Mark is the most irritating person alive, but I do miss him when he is not here. I woke up at about three o’clock from a scary dream in which he had left me and was living with somebody else, which is the sort of thing that happens when you live on cheese and read cheap romantic fiction from the library. I almost phoned him up to check that he still loved me, but there is a limit even to Mark’s patience, so I refrained and went back to sleep until morning.
Reassured then of my place in his surprised affections (“Yes, don’t be ridiculous, of course I do, have you crashed the car or something?”) I could get on with the day. It was an exciting day in my dull little life, because I had planned an expedition into the Kendal metropolis, to do lots of exciting things that I had been putting off for ages.
I took my boots in to the cobbler, to my horror he took hold of the sole and pulled and it just came off in his hand. He agreed that they needed mending then and told me to come back in half an hour. When I did they were as good as new, with lovely soles and heels and no holes in them anywhere. I was so pleased, they are my favourite and best boots. Elspeth chose them, and they have given me confidence and comfortable toes for theatre performances and smart dinners and meetings with head teachers and many other occasions when I have been trying to look more affluent and important than I actually am. The thing is that they have been doing that for twenty two years and the holes were beginning to make them counter productive.
Next stop was the optician. She turned out to be a tiny Muslim lady with what appeared to be a knot of hair the size of a football under her headscarf, it must have touched the floor when she untied it, either that or she had another head on the back of her own, like the bloke in Harry Potter. She was softly spoken and friendly, and explained that the problem was 1) not that my glasses had become worn out and rubbish, but the degeneration of my eyesight, and also 2) that the glasses themselves, whilst in need of replacement due to 1) would show a dramatic improvement in performance if I washed the coffee spills and dust and dog hair off them.
It was excitingly high-tech, like being in an American film about the future. There were machines that I stuck my head in that squirted things at my eyes, and flashed bright lights of different colours, and when she had finished she showed me a picture of the back of my eyeballs, which is not something you see every day, so of course I stared at it hard trying to look as though I understood: but it wasn’t very interesting really, round and red and veiny looking. Then we did the bit where I looked at the charts and decided what I could and couldn’t see, and then she told me that I needed some new glasses, which is after all why I had gone in the first place, because I knew that. So a prescription was made up and I got my bank card out and groaned, and in a few weeks time the pleasures of reading in the taxi at night will be mine again.
It was after lunchtime when I eventually got back, and it was such a gorgeous sunny day that all my washing had dried in the back garden. The dog and I went for a quick toot round the Library Gardens, and then he came with me to work, which he is not supposed to do but I don’t think that the taxi inspector reads this. It was absolutely lovely, I opened the boot up and we sat on the taxi rank at the side of the lake and had a picnic, with ginger biscuits which are the dog’s favourite, and bean sprout sandwiches and a flask of tea. I read my book and talked to the other drivers, and the sunshine had made everybody so cheerful that by teatime my face hurt from laughing.
We didn’t make very much money, because the weather was so lovely that everybody walked, but you can’t have everything.
