Nothing much…

We are in the middle of the weekend again, and it is a busy one.

I have had a delightful young Indian couple in my taxi this afternoon who went for miles, so we had lots of chance to talk.

I don’t always talk to customers, but I liked these two very much, they had all the joyful confidence of youth, with bright eyes still un-dulled by cynicism.

I told them whilst we were talking that I kept an online diary, and they thought they might look at it one day, partly because I couldn’t even begin to explain what it was about. Of course they won’t, because that is not at all the sort of thing you remember about when you finally get back to India and have got jet-lag and a headache.

All the same, it made me go back to the taxi rank and look at my diary-writing activities with new eyes, because, ridiculously, it is not often that I wonder what somebody might think if they were actually to read it.

I still can’t work out what it is about. How can you explain hundreds upon hundreds of words written without a story, a point, a middle or an end? In the end I shrugged and said rather lamely that it wasn’t about anything much.

It isn’t. I am having a quiet life. Today the sunshine is still beaming gloriously over Windermere, and lots of people, very sensibly, have thought that the Lake District would be a brilliant place to spend their weekend.

I think so as well. Sitting here next to the lake on the taxi rank might not be very exciting, but it is a superbly happy way to be at work. This was not on my list of career options when I was at school, but if I had known then what I know now, it jolly well would have been.

Customers in the taxi often ask if I like what I do, which is another question that I never know how to answer. Of course nobody could honestly say that they like transporting intoxicated people back to the place where they think they might have left their guest house at three in the morning. Apart from the obvious attraction of sitting contentedly at the side of the lake, watching the boats skimming up and down in the sunshine, the bit that I love is owning my own life and making all of my own choices.

Every now and again I have tried to choose to be the sort of person who earns money that she doesn’t exactly need now this minute, but I can’t, somehow it just isn’t interesting enough. I am the sort of person who can quite easily go to work until they have earned enough for bread and butter and milk and then buzzes off on a picnic.

Number Two Daughter says we are the free people, and she is quite right.

Of course I am not actually at work anyway, not in the sense of earning anything at the moment, because nobody is in the taxi explaining that they aren’t going very far but they don’t fancy walking up that big hill. Despite that I am perfectly contented, and I am sitting beside the lake blotting up sunshine like kitchen roll in a poopy-accident.

I listened to a programme on the radio the other day which suggested that people did not evolve out of the jungles and into the Savannah, but out of the jungles and on to the sea shores. This seems to me to be a jolly good idea, there is nothing more restorative to a troubled soul than sitting gazing at the ever- shifting waters. Not that I have a troubled soul.

I have an extremely contented soul, a comfortable pair of knickers, some good library books, warm sunshine and some wild salmon salad.

What more could anybody possibly want?