Making Hay

So we are a diminished household today.

It turns out to be very easy to organise our lives when Oliver is not here. Lucy lives on coffee and Pot Noodles and toast, and we live on coffee and sandwiches and toast, and nobody needs to rush round to the Co-op in a panic for apples in case Oliver gets scurvy due to inadequate care and nourishment.

Lucy dashed enthusiastically off to work this morning, and we emerged rather later, and with more coffee, for our usual Saturday of endless taxis.

Mark went straight out to work, and I stayed at home and hung washing out and made sandwiches and tidied up before following him. Lucy came back home before I left, she has done so much exercise this week that she is bouncing about all over the place like an over-excited wallaby. She is thinner and fitter and very chirpy, so I left her with plenty of  instructions relating to washing and taking the dogs out to be emptied after I had gone.

She has lent me another book, as I haven’t had time to go to the library for a while, and am getting to the end of my inspirational reading matter. I managed to provide myself with half a day of discontentedness by popping absentmindedly into Waterstones at one point yesterday whilst waiting for Mark to faff about getting some more gas for his welder, which was a brief incursion of the penniless exile into paradise. There were stacks and stacks of books that I thought I might like to read, all in the delightful pristine condition of new books, and I resolved that I will come out to work early next week and earn a bit of extra money to buy one or two.

I am not quite sure what I think about the book that Lucy has provided. It says on the cover that it is just like Willie Wonka meets the Matrix, which does not exactly recommend itself to me on either count. Lucy assured me that it was a splendid read, so I put it in the taxi anyway for keeping me occupied during quiet moments.

Fortunately on the first August Saturday the Lake District does not have many quiet moments. I have spent a very great deal of the day trying my hardest not to squish Japanese tourists who seem to have a differing concept of road safety from the one held by taxi drivers, and not very much time at all sitting reading about Willie Wonka and vampires on the taxi rank. There are a lot of visitors here, all milling about looking happily at the mountains rather than the taxi bearing down on them at high speed, which is a bit perilous, and I have thought many times that if I had a message to share with the world it would probably be: “You Can Still Get Run Over Even On Your Holidays.”

It has been warm and sunny, and Bowness Town Council has engaged a fun fair as a helpful means of ensuring that no family goes home from their holidays with any money left and will have to buy their new school uniforms for September on a credit card.

We are working every minute that we can whilst it is busy, because we are still saving up for absolutely everything, working on the assumption that once the tourists all go home, nobody who lives here will have any money to pay for getting in taxis.

This feels like a really exciting thing to be doing, because it is good to see our winter stockpile of washing powder and coffee growing, and also for the first time ever I have saved up some money for the taxi insurance, which will be a pleasure in November when we have got to find it. It feels as though every time a customer gets in my taxi they are paying a little bit towards my future happiness and untroubled peace of mind.

This is a lovely feeling, which helps sustain me through moments when I would quite like to be the sort of taxi driver who is rude to tourists, and employs special taxi driver hand signals to reveal their inner feelings. It makes me not at all mind not having spare money for books at the moment, because I can feel quite sure that I can always earn some more.

We are making hay in the sunshine.