Ian McMillan: See amid the winter's snow... a taxi driver hero

I'm talking about taxi drivers, those unacknowledged transport workers who normally perform tasks like getting late-night party people from A to B even when they can't remember where B is and have forgotten where A was, and who can been seen on quiet days on the rank standing in a huddle like a Parliament of Rooks putting the world to rights and who, when you ask them how it's been, invariably say: "Rubbish! You're only my third customer of the day, and I've been out since breakfast time…"

On Wednesdays, I usually get a taxi to Doncaster railway station to catch the train to London to do my BBC Radio 3 job. I get the taxi at 06.45, getting to Doncaster for about 07.10, giving me plenty of time to buy the Yorkshire Post italics and slurp a bracing espresso. On Tuesday night, as we know, it snowed and snowed. I rang the taxi firm and altered my pickup time to 06.30 and then to 06.00.

At 05.00, I got up and looked out of the window. The landscape looked more like Irkutsk than the Dearne Valley. I expected to see huskies. I got up and got dressed, putting on more layers than I think have ever been put on before by a middle-aged Yorkshireman. I was downstairs and ready by 05.50. At 06.00, the taxi wasn't there, and he still wasn't there at 06.10. I rang the firm and they said he was on his way. Taxi firms always say that, and because I'm naive, I always believe them.

"Shall I walk up to the top of the street?" I asked, ever helpful and knowing that our road would be like a Winter Olympic bobsleigh run. "You can if you want," said the operator. "But he's nearly there now."

I went outside in the manner of Captain Scott going to check that his guyropes hadn't frozen solid. The snow slapped me across the chops and took my breath away and threw it across the fields to Grimethorpe where it shattered on the floor. I held on to my hat: I needn't have bothered because it was frozen to my freezing skull and it wasn't going anywhere. I looked up the street and saw headlights coming towards me: my taxi! I couldn't believe it. I jumped in and almost shook his hand. He was happy in that laconic South Yorkshire way. "I've got snow tyres on," he said, grinning. "I can get anywhere with these on" and we set off into the apocalyptically wintry Darfield morning at 15 miles an hour.

I've never been to Siberia but I felt like I was in Siberia that early morning. The orange streetlights gave the deserted A635 an odd, eerie glow. It was as though me and the driver were a little arthouse movie about driving through parts of Finland that people never normally visited. Snow piled up on the windscreen and the wipers laboured to get rid of it. We had to trundle gingerly around a jackknifed wagon and we both gaped on the edge of Goldthorpe at the sight of a man walking his dog who waved cheerily at us. The man, not the dog. It wasn't that much like an arthouse film.

In the empty road that cuts through wide, flat fields between Hickleton and Marr I began to feel a little scared. We were driving very slowly and the windscreen wipers were struggling to cope. "Everything all right, do you reckon?" I asked, trying to keep the nervousness out of my voice.

The driver laughed. "Champion!" he said. "We've not slipped yet, have we?" It was true, we hadn't. There were abandoned cars by the side of the road and, in a layby, a gaggle of trucks in which truckers had been sleeping overnight. And there we were, sailing serenely through a sea of snow as though we were hovering above the white stuff like some kind of hovercraft.

We approached Doncaster Station through the gloom. Commuters trudged under and over the weather and I felt pity for a little family I could see dragging cases across the drifts. One last corner and we were there.

"I enjoyed that," the driver said, beaming with satisfaction and patting his steering wheel like you might pat the head of a faithful dog: "I hope I get some more long jobs!" I paid him. I tipped him royally like I sometimes do in a foreign country when I'm not sure how many Zlotys there are to the pound.

He drove off into the blizzard and waved. And I caught my train. Thanks, taxi driver.