For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Paris Syndrome (01.07.11)

For some Japanese tourists, their first taste of Europe has proved overwhelming. Coming from a culture that espouses civility and respect, they had expected European capitals to have the same degree of controlled manners as that of Tokyo’s 33 million inhabitants.

For someone who drives daily on London’s roads, experiencing the rude and aggressive attitudes of my fellow road users and some of my passengers, it came as a surprise to learn that some Japanese have been hospitalised by this culture shock.

It was a Japanese psychiatrist working in France, Professor Hiroaki Ota, who first identified the syndrome some 20 years ago. Named the Paris Syndrome from where this condition first surfaced, presumably after a Japanese tourist took a ride in one of its capital’s famously grumpy cabbie’s vehicles, Japanese tourists are now being forewarned before embarking on a European tour.

Paris Syndrome affects around 20 tourists a year, mainly women in their 30s with high expectations of what may be their first trip abroad. The Japanese embassy has a 24-hour hotline for those suffering from severe culture shock and can help find hospital treatment for anyone in need. This year alone, the Japanese embassy in Paris has had to repatriate four people with a doctor or nurse on board the plane to help them get over the shock.

It appears to spring from the shock of the disparity between the popular image of Paris – of accordions, flowers and cobbled streets are seen in the film Amélie– they do not realise that within our lifetimes, those cobblestones have been prised up and thrown in anger.

Around a million Japanese travel to France every year. However, the only permanent cure is to go back to Japan – never to return to Paris – next time visit London where cabbies are courtesy personified.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

A plug for Boris (28.06.11)

Boris’s dream of making London as quiet and clean as a convent during vespers drew a step closer recently with the disclosure that London now has 17,000 electric and electric hybrid vehicles registered in the capital, some 23.5 per cent of the nation’s total. The experts predict that by 2020 over a half million of these vehicles will be registered. It hardly is surprising with a 100 per cent discount on the congestion charge and nil-rate vehicle excise duty and that their use in London can only go northwards.

OK! I’ll put up my hands; I drive one of London’s worst polluters, even with expensive conversions and the phasing out of 15-year-old vehicles, London’s taxis still pollute far more than any electric vehicle ever would, and as someone with mild COPD I have more than a passing interest in improving London’s air quality.

Whilst London’s air might seem one of the best amongst capital cities around the world, the technocrats in Brussels have deemed that it’s not doing enough to meet EU-wide standards. As a city without any polluting industries or manufacturing, the vast majority, some 80 per cent, of London’s air pollution comes from road transport (with presumably the other 20 per cent from City Hall). Of this 80 per cent, it is estimated that emissions from London’s iconic black cabs make up 20 per cent, and this is the group that Boris is targeting in his Air Quality Strategy to help him meet strict emission targets.

To go down the electric taxi route taxi drivers (and Boris) have to overcome a number of problems, which you could call the four “Pees” no make that five Pees.

Price – Unlike London’s bus fleet we don’t receive any subsidies, being self-employed, we naturally don’t enjoy the generous benefits bestowed on other fleet operators. Current estimates for the price of an electric taxi are in the region of £60,000.

Plugs – In May of this year Boris switched on the Capital’s new Electric Vehicle Scheme, making it simpler for electric vehicle owners to charge their vehicles, and he is promising a total of at least 1,300 charging points by 2013. This is designed to overcome the major problem for any electric vehicle driver which is “range anxiety”, the term used by drivers of these vehicles when they need a charge. In the lead for long-distance running without needing a charge is the Smart fortwo, with a potential range of 84 miles – far shorter than the average cab is driven in a day.

Parking – No Londoner needs to be reminded of the parking restrictions and their draconian enforcement by local authorities. If London’s 24,000 cabs have to stop halfway through their working day to recharge provisions must be made away from the parking restrictions imposed by London’s Stalinist councils. You wouldn’t expect buses in a bus garage to incur parking enforcement, so why cabs?

Passengers – These have of late become an endangered species, making the cost of electric vehicles even more uneconomic for cabbies. But should paying customers to return one day they might find that because of an electric vehicle’s limited range journeys cannot be undertaken, and as they say refusal can sometimes offend.

Spending a Penny – An additional requirement now sadly lacking in London is the provision of toilets, and while parked and recharging your own and the vehicle’s batteries, proper provision should be given for eating and as the Americans call it a comfort break.

So for Boris: A good start but a lot more work to be done before you reach your clean air El Dorado.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Fluffers, harlots and herb-strewers (24.06.11)

People are always asking about what it’s like to be a cabbie and how we did “The Knowledge”; even Londoners ask it would seem the public’s appetite for enquiring into our fellow’s jobs is undiminished. But no matter how unusual a London cabbie’s profession might be, it has nothing comparable to some very strange ways to earn a living in the capital.

Take the Constable of the Tower of London who for 600 years has been officially authorised to extract a barrel of rum from any naval vessel using the river; any livestock falling from London Bridge he has the right to claim as his own, and should your pig stumble into his moat he will charge you 4d an old penny for each leg. One of his staff – The Ravenmaster – is charged with preventing the ravens from leaving the Tower, as tradition dictates that England’s crown will fall should they so to do. An unlikely event as he rather cheats by clipping their wings.

James Donalson is commemorated by a 17th-century memorial in St. Margaret Pattens Church, Rood Lane, as being the man who specialised in selecting spices – The City Garbler.

In the 1860s with London’s population one-third of today’s size, 80,000 prostitutes were touted for business giving the decade the nomenclature “the heyday of the whore”. During the Profumo Affair, Harold Wilson was quoted as complaining about a society which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays its Prime Minister.

In the days when London’s streets were not as clean as today’s, Lady Herb-Strewers were employed to scatter sweet-smelling petals wherever the monarch processed within the royal apartments as well as outside in the streets. Today the Fellowes family, of which Julian Fellowes – director of Gosforth Park – is a member still claim that hereditary right on behalf of their eldest unmarried daughter to be the official lady herb-strewer.

Now replaced by machines Fluffers were employed for years on London’s underground to walk the tunnels each night collecting waste material, the largest component of this waste left behind by the passengers – human hair.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Cracking the Code (21.06.11)

With the news that the Olympics site has been designated with its own postcode, my question today is: “Does anyone understand postcodes in London?”

Until now, the E20 postcode of Albert Square in BBC’s soap Eastenders (no I don’t watch it either) was merely fictitious, but Olympic bosses applied for premises on the Stratford site to use the iconic postcode, and the move, due to be taking effect for the start of the Games next July, has been made despite the next available East London code being E19. Postcodes it would seem have no obvious logic to their designation and no relevance in relation to the adjoining areas.

To complicate life for a cabbie house numbers sometimes have even and odd numbers on opposite sides of the street, while on others the numbers run sequentially up one side and down on the opposite side, in addition, some houses are designated a street and number even though their front door actually opens onto an adjacent road; the lowest number on any street is supposed to be the house closest to Charing Cross or is that an urban myth?

If London’s postcodes are allocated alphabetically why is it that E2 is Bethnal Green; E3 Bow; E4 Chingford; E5 Clapton; E6 East Ham; E7 Wanstead; and then arbitrarily E8 Hackney?

Conversely, if the postcode number denotes its position away from the centre of London why is NW1 near Mornington Crescent but NW2 miles away in Cricklewood; and Sloane Square SW1 while Brixton Hill is SW2 and Scotch Corner just yards from Sloane Square near Harrods SW3? How does that work?

You have to ask yourself, just why it is necessary for Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to be in five different postal districts unevenly divided between W1, W2, W8, SW1 and SW7, with the lines curving and twisting through the parks.

It all started out so simple; during the 1840s the number of letters being sent in London was increasing rapidly, with many localities having similar street names, and letters were often misdirected. So in the 1850s, a committee was instructed to find a way to stop the confusion. They originally planned to rename the streets, but many residents objected, so they decided instead to split the city into various sectors. The two central sectors were EC and WC (East and West Central) and the outer ones were named N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W and NW after the points of a compass. A scheme which involved people adding these letters to their addresses was implemented between 1857 and 1858. In 1866 in author Anthony Trollope, then a surveyor, who also introduced our red pillar boxes, suggested that NE be merged into E and then S vanished two years later, after being split between SE and SW.

While it is immensely helpful for the Post Office in locating addresses, without a vast knowledge of the postcode system it is of little use to the man, or cabbie, on the street, except to perhaps point people to a general area, say within 10 miles from their destination. If you want to find where you are going don’t rely on a postcode; use a map or better still jump in a cab and let him figure it out.

Some notable postcodes:
SAN TA1 – Father Christmas
GIR OAA – Girobank
RM1 1AA – Royal Mail Customer Service
E20 – Walford (Eastenders) or the Olympic Park
SW1A 1AA – Buckingham Palace
SW1A 0AA – House of Commons
SW1A 0PW – House of Lords
SW1A 2AA – 10 Downing Street
SW1A 2AB – 11 Downing Street
W1A 1AA – BBC Broadcasting House, Portland Place

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Toilet Caper (10.06.11)

London’s lost loos, were until the 1950s famous the world over, these magnificent Victorian edifices, both decorative as well as functional, were built in the first place simply that the government saw them as essential to the wellbeing of Londoners.

If you were caught short in London before their construction you would simply relieve yourself in the street. The delicate-minded and, of course, women found this unacceptable and the solution was provided by human lavatories. Men and women wore voluminous black capes and carried a bucket, for a farthing they would shield you from preying eyes while you sat on their bucket. Only one of these heroes for modesty is known: one Thomas Butcher of Cheapside who in 1190 was fined for overcharging his clients. Samuel Pepy’s wife in the 17th century didn’t want to pay for a caped crusader, as he noted in his diary at the time, how his wife squatted in the road “to do her business”.

No word in English has changed its meaning more than “toilet”. In about 1540 it described a kind of cloth derived from the French “toile” – a kind of linen. Then the term was used for the cloth to used to adorn dressing tables, later for the items upon the cloth, hence “toiletries”. The dressing table itself was next to receive that Monica, then the act of dressing, Georgians would use the word to describe the act of receiving visitors when dressing, next came the receiving room or any adjoining rooms, as indoor lavatories arrived that room became the toilet and now we politely call the ceramic bowl a toilet. It explains why in English you can describe something splashed on one’s face as toilet water or the liquid used to flush away faeces. The English noted for the reluctance to talk about such matters have given a plethora of euphemisms to avoid that unmentionable word: spend a penny; smallest room in the house; loo; lav; karsie; bog; john; head; water closet; and for obscure reasons in the 18th century “jordan”.

As these fine conveniences in London disappeared new names have sprung up for their modern counterparts, the automatic loos are known as “Metal Mickey’s”. These automatic machines perhaps reflect the lack of pride much in evidence in the first half of the last century.

I can vaguely remember a toilet near Chancery Lane station, with its polished brass and mahogany fittings surmounted by a set of superb cut-glass cisterns. The pride of its attendant knew no bounds as he then stocked these cisterns with goldfish, where they lived happily for many years until the local authority decided the public would prefer to use the nearby McDonalds toilets and closed this shrine to civic pride.

One of the last personalised loos to go was a splendid example in Covent Garden next to St. Pauls Church on the piazza. Here the attendant was a keen opera buff who decorated the walls with reproductions of some of the National Gallery’s famous pictures, and played well known operatic arias to his customers.

Paul Herringshaw has written a series of spoof histories on individual London toilets, entitled Stall Stories.