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Mark has been mending my taxi.

I have got no idea what was wrong with it, but whatever it was has been making the tyres go bald and the back end slide outwards when you go round a corner really fast. He put some new tyres on it yesterday and has spent most of today lying underneath it. It has made him swear a lot and be very bad tempered.

I made some sympathetic noises and a cup of coffee but when some hot grease spat out of the engine and burned his arm, it made him really very cross indeed, and I thought then that maybe the best thing that I could do would be to slope off somewhere else just in case whatever was wrong with it turned out to be my fault.

So I borrowed his taxi and went to work. This was not at all a nice experience, because everything was in the wrong places. I am very used to working in my own taxi, and I have got a special place to keep my sandwiches, and a special place for my flask, and a special place for my  book, and in Mark’s taxi all those special places are either not there or too small or in the wrong place altogether, and it is very disorientating I can assure you.

I sat on the taxi rank for ages feeling disgruntled, until he had finished banging about and being grumpy and burning himself, and brought it down to the taxi rank. I was happy then, because I was surrounded by everything in its right place, and he was happy again as well, because he had mended the taxi so cleverly, and we sat together on the taxi rank and had a cup of tea out of our flask, and felt pleased with the world.

So all in all, the day has not been without its highlights, not least of which  was that Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma turned up to collect him this morning.

It was a relief to see her. I had been distracted for a while because I was trying to get online banking right, and had been ignoring him whilst I thought about direct debits. After a short while of wittering tediously in the background to my thoughts he came and stood right next to me and bellowed: “GRANNY I EATING MY SNOT AND I DONE A WEE IN MY PANTS.” which was the end of the banking and the ignoring him, but to my enormous pleasure his Other Grandma appeared at the back door just as I was setting the washing machine off and it was all over.

We had the usual exchange of information about poo and clean trousers and where he had put his Captain Barnacle and then they were gone, leaving me feeling oddly lighthearted  and with a bit of a spring in my step.

Such a cheery frame of mind was partly due to the long-awaited return of the swallows. I had thought yesterday that I had heard them, over the racket of Ritalin Boy and Chuggington on the DVD player, although when I dashed outside hopefully there was no sign: but today there could be no doubt. I stood and watched them for ages: they were wheeling and swooping at enormous speed, and calling their wonderful travellers’ call to one another, and bringing with them the promise of the summer.

There is a pair of pigeons building their nest in the eaves above the builder’s yard. I am a bit concerned about them, because they are terribly messy, there is an enormous pile of discarded sticks underneath, they might as well put a sign on the wall that says ‘irritating smelly nest here’ and I can only hope that the builders can’t find their ladder, or don’t care enough about bird poo on their steps to do anything about it, because they are really quite appealing in a disorganised pigeon sort of way. They are fluttering and cooing and sound contented enough, but if the profligate pile of sticks underneath is anything to go by they are remarkably inefficient and are going to need all the good fortune they can get.

The other thing that happened today was that the Caring Sharing rang, and you will not be surprised to hear that I am not going to be employed by them to work in a funeral parlour, which was disappointing but predictable.

They read their rejection letter over the telephone and asked if I would like some feedback from the interviewer, who would, they promised, call me later to explain my unsuitability in detail, and then they sent me an e-mail asking me to complete a form with my own feedback about their selection process.

I thought that I might wait until they had called to see exactly which part of our little chat had condemned me to the outer darkness before I told them what I thought, but they didn’t ring, and after a while I had a brainwave.

Dear Natalie,

Thank you for your interest in my feedback.

However I think you might find the best and most appropriate feedback on this subject is to be found on the website: www.windermerediaries.com: you may find the pages entitled: “Unemployable”, Caring, Sharing”, and “Name of Candidate” to be of particular interest.

Best wishes

Sarah Ibbetson