The dawn was just starting to come up as we emptied the dogs in the Library Gardens after work last night.
We collapsed gladly into bed feeling tired and pleased with ourselves: it is always a colossal relief when the longest and busiest night of the week is over and we know that the days to come will be much calmer and gentler. We stayed in bed until late this morning, and came round slowly with huge china mugs of coffee in bed, and told one another stories of our busy night until it was really time that we had absolutely got to get up.
Once the holiday season has begun to chug back into life Sunday turns into a very unadventurous day for taxi drivers. We have got to go to work, because there are still people about, especially if the sun is shining, but they are not rollicking drunks or villains or axe murderers the way they are on Saturday night. Our customers today are elderly people who have got tired from walking too far, and people with children sticky from ice-cream, and anxious young men at the end of a long day’s walk hoping to get to the station in time for their train.
It is a day for tourists and people having a happy time. It is the day when pushchairs have got to be disassembled and stuffed in the boot whilst tired children shriek, and when everybody says that they need a taxi because it is just too far to walk back up the hill to their guest house, and when the people staying for another night all tell you that they have got an ace special offer from Booking.com which made it really reasonable and just possible to have an extra day longer staying next to the lake.
The nice part of this is that it gives me lots of time to gaze dreamily out of my window at boats bobbing up and down the lake, and to eat my picnic and read my library book, and catch up with The Archers, and think about things. This is an ace way to spend a Sunday.
I am sorry to observe that it isn’t very exciting to read about.
It is my daily challenge to find enough to tell you to fill seven hundred words without being so boring that you never come back.
I sat on the taxi rank with my fingers poised above the little flat screen wondering if I should tell you about the extra-splendid Sunday picnic I made to keep us going through the long shift until bedtime, with tuna fish in creamy home made garlic and lemon mayonnaise, and beautiful fresh melon, and slabs of melting chocolate fudge, and a flask of fragrant, steaming Earl Grey tea. Then I thought that although this was all very nice it could not be described as especially exciting.
Then I wondered if I should tell you about our evening swim, the one we do so we don’t get too taxi-driver portly. The last rays of sunshine were just reaching in through the windows whilst I puffed up and down the pool, earnestly splashing my way up to fifty five lengths, followed by the sauna, so hot that it was hard to breathe, and the cold shower and all over ice scrub afterwards until we gasped with the freezing shock and collapsed again into the gloriously warm swimming pool, to float there until our hearts had stopped hammering.
Then I thought that this was fun to do, but not really page-turning to read about.
I wondered if you might like to know about Numbers One and Two Daughters, who rang up this morning and giggled helplessly at the other end of the phone, happy to be doing things together, and having just as much fun being grown ups as they had when they were five. It was lovely to hear them and know that their lives are good.
In the end I couldn’t think of anything to tell you about at all, just another Sunday, really. It is almost midnight now, and the last few customers are just beginning to drift out of the pubs: we will be home soon.
It is pleasant to be here, in the quiet dark, watching the town settling itself for sleep.
I think we might do the same.
