We work most of the night on Saturdays, so whenever we can we try and not get up early, which I don’t find at all difficult to achieve. We sat in bed for ages peacefully drinking coffee and making plans for the day. Mark would clean the taxis out and I would make sandwiches for the evening, and we would eat dinner at lunchtime like the French do, except without the wine, obviously, and then go straight out to work afterwards so that we would get a good long shift and earn some money.
Whilst we were eating lunch we noticed that the washing machine was making a dreadful grinding noise. This is an awful thing to happen, of course, because without a washing machine life very quickly becomes an anxious drudgery, and everything gets buried under piles of towels and socks and smells of the dog and of people’s feet. I was instantly panic-stricken, so when it finished washing Mark stopped cleaning cars out and investigated whilst I hung the washing over the fire to dry.
It turned out that something had got wedged down between the seal and the drum and wouldn’t come out. Mark had to invent a special tool to get it out, a sort of bendy bit of flat metal with a lump of sticky on the end, and it turned out that the something was a library card belonging to somebody who hadn’t emptied their pockets.
Mark has got fed up of having his wallet washed, and always empties his pockets. When he loads the washing machine he sits patiently removing tissues and toothpicks and change from people’s pockets, and turning socks the right way out. This is because he read somewhere that wives appreciate it if their husbands straighten their socks instead of leaving them in a smelly ball when they take them off, and of course this is absolutely right. It is very easy to hang it all up when he has loaded the machine, and a complete nuisance when I have, because I never remember to do things like that and just stuff it all in and jam my foot in the door to get it to shut.
He was hardly grumpy at all about it, even though it had made him quite late, but when he went to hoover the taxi out and found my credit card jammed down the side of the seat he got a bit more grumpy, since I hadn’t got round to signing it and it was stuck down the side where any customer could have just picked it up had they felt so inclined.
He remembered then that my car had a water leak, and whilst he was fixing it he dropped a screwdriver down the back of the engine, so he drove the car forward quickly and stamped on the brakes to try and shake it out, and everything fell down off the shelf over the top of the front seats and landed on his head, and he was showered with books and dried mango and glasses and handcream and envelopes and all the other clutter I need to keep in the taxi.
He started to get a bit short tempered then, so I took the car and sloped off to sit on the taxi rank, where the screwdriver fell out, and one of the other drivers found it and gave it back to me, which was a good thing, and when Mark finally came out to join me he was his usual mellow self, and was pleased about getting the screwdriver back.
Whilst we were on the taxi rank we found that Oliver’s school had sent us an email telling us how he was getting on. He had scored Good for everything except Religious Studies, where he had scored only the doom-laden Satisfactory, but there was a bit from his form master which said that Oliver was a splendid little chap and working really hard, so we were both pleased and proud of him and happy then.
We saw a blackbird having a lovely splashy bath in a puddle.
My parents are going to come and take us out to lunch tomorrow.
The water leak is fixed and the car is working splendidly again.
The house is warm and safe and full of logs and the fire is not getting too hot and using up too much wood any more.
I have found my lost library card.
Life is good.
