Apologies

It is all very well having a beautiful glitter pretend-tattoo of a flower fairy when one is on holiday in Blackpool.

It doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to come off, and is not at all helpful when I am trying to portray myself as a humourless late night taxi driver, without pity for the misfortunate or sympathy for the troubled and impecunious. Actually it looks ridiculous.

I am sitting wearily on the taxi rank trying to pick bits off it. In fact I have had a busy and action-packed day, and it is rather nice to have some undisturbed quiet.

Things started to go a bit wrong last night, when Number Two Daughter’s best friend Jade, who in the ordinary way of things is a civil servant and mother to two small children, became bored with being a grown-up and thought that she would have a change.

She had a night in with her husband and the drinks cabinet.

By the time she rang Number Two Daughter, suggesting a trip to the nightclub, it was well after midnight and her husband had apparently passed out.

Number Two Daughter declined, because of being engaged in earning a living outside the nightclub, leaving Jade at home with an overdeveloped sense of humour and nothing to do except be intoxicated.

It turns out that the two are not a good combination.

After a short the operator at Pegasus Taxis rang Number Two Daughter, wondering if she could throw any light on the extremely peculiar frustrated lesbian woman who had telephoned in an intoxicated condition, explaining that Number Two Daughter should not be held at work against her will, and going into some details about her sexual potential and asking them to send her across.

Number Two Daughter apologised. She called Jade and wondered what the Housing Department might say if she rang them in a similar sort of condition. The idea made us laugh a great deal, I think I might try it one day when I have neglected to pay my council tax.

We discovered at half past three that Jade had also called Number One Son-In-Law, lambasting him for cruelly robbing her dearest friend of a fat puppy that was her only love in this world.

We apologised. Number One Son-In-Law said that it was fine, and that she had also told him that she had got her very own unicorn, so he had considered that she might be having some alcohol-related issues.

We rang Jade whilst we were having coffee this morning, who thought she might be dying. Number Two Daughter laughed unsympathetically, and we had a brief self-satisfied moment of pleasure whilst we all thought how lovely it was that the idiot with the hangover was somebody else.

Mark told us then that he had had also had an irate telephone call, this one from his sister. She is away on holiday, but it turned out to our horror that she had had bitter complaints from her expensive-holiday-cottage guests that somebody had parked an ancient filthy camper van with an exploded engine right outside their window.

You will not be in the least surprised to hear that straight away she thought of us, and wondered if we could throw any light on the subject.

We were appalled. Of course Mark promised that we would move it straight away, and was terribly contrite, because we all knew guiltily that it must be Number One Daughter’s lost-in-France camper.

We had thought it was still rotting in a French garage, but obviously the French had been rather keen to see the back of it. We realised that it must have been unexpectedly shipped back and dumped in the first available parking space by a grumpy delivery driver, instead of being towed down the drive and parked in the workshop yard where it would be decently obscured from view.

We dashed across and indeed, there it was, grimy from its international adventures and about as beautiful as a nineteen seventies housing development, busily obscuring the beautiful rural vista which makes Mark’s sister’s holiday cottage such a popular and costly destination.

There was no key.

We hunted everywhere, getting wet and alarmed and grumpy in the pouring rain before having to give up and go back to the taxi rank.

In the end Mark managed to get hold of the delivery driver, who explained where he had hidden the key, and we trailed back to the farm again.

Mark towed it into the workshop yard with the dumper truck, whilst I steered the camper, because I have got about as much affinity with the dumper truck as my mother had with the Sex Pistols.

Then we towed it backwards to the other end of the yard.

Then we towed it around so that it was facing up the hill.

Then we towed it up the hill and rolled it back down again so it was sitting neatly in the yard, or at any rate as neatly as possible for a vehicle of such rakish and exploded appearance, with its back to the shed and the remains of its engine nicely accessible.

We went back to work then, where we sat on the taxi rank and drank tea and contemplated our day of being sorry about things.

I would just like to say here, to save me any further troubles today, that if we have inadvertently upset anybody else, we are very sorry to you as well.

We will try harder tomorrow.