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We had an early morning appointment at the hospital and so to ensure we got there on time had booked a cab. It was nothing worrying or urgent, but you don’t want to be late for your time slot for fear that you will be waiting all day (if not bumped to another day entirely). And the hospital isn’t very accessible by public transport, even if you don’t have a two year old in a pram.
We had asked for a cab where Phoebe could stay seated in her pram and had a long phone conversation about making sure that happened, but when the cab turned up, the pram couldn’t stand up properly and we had to strap Phoebe in with the buggy standing on its back wheels. It wasn’t ideal, but the driver said he’d go slowly.
There was heavy traffic round Shepherd’s Bush Green and we were crawling along at the pace of a snail. A couple of police officers on foot indicated to the driver that he should park up. I thought they had spotted the precarious seating arrangement (but the back windows were dark and they hadn’t), but it tuned out the driver had been holding his phone (he later said he’d been trying to look for an alternate route to save us some time). I could hear the police warning the man that he’d been breaking the law, though they acknowledged that he’d been stationery in traffic at the time. It’s fair enough, he’d been caught breaking the law and I have heard enough stories of people getting killed by reckless texters to think that it’s not a bad thing that the law is enforced. But it’s probably a law that most of us have broken in similar circumstances.
The driver was going to get a hundred pound fine and 3 points on his licence, but he was told he was lucky as as of tomorrow both those penalties are doubling. It was gutting for the driver, of course, but I was looking at my watch and the dense traffic and wondering if we were going to be late because of all this. After ten minutes of roadside lecturing, I got out of the car and asked the policemen how long this would take. Given I had committed no crime (on this occasion) I thought they were pretty unhelpful. “As long as it takes,†said one of them. I tried to remain polite. “Do you know how long that will be though, approximately? We’re on our way to the hospital so we might need to get another cab.â€
“That’s your choice,†said the unpleasant policeman, not even the faintest bit concerned that he had stopped a possible mercy mission. They were enjoying taking their time and wasting the driver’s time, but had no concern for the innocent and possibly dying people in the back of the car. Finally he let me know it would be about ten minutes (because obviously he would know that, given that he’d clearly gone through this before). I wanted to get my family out of the car to hail another cab, but the driver was worried the police would see the precarious positioning of the pram and lead to him getting into more trouble. I suppose I was also complicit in that particular bending of the rules, not least in willingly endangering my daughter’s life for the convenience of making our appointment. But the driver was in such a fix that I didn’t want to make it worse for him. We sat in the car and waited out the ten minutes, whilst the police went through their job sarcastically slowly.
The driver who was losing £80 on this journey and was closer to losing his licence, apologised and did his best to get us to the hospital on time. Successfully as it turned out.
I think the police could have handled this better. And a warning might have been a fairer way to deal with this on this occasion. Although I guess the guy has learned his lesson - as have I. I was mainly just surprised by the dispassionate way they responded to us and the fact we were going to the hospital. What a pair of cunts.
But worth respecting that law, just on the off chance that you get unlucky, in either being caught or worse getting distracted and killing someone.
And we learned that if you want to take a baby in a pram then a black cab is the only real option.
