Today’s activities were dampened by not actually getting to bed until seven this morning.
This was because of two idiots who got into a fight, actually in my taxi, last night. The chap was travelling in the front and occupied himself during the journey by kneeling on the seat and trying to punch his girlfriend, who was shrieking abuse at him and travelling in the back.
This is irritating whilst you are driving, so I requested that they desist, which of course they ignored. In the end he was restrained by one of their friends, but it became a nasty, not to say messy, fight, during which the passenger door was kicked open and bent.
I am not especially interested in the dynamics of other people’s relationships, as a taxi driver and not a psychotherapist I do not consider myself qualified to intervene: and hence had little concern for their interaction with one another. However, they left kebab and chips all over the seat and a broken door, to say nothing of not having paid the fare, so I called the police.
The police turned up rather promptly, a lovely twelve year old copper whom I like very much, he is inclined to arrest people even though this causes paperwork. This is a superb quality in a policeman.
He chucked the nuisances in his van and swept them off the streets to the cells in Kendal police station, and we promised one another an assignation once the night’s business of drunken people was over and done with.
Thus at six this morning Mark and I were sitting in Windermere Police Station making a statement and surreptitiously checking out our customer base against the sheets of photographs on the walls. These were mugshots of known local nuisances who have been banned from everywhere. I would have liked a copy but it seemed impolite to ask.
We fell into bed at seven to be woken at ten by the day shift copper on the phone hoping cheerily that she hadn’t disturbed us.
It turned out that the nuisance had been tearful and sorry and agreed to pay, both for the damage and the neglected taxi fare. I was pleased about this, although Mark grumbled a great deal about the A frame on the car probably having been bent and that no amount of money would make up for the future tiresomenesses that this would cause.
We were awake then, so he took the car over to the farm to fix it with some bits from the poor sad donor taxi, instead of doing lovely things to the camper van.
I stayed at home and thought that I would do some cooking before I sewed some more curtains for the camper van. This was because Oliver and our lodger are both skeletally thin, and the unhealthy colour of spectral whitewash.
Every now and again I feel pangs of guilt about this. Today I made a large pan of tomato-and-cream soup, another of mashed allotment vegetables with butter, a large jar of lemon mayonnaise, and shoved a garlic chicken in the oven.
You would have had to have a palate of desiccated shoe leather to resist these. It was all intended to be easy to dollop in small portions into dishes and to be heated up in a little-and-often sort of way, because neither Oliver nor the lodger ever want to eat more than a teaspoonful of anything.
My own relationship with food is the exact inverse of this. One of the topics on which Mark and I wholeheartedly agree is that eating is one of life’s very nicest things. We like almost everything, but Oliver and our lodger do not. They both like things to have the minimum possible flavour, to be cooked to the texture of baby food, and preferably liberally sprinkled with sugar.
They are so alike in this that Oliver has come to trust the lodger’s judgement about food, and will try all manner of new things if she has deemed them acceptable. Hence the mashed vegetables, which he would have choked rather than swallowed a few weeks ago, but having been assured by his fellow anti-gourmet that they are all right, he has agreed to eat them.
By the time I had restored my conscience to health it was too late to do any sewing after all. Mark and the dogs turned up, and we went back to bed.
We set the alarm for teatime, but failed to hear it, and then had to scramble about because of being late for work.
I shall have another try tomorrow.
