It was the usual Saturday late night, and time to get up this morning seemed to come round again very quickly indeed.
We don’t usually work on Sundays, it is our day firstly for lying in bed for ages, and then for doing nice things and enjoying life, but we can’t do that on a bank holiday weekend, because obviously that is the time when anybody who has got a taxi and lives in the Lake District has got to go to work unless they have recently won the lottery or had similar good fortune. It is rubbish to have to get up and go to work on a day that you feel ought to be your day off, even if, like we did, you had an extra day off last week to compensate for it. Of course I had forgotten that by today, and felt unreasonably cross with the day this morning.
Disappointingly it was raining again, which is always so sad for people who are here on their holidays. Mostly they try to be cheerful and make the best of it, because it is still very beautiful, even when it is grey and wet: but it must be difficult when you are soaked and tired and can’t get back in to your guest house until teatime, especially if you have got children and already saw the Beatrix Potter Attraction yesterday.
Mark said that he was going to go and work on his own for a couple of hours and I ought to go back to bed. I argued feebly about this, but he was adamant, and said that it wasn’t a kindness but a financial decision, because I was vile and grumpy when I hadn’t had enough sleep, and then I was rude to customers and didn’t get any tips.
This was unarguable, so after we had emptied the dog and made sandwiches and filled the fire up with logs Mark went off to sit on the taxi rank and I went back to bed, where I slept like a brick in a rabbit hole until the alarm woke me up in a disorientated panic.
Waking up for the second time was a much nicer experience, because the clouds had lifted a miraculous bit, and sunshine was beginning to make a faltering appearance. I was so pleased that I stood by the door for a few moments just drinking in the colours and enjoying the bright warmth. I felt entirely revived then, and well and truly able to make a start on the day.
I said goodbye to poor neglected Lucy, promising her better times when we were rich, and she rolled her eyes and agreed to take the dog for a walk, and I went off to Bowness to join Mark on the taxi rank.
He was quite distracted and not very talkative, and I thought probably he had wanted me to stay in bed so that he could have some prolonged peace and quiet.
He has got it in his head that he would like to build a hydrogen powered engine for one of the taxis and is spending all his between-customer time on the taxi rank contemplating and sketching plans and occasionally trying to explain them to me, which, I might add, is a total non-starter as no matter how carefully he explains solenoids and current and injectors to me the whole thing is about as foggy as a November night in Grasmere.
I can only hope that he gets sent offshore before he gets round to actually dismantling either of them, because they are our sole source of income at the moment and I do think that it is handy that they are functional and not in a thousand bits all over his workshop having experimental surgery done to them.
Being a taxi driver was a very nice job today. The trees are have absolutely exploded with leaf, and everywhere is a thousand shades of green, some coppery, some golden, some silvery; but all of it clean and new and vivid, and it was so lovely that I found it difficult to concentrate on the road because of the breathtaking colours around me, so it was just as well that everything was trundling along at tourist pace, it got an awful lot easier when it got dark.
At times like this I can’t help thinking that it is a very splendid job indeed, even if I am doing it when I would rather be milling around the garden.
I would only have got cold and muddy anyway.
