8AM Kiss FM Ecstasy

Hello, I'm Sophie Heawood, does my column need a title? If John Doran is MENK then I could be MILF. Or maybe MILF TEETH. I don't want motherhood to define me.

MILF TEETH #10: 8AM KISS FM ECSTASY

If my assets are ever seized, and anyone ever asks where all the money went, I just need to make this clear: I’m not that bothered about shoes, I’ve only got one bra that actually fits and my lifestyle is such that my toes are yet to be sucked on a yacht. The fact is that I am bankrupting myself with taxis. To be specific – and I’m feeling a confessional urge about this, even though my mum is going to find a gun and shoot me dead – I spend all of my cash taking my toddler to nursery in a minicab.

Driven by a Turk with white hair and a wicked glint in his eye, who says, "Baby likes KISS FM!" and turns the dial to 100, and drives the wrong way down a one-way street – “No cameras, I check” – while I’m pinning the wriggling child to my lap, no car seat, 'cos we’re pretending that’s not illegal either, and I’m feeding her a biscuit to distract her from trying to open the car door, and the driver’s turning his head round to look at us and going, “Hi sexy!” and I’m never sure if he means me or the one-year-old, but let’s face it, we’re both equally hot at half eight in the morning with Banana Bears all up in our dribbling grills.

Then Ja Rule or somebody sings, "What’s love / it should be about us / it should be about trust," and the driver goes, “YEH MAN! YEH MAN!” and spins his head round to us again, and go “JAMAICA! YEH MAN!” and we all three of us sing along to the song, all of us singing different words. I imagine that the driver is my husband, or maybe my dad. As I only allow myself to imagine a patriarchal protector figure in my life for up to 15 minutes a day, it’s best that we can’t fully communicate.

In that warm car, when it’s raining and miserable outside and he’s got his hands on the steering wheel, everything is OK for a while. I’ll have a little chat with him about Galatasaray transfers to Man United like I know what I’m talking about. Or sometimes it’s the Kurdish driver who looks at me kindly because I always want to show off that I know about Abdullah Öcalan (well, except I thought he was dead). Or it’s the sweet one who left school at 13 to work as a pattern cutter in a textile factory in Istanbul, and has named his daughter something that means "water of life", but he still doesn’t know what they’re going to name their son, due in May, because, apparently, Turkish boys’ names are all shit.

And the run-down estates of Haggerston go past, compulsory purchase orders and council tenant eviction notices leaving them deserted before the bulldozers move in, the land having been sold off to developers who are putting new flats up in their place. The old ones were just flats by the canal, their windows long breezeblocked over, their signs, redundant now, saying "NO BALL GAMES" and "THERE IS NO LEAD IN THIS ROOF". But the new ones are waterside apartments; with glass so new it’s still got stickers on it. The old ones sit there looking like a spouse who’s been traded in for a newer model.

And my favourite driver plays Kiss FM, the station that is the school bully of music. Its methods are cheap and brutal. Its songs pull your hair, slam you against the wall and force you to feel all of your feelings at once. The music on Kiss FM hypnotises because it has the mid-range missed out. There’s no middle, it’s just a load of sub-bass at the bottom and treble at the top. Your ears are kind of tricked into searching for a wholeness that isn’t there. There’s Neyo or Justin Timberlake or Miguel, songs that bring you petrol station flowers and try to slip their hands inside your bra (but only to work out what size you are).

And then there's Sean Paul, shaking you around like you’re a piggy bank and he's trying to get the last 50p out of you. Rita Ora singing “R, I, P / to the girl you used to be,” with Tinie Tempah chatting about flying saucers over the top, in what is definitely the worst rap ever recorded. (And I speak as someone who actually heard the rap record that Victoria Aitken made after her Tory MP dad got sent down for perjury.) Seriously though, that Rita Ora song is so cheap it's ripping itself off – it’s breaking into its own house to rummage through its own grandma’s handbag and nick her bingo winnings. It doesn’t have a middle at all. As Gertrude Stein said of Los Angeles, when she tried and failed to find its city centre, there’s no there there. So we keep on singing it.

The baby is shaking her head around like a puppet and squealing in Kiss FM ecstasy. Which always leads the driver – every single driver – to ask the same thing, which is why I’m not pregnant again yet. “My wife, she had three in three years! All boys!” they cry. And then the lurch comes in my throat and I think, fucking hell, am I still bothered about this – yes, I am still bothered about this. I think, I could try and explain that we haven’t seen her dad since she was four months old, that he met someone else when I was pregnant, not that it was ever exactly like that anyway… Like what? I don’t know.

I try to think of a nice way to tell the dude that this picture isn’t what he thinks it is. I try to think of a way to say this in words of two syllables or less. Which is why I hear myself saying, “Yes! Time to have another one, haha!” and then the driver is happy and he says “Lovely jubbly, babies!” and he turns the music back up. I suppose I still haven’t worked out how to tell people that the middle of our story isn’t there.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously - Offer Your Sex to the Lord