Destination unkown...

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"Do you know where you're going?"

It is a loaded question, isn't it? Did the asker mean to throw me into an existential quandary about my path in life? Did I seem lost and frightened? Was I leading someone astray?

Not entirely. In fact, not at all.

The question was asked by a taxi driver at two o'clock one morning as he prepared to pull away and take me home after a night-shift in the newsroom. What's more, this was a pre-ordered taxi, and I could see that the driver already had my pick-up and drop-off addresses loaded into his satellite navigation gizmo.

So, to ask me "Do you know where you're going?" struck me as a rather odd, faintly unsettling question.

Why wouldn't I know where I was going? Where on earth did he think I was heading at that time of night? Did he think I chosen a drop-off address at random, just for the high-octane thrill of it?

What response did he expect?

I should have said "Surprise me" and waited for his reaction. Or said "Your place" and freaked him out. Or perhaps I should have broken down and said, in between sobs, "No, I just don't know what to do with my life! How did it come to this?!"

Taxi drivers being the enigmatic sort, any of the above responses would doubtless have elicited the same shrug of the shoulders as I got when I said "Er...home. That address there on your sat-nav".

"Ah, ok," he said, in a heavy, if undistiguishable, accent.

"Ah, ok"?! What the hell does that mean?? Where was he taking me...?

On the way home (or to what I hoped would be home), I said little and gazed out of the window through tired eyes at the falling October snow. The headphones in my ears were meant as a clear signal that conversation was not an option. Cabbies and hairdressers both went to the same school of inane banter, and I had had enough of politely engaging with strangers about the hecticness or otherwise of their day, or their brother-in-law who once fitted the plumbing at the Daily Mail (so all the filth could run out, presumably).

At one point I heard the husky toned sat-nav lady say "turn left" as the taxi swung very much to the right right round a corner.

I resisted the urge to say "Do you know where you're going" and settled back into my seat to see if the driver's question had been just an ice-breaker, or if it had been a warning...

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