My first observation about Liverpool, shortly after arriving, is that the suspicion of everyone in the customer service industry here is that you are either in the process of ripping them off, have ripped them off, or are about to rip them off in the near future. One of the first tasks any visitor to Liverpool needs to perform is a visit to the nearest off-license to purchase as much alcohol as you can carry and then to consume it. There’s no other way to approach a night out in Liverpool, really. Get as mindblowingly drunk as possible and the paranoia of the local shop staff seem to be less of a personal insult and more part of the culture. Hosts to myself and assorted friends this weekend were Seth and Gareth, who have rented a lovely flat with a balcony not too far from the town centre. As nice as the flats themselves may be, the local environs have been deemed risky enough to cause the local off-license to have the most peculiar security arrangements I’ve seen. It consisted of a few shelves of soft drinks and snacks in a public area and then an impenetrably thick barrier of security glass with all the alcohol unobtainably protected beyond. Purchasing drink is a matter of pressing yourself up against the glass and squinting to see what they have. “Is that a particularly dry Pinot Grigot?” is not a question you are going to be able to ask, nor determine from a faint wine label 10 feet away. Best stick with what you know. Brand-label wine and some cheap lager that looked cold. Get out of here before the locals set upon you, they’ve all got a look in their eye. They’ve rumbled us for southerners. Quick, run!
A similar strange approach to rip-off protection ocurred no more than an hour later. I’d managed to get a phone number for a pizza place using Google Maps on my phone, no less. (It’s the future!) We racked up an impressive order of 75 quid’s worth of food and I prepared to give them my credit card number, but was thwarted: “I’m sorry, you can only pay by cash on your first order”. I paused to wonder. I can order a 3000 pound telly from John Lewis with this credit card, have it delivered by burly men who will set it in my lounge with the delicacy of a vase of orchids, tune it to my favourite channels and if I’m lucky, even offer me sexual favours for a generous tip and you’re telling me you won’t deliver me pizza without cold hard cash? We have a whip round for cash and are thankful we have enough to cover it: the nearest ATM probably requires a 24 hour armed guard and DNA test before you’re allowed to withdraw a crisp twenty. What the hell is up with this place? Do they believe in their own stereotypes?
To give the rest of the town credit (with a terrible exception to follow) people here are dead nice. The chap on the train and the station service manager who I dealt with to fix my train tickets on Sunday were both very friendly. Everyone out late on Saturday night was having a rip roaring time and I think it has to be one of the least threatening town centres I’ve been to. Certainly compared to somewhere like Reading, where they’re so bent on coke and wife-beater that they’ll stab you in the balls just for glancing at them without the correct level of reverence for their Armani shirt and G-star jeans. None of that toss here; everyone seems to having a genuinely fun and relaxed time, spilled out onto the streets to have a quick smoke before plunging back into the heat and noise to have another dance.
A brief diversion follows. In 1939 a group of psychology professors from Yale University in the US got into some significant controversy by formulating a hypothesis about the causes of aggression, called the Frustration-Aggression hypothesis, which postulated, quite incorrectly, that frustration always led to aggression. They later revoked some specific statements, claiming that they didn’t really mean it always led to agression, just that it sometimes did. These professors would have doubtless been less quick to go back on their original statements if only they’d seen the debacle that is Liverpool City Centre trying to get a cab home at night. I can testify that I have never witnessed such a cavalcade of asshattery from such a large group of people as those who make up Liverpool’s licensed late night Hackney Carriage drivers. You may now rightly assume that the title of this post refers to a letter I wrote this morning to Liverpool Town Council which unravels to them the utterly broken culture among those plying for business illegally in the early hours from apparently legitimate taxis.
Liverpool’s Hackney Carriage bylaws (I thought I’d bone up on them before ranting) state that if you’re ready for hire, you pop your light on and make your way to one of the town’s taxi ranks where you can pick up a fare. At 2am on Saturday night, there are no cabs at taxi ranks, I can tell you this as the stone cold truth borne from grim experience. The reality of it is that the cabs drive around empty, with their hail lights off, slowing down and trolling the side of the road. They don’t respond to hails and randomly pick people up if they’re going far enough to make the fare worth it. Many were offering flat rate fares to destinations in the region of 15 pounds. Illegal, for a Hackney carriage who are supposed to be metered to keep prices fair. When asked for information on where we can pick up a taxi, amazed that none were driving with their for-hire lights lit, they would drive off wordlessly as though there were some great conspiracy about which they must remain silent. The first rule of Liverpool’s Taxis is: you don’t talk about Liverpool’s taxis. Even those cars with their For Hire lights on would refuse to stop when clearly hailed by others. We even saw a lit taxi swerve around some people hailing it and burn off into the distance to a predictable shower of insults about the sexual proclivity of the driver’s mother. We were far from alone in our trouble getting home, it was obvious.
One driver we stopped told us we weren’t going far enough and drove off before I had time to tell him we didn’t know where we were going and that was the point of getting a cab. We’d been waiting for 20 minutes or more when another driver stopped and, when we told him our destination, changed his mind and said he was here to pick up a phoned through job “worth 15 quid”. I asked him how to book him by telephone and he declined to answer. I said we needed to go home and that Polly has arthritis and can’t walk far. He shrugged the most “couldn’t care less, mate” shrug you can imagine and pulled away. I punched the back of the taxi, thus proving the adapted Yale hypothesis as it applies to Liverpool’s taxis and being sent into a blind rage by this godawful frustrating state of affairs. I stomped about threatening to firebomb every goddamn taxi driver in the whole city if they didn’t start behaving themselves. To prove his own deceit, the taxi driver, having driven away from us, disabled girl and all, stopped just a few metres further down the road finding out if the hapless fucks by the bus stop were going to better his offer of “anything more than 15 quid” for a ride. The three of us screamed and shouted at him and berated him for his lies and he sped off, much to the astonishment of the couple trying to convince him to give them a ride. We shared a brief moment of “What the hell’s going on with taxis in this city?” with them before wandering the streets looking for petrol and matches to carry out my dastardly revenge.
Monday morning and I’ve had time to think over things and I cannot find any reasonable excuse for their behaviour: hence the strongly worded letter. We opted to walk home, somehow, and started along a convulted half-guessed path before stumbling across the only honest taxi driver we’d found in 40 minutes of searching who took us home professionally, on the meter and with politeness. I wish I had taken down the numbers of the taxis we saw messing people about last night but it would have been, essentially, all of them. As I put it in the letter to the council, how can I possibly go for a night out in Liverpool without knowing if I can get home? Yours in disgust!
