The thing about the summer is that there just isn’t any time to do anything at all except go to work.
I haven’t been to the allotment. I haven’t finished making my skirt. I haven’t done anything in the garden. We have run out of home made biscuits and I have been feeding Oliver on chicken nuggets and pizza.
Mark hasn’t finished welding up the camper van. He hasn’t done any more to his home made hydrogen bomb. We haven’t brought enough logs back and we still haven’t serviced the boiler.
I haven’t bought the children’s school shoes. I haven’t finished sorting out the mess in the loft. We haven’t had a decent long walk with the dogs for as long as I can remember and we haven’t been swimming for weeks.
The house needs dusting. The bathroom needs cleaning. The lawn needs cutting. I haven’t finished sewing the name labels on the children’s school uniforms.
On the whole I don’t really mind about all of this very much, because of course I know that once the summer holidays are over – once Bank Holiday weekend is over really – then the tourists will go away and the taxi rank will become quieter, and slowly we will wind down towards the winter.
Today I mind, though. I have been trying to organise Lucy’s uniform in the loft and have discovered that some of the shirts that have been sent have got the wrong name tag in them, and that Oliver’s new swimming trunks are too big, and that I haven’t yet bought new tuck boxes, and became anxious and frustrated because instead of sorting any of it out I just had to leave everything and dash off out to work.
Going out to work is the thing that will pay for new tuck boxes.
I still wish I didn’t have to do it at the moment, especially as it is going to take ages to buy them since I have just looked on Amazon and to my horror they start at fifty quid, which is an awful lot of going out to work: they might finish up with a cardboard box each.
I like my job. I have never in my life come across anything else which enables a person to earn money with so little effort, which is one of my favourite things about it. Also I can start when I like and go home when I have had enough, and if a customer is drunk and horrible and rude I can chuck them out. I do this sometimes.
Also when I have not got customers I can write to you or just stare out of the window at the lake or at the fells or at Costa Coffee or I can read my book, which is a splendid one at the moment, a truly ghastly tome about the deeds of the Yorkshire Ripper.
I would never have been seen dead buying a book like this from a civilised establishment like Waterstones, but I got it out of the library, so I can be thrilled and horrified and appalled from the safety of my own taxi and also have not had to pay eight pounds and ninety nine pence for the experience, which is a definite bonus. Afterwards I can give it back and thus will not have its presence on my own bookshelves providing visitors with an unmistakable clue that I am a tasteless proletarian in my secret inner soul and not middle class at all.
Despite this secret source of gratification it is frustrating to be at work when there are so many other things that I have not done, even though spending every day driving around the Lake District can hardly be said to be a gruelling way of earning a living.
Tomorrow I am going to take some time off.
I took the picture this evening as a means of showing you just how difficult my life is, it was the view from one of my journeys earlier on. It has come out slightly darker than I remember it, but it gives you the general idea.
It also confirms my long-held opinion that Wordsworth was rubbish. Lonely as a cloud in the Lake District. What an idiot.
