We didn’t get around to building the wall at the farm today either.
Instead, it has been a day of so much dashing about that for once I am relieved to be at work.
It was the day for the quiet demise of Mark’s old taxi and the introduction of the new.
This is not an instantly straightforward process, and involves some carefully considered organising.
It would have helped if I had started on the organising process a bit sooner, but life is full of things far more interesting than registration documents, and so I hadn’t. In consequence of this oversight I had to get out of bed this morning and go to Lakeside’s taxi office to plead with them to try and remember where they had left the paperwork.
We have had the car for ages and even paid for some of it, but so far we have failed to collect any documents. These are useful things to have when you purchase a car.
Once appropriately equipped with documents, I rang the insurance company and explained that we would like to change the insurance from the old car to the new. This was arranged for the magical hour of four o’ clock, and cost me twenty five quid.
After that we had got to dash over to the farm, where Roger Radio was coming to meet us. He was going to take the taxi meter out of the old car and fit it into the new. My meter needed altering as well, so we both had to be there.
Roger had originally intended to come and do this on Tuesday, but was prevented by a terrible hangover, communicated to me in an intoxicated text very, very late on Monday night. As it turned out, this didn’t matter, because we didn’t have any money on Tuesday anyway, so all was well that ended well.
We left Lucy in charge of feeding Oliver and Harry and doing the housework. There was a lot of housework, because the washing needed to be pegged out, and there was a massive stack of pots. I felt a bit guilty about sloping off, but only a bit.
We like Roger Radio, he is far more cheerful than anybody should be who spends their entire life dealing with taxi drivers. You are not allowed to set your own taxi meter, for obvious reasons. Roger is an Approved Person and comes and does that sort of thing. He looks forward enthusiastically to tariff increases, which is mostly when we catch up with him and exchange gossip.
Once he had finished we had got to rush down to Lancaster with the old taxi to take it to the scrapyard before the insurance ran out.
The scrap car man in Lancaster is friends with Mark, who has always got sensible things to say about scrap metal. He even manages to nod and sniff politely at me. He is round, and covered in oil, and knows absolutely everything about cars that a person could possibly know. You can ring him up with the most stupid of questions about an alternator or a gasket or a heater or a fan or a flywheel for any car imaginable, and he will grunt and explain that they changed the pattern in ninety four, and is it before or after that, and if it’s after then you can use the one from a Fiat.
We sold him the dying taxi and came home. We discovered that in our absence Lucy had forcibly inserted Oliver into the shower and obliged him to apply the soap, because of going back to school.
I taxed the new taxi and Mark glued the wobbly wheel back on mine again. Then he went to work in the new taxi, and I set off for Yorkshire with Oliver.
Oliver has been developing a social conscience. He is burning with indignation at the practice, not uncommon in educational establishments, of placing the whole school in occasional detention for the misdemeanours of a naughty few.
Oliver has commenced a campaign to right this practice, and spent most of the journey practising the speech that he would make to the head of boarding on his return.
I like the head of boarding, who seems to me to be just a more whiskery version of the boys, with an enthusiasm for activities like corridor cricket that I admire hugely, how on earth he does it I shall never know.
Oliver is going to attempt to enlist his help in drafting a petition to request a change of policy.
I am very impressed, clearly a leading role in union politics is waiting for him when he grows up.
I expressed some doubt about the likelihood of his success, but he was undaunted. One thing was sure, he explained, if he didn’t do something then nothing at all would change.
I left him at school, where they were having a barbecue, and he bounced away full of determination to change the world into a better and fairer place.
I went to work.
