I Drove It My Way Read Free

towers.
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    Back in London, we are now on the King’s Road, heading towards Sloane Square, where we find Royal Avenue. This is the address author Ian Fleming used for James Bond’s London flat in his famous spy books.
    Here in the King’s Road, a very attractive fashion designer called Mary Quant created the mini skirt and hot pants. This world-famous road saw the comings and goings of punks and hippies, and was the ‘place to be’ in the sixties and seventies. The Stones, the Beatles, Bowie; they were all here and left their mark.
    I’ve seen shops in the King’s Road with the strangest names, such as a shoe shop called R. Soles and a Chinese restaurant called Ho Lee Fook. That reminds me, in north London there is a taxidermist shop called ‘Get Stuffed’. These are names that one does not easily forget, and that’s called good advertising.
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    Many a time as I drove my cab along the King’s Road, I would observe a man sitting at a table outside a certain restaurant, who, in my opinion, was one of the greatest footballers in the world. He always had a bottle of wine and a full glass on his table, which he would regularly raise to passers-by. Yes, it was the famous George Best. I picked him up one day and took him from one pub to another. I suppose that by doing that I must have played a tiny part in his downfall. George eventually had a liver transplant but even so, the demon drink won the day in the end. I have a great photo that I treasure of him smiling and looking into my cab window. I think it’s quite rare because he was nearing the end of his life.
    The day Mr Best was in my cab he asked me if I knew any jokes. ‘Yes,’ I said to him. ‘You are from the City of Belfast where the Titanic was built. Well, that ship was not really made in Belfast as you thought. It was rumoured that it was made in the Far East, in Thailand, hence the name “ Thaitanic ”. They just spelled it wrong.’ (OK, it’s a bit weak.)
    Anyway, that was only a part of the joke. I went on to say that more people would have been saved if they had listened to the onboard speaker announcement. ‘Some people were waiting for the dancing because the ship’s Tannoy had said there was a band on ship,’ I told him. He did not get the joke straight away, so I said ‘Abandon ship!’ and then he said, ‘Oh, I get it,’ and laughed.
    Then he told me a joke about the two Northern Irish ducks on a tandem bicycle. The one at the back said, ‘Quack’ and the one at the front said, ‘I can’t go no quacker’. I had heard it before but it was nice to have it told in a proper Northern Irish accent. I did laugh.
    George Best lived just off the King’s Road, near Oakley Street with his lovely [second] wife, Alex, who stood by him for as long as she could. Sadly, he died in 2005. In the same street lived Cynthia Payne, more commonly known as Madam Cyn, whose house of ill repute was some way away in Streatham), and just a few doors along there is a blue plaque to one of the most famous adventurers of all, Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic.
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    Close by, and spanning the River Thames, is the beautiful and ever-so-flimsy Albert Bridge, built in 1842. This bridge can take most cars but no Rolls Royce or Bentley is allowed across, due to the two-ton weight limit. The Roller and the Bentley each weigh two-and-a-half tons. It must really annoy the owners of these expensive, high-status cars that they cannot legally follow an old banger over the bridge. A black cab is just on the twoton limit but with four or five large passengers on board it is over, although the boys in blue tend to turn a blind eye.
    Some years ago the cab trade fell out with the police and a few cabbies felt the full force of the law. This small disagreement did not last very long as the cab trade and the police tend to work