Changing times

This changing clocks idea is not on my top ten list of nice things to happen in life.

I am no great fan of British Summertime anyway, because I find it much easier to loaf about doing nothing with a glass of wine when it has gone dark, which just does not happen early enough when we have fiddled about with the clocks.

In any case we had to get up ridiculously early this morning just to organise our lives and get out to work by mid-afternoon. In fact the only person I have talked to so far who thought the whole thing was a marvellous idea was the night porter from the Ryebeck Hotel whose shift had miraculously become an hour shorter.

Of course we have bravely ploughed on with the disorientating and wrongly timetabled day, which did not go dark when it was supposed to, and left us feeling mildly grumpy and sleepy.

Also it is tiresome because it means we have got to drive more when it is still daylight. I don’t very much like doing this, because there are too many marvellously distracting things to look at. Sooner or later I am just going to thump into the car in front whilst absently paying attention to an interesting shop window and not to the road. It is much easier when it is dark because all I can see is the semicircle of road in the headlights in front of me.

Lucy was also grumpy this morning, because today was the day when she was engaged to go back to her slave labour at the local Chinese restaurant.

There were several reasons for her reluctance, as well as the obvious one of the dreadful wages. She is scared of the manager because he shouts at everybody in Chinese and gets disgruntled because the other waitresses laugh at her Chinese accent.

Also last summer there was a doleful Romanian kitchen porter who was hopelessly in love with her and who blushed pink to the ears and looked the other way whenever she appeared in the kitchen. He didn’t seem to speak any English at all, so there never seemed to be any point in Mark going round to the kitchen to explain that quite apart from her extreme youth, she is a pampered costly princess and forever out of his reach, a kitchen porter’s meagre salary would be unlikely to keep her in manicures.

However by the time she emerged late this evening she was in bouncing high spirits. It appeared that the manager had almost not shouted at all, and there is a new kitchen porter who told her that she was beautiful and wanted her to come clubbing after work later on. I think I will not mention that to Mark, who is not terribly enthusiastic about nightclubbing young men even if all they are doing is getting in the back of his taxi. In any case Lucy declined and explained that she still had homework to do.

I took her back home to the more prosaic occupation of taking over supervision of Oliver and Harry, and left her making beds and organising late night pizzas whilst I went back out to work, because we are still in the middle of the Easter adventure.

I am not at all looking forward to her reaching the clubbing years, we had enough excitement with Numbers One and Two Daughters when they were that age.

One of the highlights of being a taxi driver is that detailed information about all of their late night carryings on was regularly relayed back to me: if one of them was being unwell or antisocial outside some hostelry I knew about it almost as soon as the doormen did: and handily, well before the police. There has been more than one occurrence of one or other of them being hurled bodily into a taxi and removed at speed from the scene of the little difficulty, and dispatched off home to bed to be harangued in the morning.

We have got all that yet to come with Lucy, although very fortunately not tonight.

Tonight is just another night.

The picture is Mark loading a family into his taxi outside Lucy’s place of employment this evening. I thought it was jolly artistic and symbolic of our life in the service industry, also it was the only one I had got.

Happy Easter.