New Year’s Eve, and I am inexplicably in the most buoyant good humour.
It has been an extremely short day so far, which is fine because it will finish up going on for absolutely ages. I woke up to discover that it was a quarter past one in the afternoon. Nobody else in the house was stirring, like the sort of film where civilisation has had an unexpected calamity and one lone person is left tiptoeing around a mysterious scene of abandoned dolls and dropped wallets to the sound of ominous orchestral music.
It turned out that civilisation was perfectly all right, as it happened, and that we were all just still sleeping off the excesses of the last few weeks. I cleaned up some mysteriously chocolate coloured sick left by one of the tiresome dogs, and we had coffee and got on with our lives.
There wasn’t really a great deal of getting on to do, because as you all know, today is a day for nothing except driving taxis. This isn’t entirely true, because since our council readjusted the fare table so that we can’t charge double time until after seven o’clock in the evening it has become almost completely impossible to get a taxi at any earlier time. Hence we had a tranquil day of hanging washing up and preparing to go to work at six fifty five.
Of course tonight was the night of the children’s party. We prepared them a tediously uninspiring repast of sausages, pizza, crisps and doughnuts and felt glad to be grown up.
I stopped there for ages, because whilst writing those few words my world changed. I was sitting peacefully on the taxi rank. It was my turn to move forwards when suddenly my taxi developed a strange noise. The power steering has developed a terrible leak.
As you know, tonight is the busiest night of the year, not at all a night for something to go unexpectedly wrong with a taxi. Mark said that it is because of a something on the steering rack, and went dashing off to the garage to get some more power steering fluid, and I waited, steeringlessly.
We topped it up so that I can steer again, and now the evening has developed one of those interesting details which will keep me on a knife-edge of thrilling suspense all evening. No longer is it a quiet if prolonged effort of chugging about extracting cash from intoxicated people. It has become a drama of dangerous possibility, I might quite possibly finish up in a broken and steaming heap at the side of the road with angry passengers shouting fruitlessly at me. My life is very exciting sometimes.
All we need to do is to keep it going all night and then next week Mark will take the steering rack out of the spare taxi in his shed. Cross your fingers for me.
In the meantime we have spent the day talking and daydreaming about the year to come. We have got loads of plans. I love getting older, the world just gets bigger and bigger.
We will get the camper van finished soon, and then we can be free again. I love staying in hotels but they are not exactly a budget option, and I have got to be really organised not to forget to bring things that we need. Once we are back in the dear camper van lots of things will be all right, and we can come and go with ease.
I am excited about next year. All sorts of things might happen. It is the adventure ahead of us. Of course every new day is an adventure ahead of us, but there is something magical about a day when everybody feels adventurous and looks forward and makes new plans all together.
Happy New Year.
LATER NOTE: The taxi is stuffed. Mark is driving it because of being strong enough to haul it around corners without any power steering, and I have been guiltily ejected into his easy to drive taxi. He says that it will be fine and these things happen. He is jolly brave. I think we are really lucky. Imagine a dreadful thing like that happening and not being able to manage to carry on. Instead we are still here, still in the game, still getting on with it.
We are going to have a brilliant year.
