Monday night in the Lake District is the night when hotel staff go out, because unlike everywhere else in the known universe, in the Lake District, Tuesday is everybody’s day off.
This makes for a busy evening.
The early part of the night is barely worth doing, if you are a taxi driver, because nobody finishes work until ten at night, but after that the tourists have all buzzed off, and the streets belong to the intoxicated kitchen porters of the world.
We are busy then.
We are the busiest when everybody has been paid, which they hadn’t this week, and so some of them walked the ten minute distance to the nightclub, but there were several who were either incorrigibly lazy or wearing high heels, and so we were fully occupied from midnight onwards.
I have got a favourite hotel. The staff from there are an especially youthful and enthusiastic crowd who know how to have a good evening.
They have such good evenings that it would be a bad idea to accept an advance booking from them for the end of the night, as inevitably they will either have been arrested or had an upturn in their relationship fortunes in the meantime: but they are my regular customers. They all ring me when they are ready to go home and I follow their adventures with interest.
It is an expensive hotel. I had better not tell you which one it is.
The bar manager is my favourite. He is youthful and good looking and sometimes really has got to run away from pursuing females. I have rescued him when he has been sprinting along the road with females in hot pursuit. This sounds unlikely but is absolutely true, I promise you.
He got in my taxi last night with a pretty blonde. He had had a great deal to drink, and was contentedly sprawled across the back seat encouraging her to become physically involved with his undergarments.
“Do you like me?” she asked hopefully.
He is an open sort of chap, but misfortunately he was very drunk indeed.
“Well, I do,” he said, truthfully, “because you’re very pretty and I really want to do sex with you. The thing is that every time you talk I just can’t help noticing how irritating and boring you are. Apart from that you’re all right.”
When you are driving a taxi you are not supposed to eavesdrop but of course I was doing, and I had to try very hard indeed not to be observed snorting back laughter.
The awful thing was that she sighed happily and settled down back into his arms.
The next customer was his best friend, who is a breakfast chef and therefore should make more effort to get home earlier than he does. Sometimes he has got to stay up instead of going to bed in order to make sure that he actually makes it to the kitchen in time for kippers and bacon and eggs.
He did not have a girl with him. He told me a doleful story about the girl he had brought back in my taxi the week before. He had courteously explained to her that he did not do sex on a first date, and would just like to get to know her first, to make friends and find out about one another. He thought this was more respectful and gentlemanly.
The girl in question was very cross indeed and said that she had wasted the whole evening on him and if he wasn’t up for it she would leave him to it, and marched off grumpily.
The world is a different place from in my youth.
After that was a very pretty Polish waitress, who was glowing with happiness because after two years in the UK she was off home tomorrow, on her first visit for ages and ages.
She was beside herself with the joy of it, she missed her mother. There was no other family, just the two of them. Her mother missed her a great deal, and they spoke on the phone every day, pleased about the success she was making of her life in England, and she was thrilled at the prospect of seeing her again after so long.
“It is most wonderful,” she said happily. “Can I tell you a secret? I have told no-one and I am so excited. I am pregnant.”
I expressed congratulations, cautiously.
“Is wonderful,” she said again, happily. “I am nearly twenty two, so I am quite ready.”
There did not seem to be a boyfriend anywhere on the horizon. She did not seem to feel that this was a regrettable absence. She was simply pleased with her world.
I asked if she had told her mother.
“No, not yet,” she said, happily. “It will be the loveliest surprise for her when I get home.”
I hope very much that she was right.
The last customers of the night were going to the staff house, it was a Japanese girl who had left a week before.
I expressed surprise at seeing her.
“I am just here to visit,” she said, wistfully. “I thought it would be good to move on and try new things whilst I am here, but I miss everybody so much. It is so much fun to work here.”
The sun had risen by the time I got home, beautiful pink and gold skies.
I can’t take a picture of hotel staff behaving badly.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy.
