The fellow blogger Eugene Solomon author of "Cabs are for kissing" is now out..






So the burning question is.

John ! Where's your book?

I have started...watch this space.