I like taxi drivers.

Sure, they might smoke in the car and their cars might be smelly, they might listen to Poor Taste Music and if they have a bad day they might not be very polite. But then, who is?

What I like about taxi drivers is that they tend to have two fine qualities: they generally are great storytellers and they have an ear close enough to the ground, to be able to tell amazing tales about the city and the country we all live in.

On top of that, many of Bulgaria's taxi drivers have gone through a range of jobs over the past 15 to 20 years, often on the edge of legality.

A few days ago, a taxi driver told me a story of how he had returned from a provincial town the night before. I will not mention the name of the town here, as it is not relevant.

In any case, on the night of his return to Sofia, the taxi driver was pulled over by police. According to the taxi driver, the policemen were on a fishing expedition, triggered by his out-of-town licence plate.

After carefully checking the driver's paperwork, all of which was in order, they started picking on the number of vignettes on the car's front window. Being a professional driver, the taxi driver had built up quite a collection of vignettes. All but one were no longer valid.

"Which of those vignettes is valid? Do you want me to write a fine for that?" the taxi driver was asked.

At that point, our story-teller said, a Mercedes with tinted glass passed, cruising at several times the maximum speed.

"Surely you have more reason to pull him over," the taxi driver said, pointing at the Mercedes that disappeared in the distance.

"You don't know whose car that is," the policeman explained.

Allegedly, the car was owned by one of the deputy mayors of this small provincial town.

Other taxi drivers have reminisced about their past lives as truck drivers in the early and mid-90s, among other things on fuel-convoys to Serbia during the trade embargo against that country. I've heard stories about the owners of the trucks, the organisers of the transports and those who provided at different levels protection to the transports.

If only Bulgarian politicians would lack amnesia the way taxi drivers do about the world around us, past and present, before shooting their mouth off about the quality of the "human material" they have to govern, they might actually qualify for the job.