AUTUMN in Abingdon and the familiar civic rituals continue apace, eking out the year: Michaelmas Fair and Runaway Fairs have come and gone and Remembrancetide, a short little season marked out by Armistice Day, Remembrance Sunday and All Hallows Eve approaches.

Rarely taken into account by the unending tide of new entrants into the taxi trade are the wide seasonal variations in income and the collective acceptance by the taxi trade of short term cancellation of contracts. In October last year, I was earning £2,000 a month more than I am now.

Such are the vagaries of self employment in the small town taxi trade of Oxfordshire.

The struggle to survive is real and it is ongoing. It is only thanks to the business of regular customers and friends that I have managed to survive the traditionally very quiet school holidays season.

Often in my work as a taxi driver I feel constrained by the limitations of working in a small town, not least for these financial reasons.

To paraphrase a Glen Campbell song: "I've been driving these streets so long."

In the old days before taxi driving, I would be fortunate enough to travel overseas four or five times a year and relished every moment of it. As someone whose home is in Oxford, this most transitory of cities and who spends my life journeying, I am well aware of the concept of physical place.

So last October, having struggled and saved for well over a year, it was a considerable achievement to be among a small group of souls who arrived on pilgrimage to The Holy Land at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Having piled on the coach and secured my favourite seat on the back row, the tour guide came on, with the classic mannerism of tapping the microphone, to ensure it was working.

His first words: "welcome - welcome home".

At the time, I thought this to be tour guide spiel but strangely enough, it did feel like home.

And that was because we were sojourning in someone else's land, in the very places where Jesus himself had walked, had been born, lived, worked, died and rose again - some two thousand years previously.

Land literally sanctified by his presence there.

In my entire life and my entire journey of faith, which is now 28 years – I don't know that I have ever felt as close to God as I did in that place, on that pilgrimage, at that time.

But the reality of course, is that those of us who have faith in Jesus of Nazareth are also pilgrims in our own taxis in our own home towns – in this world, not of it – and we continue to have to have to labour night and day, to be a pilgrim.

So much can change in a year.