Andy Peters Brighton & Hove Cab Trade Association
info@bhcta.co.uk www.bhcta.co.uk
I don’t take any animals
This has been my policy since over forty-years ago a passenger plonked a cage with a cat on the back seat of my fairly new taxi. This resulted in the seat being soaked in cat’s pee, which as I am sure you will all know has a very distinctive smell at the best of times. This was worse because, as I found out, the cat was being taken to the vet with a kidney problem. Even though the seat had been fitted with tailored vinyl seat covers, nothing I used to clean it took away the acrid smell. Additionally, the offending liquid had also run under the seat and embedded itself to some of the sound deadening material and soaked into the seat foam.
In the end I had to replace the whole seat with a new one as the internet had not been invented back then to search for a second hand one.
About a year later, a woman got into the car on a booked job with one of those meaningless bits of fluff with teeth that someone stupidly invented for people to fawn over and treat like a little baby and stick a red ribbon on its head with the intention of making it look angelic. You know those ones that are all growl and saliva.
I have to make the point that this was in the days of ‘pen and paper’ and long before technology fortunately stepped in which allowed a driver the option of ‘no animals’.
She suddenly remembered that she had forgotten something, so got out and left this ‘claws and teeth’ little scrote on the back seat. I looked around and it was just like in one of those old western movies with one cowboy dressed in black, being the ‘claws and teeth’, and me dressed in white both thinking whoever draws first walks out alive. You could almost hear the music.. ‘Wolwawal… Wolw.. Wolw.. Wolw’. Google ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Ennio Morricone if you are a certain age.
Unfortunately, I was not as quick, and this cannon ball of energy leapt from the back seat to the front.
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However, I was quick enough to give it a retaliatory slap, knocking it into the front passenger seat floor- well although receiving a glancing nip at the same time. Fortunately, I had only just had a tetanus injection following an encounter with a hamster a month earlier.
However, I could see round two was about to begin as this little Shih Tzu had recovered unshaken and was looking directly at me, growling and eyeing up my neck.
The door opened and the woman got back in again and the beast started whining all innocently. Have you ever heard those types of people who speak to their animals as if they were human babies? You know, the ones that make your skin crawl when you hear them do this, but you dare not say anything about their precious little rats. Well, this was one of them and the dog jumped up on the front seat, on to dashboard which rebounded it back to the seat repeating this at least three times, and then threw itself into the arms of its human who was now sitting in the back the seat whilst whimpering for sympathy. After pampering the dog she then told me where she wanted to go.
I turned around and looked at her and through gritted teeth told her that she and her precious little baby were going nowhere. She was quite taken aback, even though she had seen the acrobatics of the ‘ball of spite’, for which incidentally she made no apology. We had a stand-off which ended up with me being called various names as she got out of the car, which for a lady I was actually quite impressed with.
I do have to make it clear that guide dogs, or what is now known as assistant dogs, are more than welcome. In fact, I would take these dogs unaccompanied every day, all day.
So, this brings me to what happened recently.
It was raining hard and I was on the rank, first turn, which is 100 yards away from the train station, when the train came in and people were coming out and heading towards the rank. This is one of those times when you see a crowd of people and you try and work out which one will be your customer. Will it be one of the ones with the huge suitcases which means I could get soaked because I help people as I’m not an Uber driver that just sits there and lets the customer struggle. Maybe one of those fast-paced seasoned commuters who would do well as rugby players. It wouldn’t be the old lady who was actually being
MARCH 2026 PHTM
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