The big sleep

It was around 0200 when I pulled up in my taxi at the address in west Hove. My passenger, a middle-aged gent, was already saying his goodbyes at the door to a group of people after what seemed to have been a very convivial party. He got in and gave his destination as a little village close to the coast a few miles east of Brighton Marina. I hadn’t travelled far when I saw in my mirror he was fast asleep on the back seat.

As I passed the Palace Pier, the sudden ‘bleep bleep bleep’ of my lifeboat pager alerted me to a lifeboat callout, and the need to get to the marina sharpish. I was first to arrive at our boathouse and on answering the phone, found our tasking was to a yacht that had run aground under the cliffs just east of the marina.

Other crew arrived and soon we were speeding off on our Atlantic 21 lifeboat. It was a calm, foggy night and the yacht’s skipper has tried to use his new GPS to find the marina entrance but it had been set up with the wrong datum and led him too far east.

We managed to tow him off the rocks but he’d also somehow got a rope jammed round his rudder and prop, so the tow back to the marina was a slow process as the yacht kept trying to turn to port.

On arriving back at the boathouse after a couple of hours, one of the shore crew asked, ‘Who’s the guy asleep in your car?

In the midst of the red mist that affects all lifeboat crew when the pager bleeps, I had totally forgotten my passenger. I carefully got back into my taxi without waking him, turned off the meter which was now over £50, and gently drove to the address he had given me.

Arriving outside his house, I turned round and gave him a nudge. ‘We’re here, mate,’ I said jovially and gave him an estimate of what the fare should have been.

Still in a dozy state, he paid without question, but I could see that the early-morning sky, where dawn was beginning to show, was causing him a little confusion.

As I drove away, I pretended I hadn’t heard him ask, ‘What time is it, mate?’