Low life | 23 March 2016

I shared a taxi from Cheltenham station to the house party in an outlying village with a stripper. Finding a taxi in Cheltenham during the Festival is as difficult as picking a winner in the Bumper, and we were amazed and pleased to have got one so easily. One wouldn’t have guessed that the dark, petite young woman, thickly wrapped against the cold night air, was a stripper, but she was proud enough of her occupation to talk about it on the seven-furlong ride between the station and the ‘gentleman’s club’ where we dropped her. She’d come all the way from Cardiff, she said, to dance in a cage from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., and she very much hoped it was going to be worth the effort financially. The driver, hitherto a picture of exhaustion and apathy, sat rigidly to attention on hearing this, and he closely interrogated her via his rear-view mirror.