Double Time

Last day of the summer, at least as far as I am concerned.

August Bank Holiday marks the last day of the summer cash cornucopia and the beginning of the slow change that inexorably becomes winter.

I am very pleased about this.

I like winter.

Any season where the sun is over the yardarm by half past four is fine with me.

I can retreat into our underground cave and keep warm until springtime, like a bear, except with more wine and A Game Of Thrones on the DVD player.

We are going to celebrate the sudden onset of poverty with a couple of days in Blackpool, starting tomorrow, just to make the point to ourselves. Mark has spent most of the last week at the farm, glueing the camper van back together and fitting his hydrogen fuel travel-on-a-budget invention. This is supposedly in full working order now, and the trip to Blackpool will be its maiden voyage.

I will just take this opportunity to observe that if this page is unexpectedly blank tomorrow it may be that we have had an explosive-related misfortune on the M55, and indeed if that is the case could you please collectively divide up my possessions between my remaining children, turn off any life support equipment and donate my remaining body parts to medical research. Just to save anyone the bother of looking, there is no insurance for anything anywhere at all. Sorry.

It has been quiet on the taxi rank today, largely because bank holidays are charged at double rates in taxis. I think this is absolutely brilliant. It is £7.50 a mile, which is the minimum price wherever you are going.

Some customers were quite rude, and one made comments about Dick Turpin and a mask, which I thought was ungrateful considering I had driven him back to his hotel and it was hardly my fault that it was only round the corner. He could have walked perfectly well if only he had not been so fat and idle.

Some more customers got cross with Mark and demanded to see his identity badge, which unfortunately turned out to be his last year’s expired badge which I had substituted for the current one in an emergency when I dropped it down the back of the dresser. It is lost now until somebody can be bothered to take everything off the top of the dresser and move it out of the way. Mark might have done that if I had told him what had happened but I forgot. I explained when he got back to the taxi rank but it was a bit late by then.

Anyway the gloriously inflated prices have meant that in between furious customers there has been a lot of time for reading and sewing, because most people who live here have got in taxis in the past and now just walk everywhere on bank holidays, which is probably good for our collective public health.

Unfortunately one of the side effects of having time to kill has been that I was able to sit and browse through Amazon for ages, which was lovely but ultimately expensive, because there were a couple of books suddenly available which I wanted really badly but were out of print etc. Mark just rolled his eyes and made witticisms about his mother having warned him that I would spend all his money. She must have been wrong because he has absolutely never got any money.

Lucy finished work tonight as well, so that she can spend the rest of the week sleeping and trying to scrub the smell of fried rice and prawn crackers away before school. She was sorry to have left in the end, because they all hugged her and gave her some chicken chow mein as a leaving present. She has got a lot thinner whilst she has been working, mostly because of the dining rooms on two floors. This is a nuisance because all her new school uniform is too big now. She is looking forward to going back to school, she said that she can’t believe that she never really appreciated how lovely it is to spend your days just sitting in a classroom watching somebody else working at the front.

She goes back on Sunday.

The summer is over.