A marvellous start to my creative time on the taxi rank: because I have regained possession of our flat portable computer thingy, and this entry is not being typed laboriously with one finger on my mobile phone whilst squinting ineffectively through my glasses. Oliver has had use of this whilst he has been at home in order to play a game he has loaded on to it called Goat Simulator, the point of which is that the player can pretend to be a goat in a special virtual goat cyber world. I am very impressed with this. Technology is a fantastic thing, fancy having got so much of it lying about spare in the world that we can use it for allowing small boys to pretend to be goats, and it hasn’t all got to be jealously guarded and rationed for trips to Europa and finding cures for Alzheimer’s and similar. However I don’t have much lying about spare, and so am very pleased indeed once again to have a lovely big screen to poke, which makes reassuring but unnecessary typewriter noises as I do it, which is a nice detail included by Steve Jobs especially for the benefit of old people like me who like things like that. What a thoughtful and kindly world we inhabit.
I have had a trip to the library this morning, which was also a nice event, because they have got some new books in. This happens every now and again, and is very pleasing. I have been there a lot over the winter when it has been quiet on the taxi rank and was just starting to get to the stage where I might have had to start resorting to books with pictures of ladies in period costume or bleeding daggers on the cover, which are some of my shorthand rejection criteria, also anything with a handwritten title font in the Autobiography category, also anything which contains the word ‘brooding’ in the blurb.
It was very satisfying indeed. To my joy they had the new Ben Elton novel, which I haven’t read, and a surprising autobiography written by somebody of whom I have never heard called Lisa Riley but who seems to have known an awful lot of people whom I also know: which was a peculiar disconcerting moment, standing in Windermere library with the early spring sunshine flooding in through the windows, reading a litany of familiar names and places from my youthful past. I still don’t know who she is or what she has done (this is a familiar experience when you don’t have a television and rely on Radio 4 for your window on to the world, it also makes outings to waxwork museums a complete non-event) but I have got the book out and am excited to find out. They didn’t have the second book in the Jeffrey Archer series I have started reading, but have inexplicably jumped straight to the third, for some incomprehensible library reason. I am a bit unsure what to do about this. if I leave the series until they have got the second one the third might be moved on to another library in the meantime, then to be forever beyond my reach.
In the end I decided not to bother on account of not really being able to remember the events of the first one anyway any more, and finished up with a pretend-scholarly but actually Daily Mirror page turner type of tome called: “The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile” which is every bit as riveting as it sounds, absolutely road-accident captivating, self-righteous and moralising in the fine tradition of the British press, I could read it all day. I will have to keep it under the taxi seat in case customers ask what I am reading, which always irritates me in any case, because it is too intrusively personal even though they are only trying to be civil, so I always say: ” Kafka”, which I can usually rely on to be a conversation stopper.
And so I am fully equipped for my long day on the taxi rank. Saturday goes on for ages when you have got a taxi, from lunchtime until almost Sunday breakfast time, because of people on their holidays during the day, and stag parties and other drunk people at night. Mark rubbed my sore shoulder for me this morning before I left, and he is now happily at home playing noisy games with Oliver, and I have made myself a picnic of a large flask of milkless Earl Grey and a beef and spinach sandwich with olives, and some dried pineapple. I have got a good book and my flat computer thing, and the sun is shining. From my vantage point by the pier I can see lots of people milling about having boat trips up and down the lake, and snow on the fells, and a good stiff breeze across the water is making the pennants on the boats and the flags on the hotels flutter brightly. I can read my book, or wind my window down and chat, or write yarns to you: and I can’t help thinking that whatever happens to me in life my lot is not at all a bad one.
