The Last Straw Frank McNally'Cricklewood," I told the taxi driver at Heathrow, trying to sound confident but feeling a bit shifty.
My last trip to Cricklewood was on a bike, I recalled - a bike I'd brought from Holyhead on the train. It was the era before budget air travel. There was a rumour going around that a baby called Michael O'Leary had been born in a stable somewhere and would soon bring tidings of joy to millions. In the meantime, many of us still travelled to England by boat.
Younger readers may assume this was the 17th century. In fact it was 1989, and in the cab from Heathrow I was feeling uncomfortable about the sudden improvement in circumstances. I knew The Irish Times would be paying the fare, but even so - the dramatically diverging rates of progress being achieved by the taxi meter and the actual taxi were making me tense.
It didn't help when the driver asked my exact destination and keyed it into a computer. "We have this global satellite positioning thing," he claimed, but I wasn't sure whether to believe him. I suspected the female computer voice giving him directions - "After 300 metres, turn left" - was really a live woman back at the taxi control centre. In the bits I couldn't hear, she was probably saying: "Go twice around Kew Gardens. He won't notice." The satellite lady - if that's what she was - was competing with the car radio, which was tuned to Moron FM.
It struck me that while everything else is dumbing down, cars are bucking the trend by getting more intelligent. It can't be a good thing to have this growing IQ gap between the driver and the engine. Already, the relationship is seriously unequal. "I was going to take the North Circular, but she's telling me this way is shorter," the taxi man informed me at one point. And who was either of us to contradict her?
London has changed a lot in 16 years. Back then, the traffic was terrible. Now it's much worse. We think we're great with our Celtic Tiger economy. But we'll never be serious players until we have traffic as bad as London's. On the other hand, some things haven't changed. When I lived there briefly, Shane McGowan was singing about London's dark streets, and like Shane's teeth, they haven't got any brighter since.
On the shortest day of the year, Harlesden is like the interior of Newgrange, except that the builders forgot to leave a gap for the sun to get in.
Anyway, we reached Cricklewood eventually, and I recognised the spot where Irishmen used to gather to get work on the buildings. You'd stand there at 6.30am trying to look attractive to the kerb-crawling brickies and plasterers who needed a bit of rough in a hurry. If you got hired, you'd be whisked off to some building site and asked to perform humiliating acts with a shovel, or sometimes a cement mixer. In the evening they'd give you £30 and drive you home again.
The memories flooding back, I finally said goodbye to the taxi driver and the satellite lady, and paid the fare calmly, despite noting that I could once have bought a bike for it.
The plan now was that I would do the reporting job I came here for. Then, in the hour or so left, I would stroll around the area, check out old haunts, and think profound thoughts about the passage of 16 Christmases.
The plan didn't work out. Before the job was done, the spare hour had evaporated and the recreational options were reduced to getting a taxi straight back to Heathrow. That was the biggest change, I reflected ruefully. We used to have no money. Now we have no time.
The West Indian lady behind the counter of the minicab centre had plenty of it, however. Sounding uncannily like Lenny Henry impersonating his mother, she greeted me as though I was the first Irishman she'd ever met (highly unlikely in Cricklewood).
And before dealing with my transport needs, she wrestled with the thought that she knew my name from somewhere, finally deciding that I shared it with a wrestler from the 1970s. I think she meant Mick McManus, but it was close enough.
When the taxi arrived, she even came out to see me off, and after wishing me a merry Christmas, told me to be sure and come back some time "and bring me a live leprechaun". Suddenly it felt like 1989 again. I assured her that the first leprechaun I saw when I got home would have her name on it. And the next time I came to Cricklewood, I'd bring him on the back of my bike.