It has been a jolly full day.
I am on the taxi rank. Mark is not here because he is being divested of his mathematical ignorance in Kendal, so I have got the flask of tea all to myself. I quite like this and am not at all lonely.
I seem to have rushed about all day, which of course is my own fault for not getting up earlier. I did stir briefly at around half past eight, but decided that it was still the middle of the night, and closed my eyes again, sleepily. Of course this turned out to be the death knell for a day of gentle pottering.
When we finally surfaced I couldn’t even persuade Mark to help me, because he had got things of his own to do.
We are going to go away tonight when we have finished work, and he wanted to tiddle about doing electrical things to the camper van before we set off.
He has got some new batteries which he has pieced together. They are not for starting the engine but for running useful things like the lights and the DVD player inside the camper van. They are very powerful because I am no longer prepared to go camping without a hairdryer and a microwave. Note to adventurous young people, this will happen to you too one day.
He heaved the batteries into the wheelbarrow and trundled them round to the camper van. I called round to see how he was getting along later, and found him sitting on the pavement looking frustrated.
The batteries have had to be fitted through the locker in the back of the van, and he had got to sit on the pavement to do it.
He discovered then that the van has turned into a tourist attraction.
People kept stopping to take photographs and to ask him questions. These were not just occasional passers by but included a coach load of Japanese tourists.
He had not got much done, and said that he is going to move it somewhere else next time.
I left him being resigned and polite to people and rushed off.
I had got to go to Kendal. Oliver is obliged to remove the SIM card from his mobile phone when he is at school, and has lost it. I rang Vodafone for a replacement, and they explained that they could indeed send me a new one. This would cost me twelve quid. Alternatively I could go to the Vodafone shop in Kendal and they would give me one for nothing.
We are on a tight budget.
I went to Kendal.
I was just pulling into the car park when the phone rang. It turned out to be the council, who wanted to talk about taxi ranks outside nightclubs.
I parked the car and went to the council offices.
The nice chap from the council explained that he was sorry that the council had not attended any of the meetings so far, but that he had taken over handling the issue and had every intention of becoming keenly involved.
This is always a bit troubling. We have grown used to having licensing officers who think that relaxed and flexible is the way to approach the job. It means we can just get on with things without having to worry about them too much.
He said that he had been to look at the place where there should be a taxi rank but isn’t. He agrees that there should be a taxi rank and will try and arrange one as soon as practically possible, which will take a while because of the different departments involved, but will probably be at least before we all retire.
I expressed gratitude on behalf of taxi drivers.
He said that the putative taxi rank is going to be in a different place to the one we have not got but are pretending to have at the moment.
My heart sank at the prospect of trying to persuade everybody to move again. It has already involved a lot of explaining and cajoling and bullying of sulky taxi drivers to persuade them to go and sit on the other side of the road to the drunk people, and not to argue with the man in the burger van, and to take fair turns and not cheat.
I said that he would have to write to everybody.
This is never a perfect solution because not all taxi drivers can read. I know one or two who can only do local journeys because they can’t read the signs to go anywhere else. Also there are a few who are from other countries and my experience of official letters in a foreign language is that they tend to be completely incomprehensible no matter how keen you are.
Most communications from the licensing department tend to be pretty incomprehensible anyway, and I have read at least one letter which I knew was actually intended to be utterly beyond understanding.
I admired that one very much, its author had done a superb job of sounding so concerned and official that the reader would completely fail to notice that actually it was expressing an intention to do nothing whatsoever. It was a work of genius, and I wish I had kept it.
I promised I would talk to everybody and tell them to send their ideas to him in the office rather than just complaining loudly on the taxi rank. We both knew that they wouldn’t.
Afterwards I went to TK Maxx, by way of recovery, to buy socks for Mark and Oliver. They had such nice socks that I bought some for me and Lucy as well.
After that I went to Elspeth’s house to collect some DVDs of a television series called Doctor Who for Oliver. He likes Doctor Who very much, because he sees it at school, but is hampered in this passion by the absence of television in our house.
I do not know much about Doctor Who. The last time I watched it he had very curly hair and an irritatingly long scarf. I know that he has changed since, a bit like James Bond, and that one day he will turn into a girl because of pressure from political correctness, but beyond that I am ignorant.
Elspeth was having a clear out, and donated dozens of DVDs, which was brilliant, and also some DVDs of a series that I am hoping one day to catch up with properly, called A Game Of Thrones. I am going to need a winter in which we have at least a week of really heavy snowfall in order to accomplish this. There is something about heavy snow which makes it all right to do nothing whatsoever.
In the end I rushed back home to catch Mark before he went to be educated, and to pack the camper van before I went to work.
We are going to have a shower and set off when we have finished working tonight, and I am looking forward to it very much indeed. It is nice to sit here at work hugging the secret knowledge that in a few hours I will have flown away and be free.
This seems to have been a very long entry, you can tell that Mark isn’t here.
I am going to go and read my book.
