Over the past thirty six hours, my life has been beset by so many ‘difficulties’ that it’s difficult to relate them all. Last night I shared some of the trials and tribulations of a market researcher on fieldwork…..it gets worse.

This morning, after a frustrating episode checking out of the hotel (although the building is absolutely wonderful – an Art-Deco building that was the original airport terminal), I wouldn’t recommend staying there to anyone unless they were desperate!!!

We’d ordered a taxi to take us back to Lime Street Station to begin the journey to our next location (the East End of London). It had been booked by the hotel the night before and was due at 9am. It hadn’t arrived by 9.15am, our train time was 9.40am and Lime Street is a good twenty minutes from the airport.

The fun really starts here – the taxi pulled up, the driver jumped out and asked us for our name, we responded and were told ‘that’s fine’. Our luggage was put in the back, we were just setting off when a concierge came out of the hotel and started yelling at the driver ‘get those people out of the car, these people are the ones you are supposed to be collecting’. There were two men who had suddenly materialised out of the hotel and were standing about ten feet away making offensive gestures at us. We were worried about being late for our train and had given our name to the taxi driver who said he could take us.

The driver then got into an argument with two of the hotel staff. The taxi company suggested the two men shared the taxi with us but they refused saying they wanted the taxi and we had to get out. We were now very close to missing our train so we stayed put. The next thing we knew, the taxi driver was throwing punches at the concierge and the concierge was responding in kind. The whole incident was bizarre in the extreme and deeply disturbing.

We finally got away and got to the station where we discovered that the train we’d been rushing for had been cancelled – pah!!! So, instead of being on a train bound for Birmingham then on another one to London, we found ourselves having to train hop to get back.

Everything about this incident was badly handled really – the taxi driver shouldn’t have agreed to take us if he’d been asked to pick up someone else, he’d also have been better off just driving on rather than stopping once the fracas broke out. Throwing punches at the hotel staff didn’t help either. The hotel staff were unhelpful and enflamed the situation. The two men were downright rude and very obnoxious. Finally of course we should really have given way to them but we chose to stand our ground.

Note - this taxi was NOT the one in question and the reason why the photo is pants is because I'm now scared of taxi drivers so I took it from inside my car at Farnborough station when I got back there from London tonight!!!

It's not the first time I've had trouble with taxis.

Last year I was time-poor....nothing much changes then!