Streetgeezer appeared to be cultured, but then, so are germs.
'What a piece of work is a Mini cab driver.
How noble in reason,
How infinite in faculty.
Informed and amusing,
Inexpensive and admirable
In action how like an angel.'
He would often paraphrase Shakespeare, well aware that with a purposeful misquote he could appear intelligent, whilst avoiding the possibility of making mistakes with the real text and being picked up by a humourless pedant. He called himself Streetgeezer, to counter his claim to be an amateur anthropologist, a pseudo sociologist, a dilettante aesthete.
He claimed that his desire was to discuss when really he only intended to discourse. He only listened to a tale so he might re-tell it with him as the protagonist. He would offer impressed passengers his card but never even asked their names, having no real use for them other than as an audience. He had either failed or not yet succeeded in other artistic ventures and, while he waited for success, he entertained his passengers whether they wanted it or not. Barry Cryer, the famous comedian and scriptwriter once told him, after a stimulating journey into town, that he should be in showbiz.
'But I am.' He had replied with characteristic immodesty.
'I play to a full house of four, but over the years my total audience would fill Hackney Empire many times over.'
He would also claim that his dishevelled appearance and the unkempt state of his car were deliberately in juxtaposition to his apparent intellect, and a device to un-nerve customers, their reaction being a useful talking point. Anyone who knew him in real life would say he was just a slob. On a smart day he would wear a black suit, white shirt and black tie, regarding this as a subversion of the dress code; mocking conventional smartness by dressing like the Blues Brothers or Reservoir Dogs. On a bad day he ignored the code altogether. He carried more than the usual girth of a minicab driver and suffered the requisite back pains, neck pains and haemorrhoids. For no apparent advantage to his appearance he wore gold earrings and tied his unnatural straw coloured and textured hair in a pony tail.
He had been sent to pick up from an address at the Stamford Hill end of St Ann's Road. It had been an uncertain week, and when the passenger got in and said, 'Wood Green,' he felt forced to reply: 'Maybe, but then again, maybe he wouldn't. Ask Crickle, I'm sure he Wood.'
'You all right?' The bemused passenger enquired.
'No actually I've got a Trotsky of a headache.' He was hardly surprised when the passenger waited for the correct change making the avoidance of a tip totally obvious; however he was rewarded by the inspirational sight of Wood Green's mutant courthouse.
Originally a school opened in 1865, the front and sides faced in white Suffolk bricks have been preserved and added to by a giant dark slate grey sloping roof that rises above the front and falls way behind like a geometric slag heap. Futuristic spikes shoot aggressively from the refreshed 19th century stonework like the Close Encounters mothership rising up behind Windsor Castle. Completed in 1989, the architects claimed it reflected the surrounding buildings without overpowering them. It does neither but it does stand as a tribute to eccentricity; being somehow ridiculous without being truly ugly.
During the first six months of 1993 radical changes were afoot to the Highgate one-way system. Rumour and speculation were rife and the word was that it was a return to the traditional two-way method.
'Why have they got to do this?' The passenger asked rhetorically.
'That's progress,' Streetgeezer replied, never having been one to let a rhetorical question get away unanswered.
'But surely progress was having a one-way system that seemed to work perfectly well?'
Highgate residents were sceptical of any road changes, following rumours that the humps and bricks that had recently appeared in the Highgate area were the result of using up the un-spent part of the red route budget.
'Ah!' The driver interjected, preparing for the political speech. (He had not always been a politically motivated, woolly liberal pinko socialist.... Only since the shit fell on him.)
'To justify their existence any council or government has to be seen to be continually changing things. Now they call it improvement but we probably call it interference. Once they have changed everything one way there is only one thing left to do.'
'Change it back!' The passenger was catching on to the argument.
'Yes. There always has to be change, no matter how wasteful. How often do they completely refurbish petrol stations? There always has to be new management with new ideas, new theories on motivation, restructuring the company and inspiring the staff and customers by designing and adopting a new corporate logo. We have to talk of a new world order to replace the last new world order. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss only this year's model.'