Another day of glorious sunshine, the air thick with the scent of hawthorn blossom and cut grass.
It is beautiful, almost impossible to believe it is the same dreadfully desolate place torn apart by howling winds and floods just a few months ago. The world has become coloured: from the sodden grey and brown landscape somehow the most vivid, stunning hues of green and pink and yellow have emerged, brilliant and clean and bright against the blue skies.
There are people absolutely everywhere, looking at things and eating ice creams and wandering absent-mindedly into the road in front of speeding taxis. I am trying very hard to feel patient and pleased that people are relaxed and having a contented time milling about, although actually it is just good fortune that I haven’t run anybody over so far: but it is almost over now. It is the last day of the bank holiday and we have worked and slept and then gone back to work until we have collapsed to sleep again.
The petrol station has run out of fuel and the wine bar ran out of wine and had to do an emergency dash to Windermere Wine Stores in a taxi. Booths has run out of absolutely everything. Number Two Daughter went up with the children to get shopping in order to organise something that they might all like for dinner, and came back with crisps and spinach, which was all they had left.
The sunshine has meant that people have stayed longer, extracting the last possible minutes from their holiday: when it rains they all buzz off straight after breakfast.
We couldn’t hang about sleeping as long as we would have liked to after last night, because today is that most splendid of all taxi days, Double Time, which we are mercilessly charging to absolutely everybody, indignant locals and tourists at the very bottom of their holiday purses alike. We dragged ourselves gritty-eyed and yawning out of bed this morning, because almost every fare is going to be at least ten pounds, and it doesn’t take very many tired tourists to make for a very celebratory end to the holiday at that rate.
Number Two Daughter bullied the children into being helpful whilst we staggered about organising the tired scraps left over in the beginning-to-be-very-bare fridge into something that we could scrape on to sandwiches, and then she kindly took them off for their riding lesson whilst we made flasks of tea and pegged the washing out, and finally chugged back to the taxi rank.
I am here now, living my life out of the driver’s seat. I seem to have contracted some sort of eye infection over the weekend, probably from rubbing my eyes after handling horrible dirty cash. Mark called back in at home on his way back from a run to the station to get the drops that the vet gave us for the dog once, to see if they would help.
We had a small taxi-rank clinic and I sat in the front seat of his taxi and leaned it back as far as it would go, and Mark sat on the back seat and squeezed the drops into my eyes. In fact they worked brilliantly well, the dog must have been very grateful when we used them on him, because the soreness and itching stopped right away. It was especially good because of not needing to miss a single double-time run, we are trying to make enough cash to pay the mortgage and buy some of the things that we need to fix the camper van. This is not a time to be tiddling about at home.
Tomorrow it will all be over, there will still be people here because of school holidays and sunshine, but it will be quieter, and we won’t need to go to work as soon as we wake up and stay there until breakfast time. I am pleased about this, because I would like to do things like talk to the children and clean the bathroom. It feels as though it has been a very busy few days.
Tomorrow we can stay in bed.
Hurrah.
