I blindly let life fall around me. The three year old Mondeo was towed away and crushed after I couldn't be bothered moving it off the double yellow lines that a hirer had left it parked on and was broken into, my council has a policy of towing away any car that is left open to access.Warren t claim wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 9:59 pm OK then. Here's an update that I've been delaying posting for years but illness and scotch has motivated me to post this. Apologies in advance for the boring relationship preamble.
They say that love is blind and it's true that women certainly have a way of fucking things up.
Enter Ex_Mrs_Claim to the story.
All was well in the world. I had a few Mondeos out on rental and a couple of hacks. I thought all I was doing well until I met her. Even 15 years on I still struggle to believe that I was the sort of person to fall for a woman that's so fucking controlling and manipulative. She flagged my cab down on the Thursday, we went out on the Friday, we moved in together on the Saturday and were engaged on the Sunday.
She'd recently split up with her husband who'd left her for another woman after 12 years so I should have known better, especially as she was well fit with a huge Ann Summers wing in her bedroom and the bird her ex left her for was a bit of a munter. All went well for the first few months until her massive insecurity about me doing a job that brought me into contact with other women brought out her nasty side. Need I say that by that time she was pregnant?
She was starting to not just restrict my working hours, but also stop me from seeing my friends and family. Being a wanker I allowed this slow erosion of my freedom without knowing it at the time. She is/was a solicitor and had money which meant that I was becoming a kept man without me even knowing it.
My taxi business was failing due to my neglect and I was being oblivious to it.
Most of my taxis were paid for by cash as I'd bought them as Cat C/D from the long gone Blue Cycle salvage site but there were a couple of exceptions. The first was a (then) 3 year old Mondeo I'd bought on finance via Black Horse because I quite fancied getting into the accident management credit hire business but got cold feet due to having to register for VAT meaning that I just rented it out as a normal PH car but for a bit more than my other Mondeos. The other financed vehicle on my fleet was a Metrocab. Due to already having finance off Black Horse (who were also the only lender offered by LTi) I had to finance it by other means, i.e a local money lender who bought and sold cabs and plates.
I'll continue this when I've fetched another drink and fed the cat.
The Metrocab was another story though. It was the most unreliable piece of shit to ever grace the public highway. I was sort of managing to keep it on the road but I was fighting a losing battle. By this time Claim_Bird and Mutha_Claim were at each other's throats making my domestic life hell. Throw the fact that Claim_Bird was six months pregnant into the mix and you can begin to understand how much joy my life held.
I finally gave up on the Metrocab. The problem with that is at the time Mutha_Claim was driving it at the time and she was far from what you'd call "backwards compatible" when it came to what car/taxi she drove. It took me a lot of persuading to get her out of an air conditioned Mondeo and into a Metrocab. I managed to talk her around only because the Metrocab was an automatic.
I was between a rock and a hard place. Persuading Mutha_Claim to get back into a Mondeo wasn't going well. She was wailing that she'd rather "slit my wrists than go back to private hire" and "you don't know what happened to me when I last worked private hire". Out of curiosity, I asked a mate at the taxi office to pull the records and see if Mutha_Claim had ever had cause to push the panic button and he said there was no record of her ever calling for assistance. This doesn't surprise me as she couldn't even lie straight in bed. Somewhat unsurprisingly, later in her career she went back on private hire working for Frank and was very happy.
Another update shortly...
