Walkers

I am on the taxi rank.

It is midnight, and I have been here since seven o’clock, apart from a brief interlude when I dashed back home to visit the bathroom and to insist that the dogs had a trip out in to the garden for the same purpose.

I have earned seven pounds so far, seven pounds fifty if I count the tip.

It is not busy here in January.

It has been an entire day without interesting event. I have made bread, and done the washing, and washed the pots. After that I spent the middle few hours between skimming hastily through the housework and going reluctantly out to work, sitting at my computer, biting my fingernails and trying to navigate my characters across the Yorkshire landscape.

It was at this point that I discovered that it is not a good idea to attempt to write a book based entirely on one’s own imaginings. Research is a good idea.

I came unstuck today because of my firm conviction that it would take at least two days to walk the nine mile journey between one town and another. That is what it would take me, and I might have to have a day off in the middle to recuperate.

I discovered today that this is not at all the case. In my story, my characters have got horses carrying all of the heavy things like the map and the compass and the tent.

In consequence, their experience would not in the least be like my recollections of my own once-in-a-lifetime-cross-mountain expedition. This actually took place in my schooldays, when Jane Brereton and I got lost on the Duke of Edinburgh hike, got fed up of lugging our rucksacks about, and finished up in a pub which had not heard of age-related legislation. Somebody gave us a lift to the camp site. I forget the rest. The bit that I do remember was that I did not like walking up hills in the least, and also that cheap walking boots are the least pleasant footwear known to man.

Given that I don’t think I ever used them again, it was probably a good job that the boots had been cheap, because the experience put me off outdoor shenanigans completely. After that whenever I went camping I went in the car and took a mattress.

I have not allowed my characters any such luxury, and they have been wallowing around in the sort of conditions that would make the Mountain Rescue wag their fingers and issue stern warnings. However it appears that in the planning stages I have seriously overestimated the length of time it would take somebody to get from the junction of the A66 to Carlisle, and now everybody is going to be turning up at places at the wrong times and missing each other, unless I give somebody a broken ankle, or something.

I suppose I could always pretend that my characters are as seriously fat, lazy and unfit as I am, except that does not add much to the appeal of a romantic hero, and so I think quite simply I shall have to have a bit of a rethink.

I have been puzzling over this issue ever since I arrived on the taxi rank, so it is a good job it has been quiet. I have drawn maps and plotted routes and thought hard and explained it to Mark. It is jolly complicated, writing a book. I am struggling to manage it even though I am only a taxi driver. How Tolkien managed to fit it in between lecturing in Old Icelandic and getting drunk in the Eagle and Child with C.S. Lewis I have got no idea at all.

What a good job it is so quiet.

I haven’t taken a picture today. Have a picture of me and Oliver on our holidays.