To Buckingham Palace for Tea with the Queen

My Royalist-Jamaican mother would have been smiling down at me from her seat on the right-hand side of God as the taxi arrived to pick me up to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

The idiot Eastern European driver parks his car at a bus stop two hundred metres from my flat, so I am forced to stride up to him, suited and booted with dreadlocks flowing in the cold evening wind. He looks almost straight through me just as I reach the stationary Mercedes and starts the engine to pull out into the street. I quickly knock on his window and manage to open the passenger door as he steps on the brakes.

“Are you the car for Buckingham Palace?”
“Hurry up and get in, man,” he shouts back at me, “I’m parked in a bus lane. It’s a fifty pound fine!”
“I didn’t tell anyone to ask you to park here. I told your controller exactly where my flat is.”
“I was looking at Beaufort Mansions,” he offers up as a feeble excuse.
“That’s your problem, mate, that’s not where I live.”
“My problem?” he says with a snarl. “If I had known there was a problem parking, I would not have accepted this job.”

Well, F***-off then, I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t want to be late to meet Her Maj, so I got into the car and…