I am sitting on the taxi rank feeling sleepy.
The reason for this is that we had an unexpectedly late night last night.
We had finished work at about half past three, and were strolling around the Library Gardens in the cool darkness with the dogs, grumbling about customers and generally unwinding at the end of the night, when we heard a huge screeching of tyres and a bang.
Partly because we thought we might be helpful, but mostly because we are both incorrigibly nosey, we rushed over to the main road to see what was happening.
Disappointingly, because there is a horrible ghoulish part of me that is always shamefully fascinated by disaster, there was not a bloodbath or shocking heap of mangled tin outside the Ellerthwaite Lodge at all, just a long black skid mark, leading to a taxi sitting sadly at the end of it in a fast-spreading pool of oil with one of its front wheels sticking out at a peculiar angle.
Enquiry of the taxi driver revealed that he had just been trundling through Windermere slowly and peacefully when unexpectedly the front wheel came off.
He was new, or he wouldn’t at all have expected us to believe that. We all drive at seventy through the centre of Windermere at four o’ clock in the morning, on the general presumption that when you take into consideration the speed the traffic moves all the rest of the time this gives us an average travelling speed of somewhere around the speed limit.
It was a taxi, so within two minutes there were three other taxis there, who said: “That’s a good sixty mile an hour skid mark,” and laughed. We all stood around for a while then, looking at the collapsed wheel and making stupid jokes, and everybody lit cigarettes and helpfully flicked their ash into the pool of oil, and the new driver who was somebody’s employee and not an actual owner-driver, looked as if he might cry, in case it somehow turned out to be his fault. The rest of us have all had plenty of wrecked taxis, and are perfectly assured that no accident is ever our fault, no matter what the circumstances. In any case it wasn’t actually our problem, and so was a not-to-be-missed opportunity for self-satisfied humour at somebody else’s expense.
I like to be with taxi drivers. The younger ones, which is what these few mostly were, are rascally types, bedecked in gold earrings and tattoos, it is like being among pirates. We older ones are fatter, and greyer, and not as reckless as we were twenty years ago, and it is nice to see a new generation up and coming.
In the end Mark had a proper look at it, explained that the bottom ball joint had come off and that it needed fixing before we could move it, given that none of us had a recovery truck handy.
Somebody took him back to our house for tools, and he put his overalls on and brought the trolley jack and some spanners, and this turned out to be a good thing, because it meant that when the police turned up a few minutes later it meant that the situation was genuinely in hand and nobody had to hide anything except the skid mark, which the rest of the taxis had thoughtfully parked on the top of. The police were equally relieved not to have to start interfering with anything, and buzzed off quickly before anything happened that they would have to write a report about.
Mark fixed the ball joint back together, which to his satisfaction had been wrongly fitted by a garage mechanic who he doesn’t like very much, and we chucked a bag of sand over the spilt oil, which made us feel as though we had been very sensible and responsible, and somehow this brought the impromptu party to a natural conclusion, so we took the dogs for the rest of their walk after that and went to bed.
Neither of us felt much like getting up to take Lucy to work this morning. I had been having a peculiar dream about buying some long haired pink kittens, which Mark speculated was brought about by borrowing Lucy’s reading matter.
We ploughed on with the day anyway. After we had taken Lucy to start her day’s labours at the Chinese restaurant we had an hour spare. Mark messed about with his hydrogen engine and I put clean sheets on the beds, and brought some flowers out of the garden, and then we went to work, where we have been ever since.
I didn’t think I wanted to turn into the sort of person who takes photographs of road accidents, so I have included a vastly more civilised picture of some flowers out of the garden. You will have to imagine the road accident.
