I am having a difficult evening.
I am on the taxi rank in Mark’s taxi.
This is all wrong. Everything is in the wrong place and there is nowhere to put my glasses. The taxi meter is different and I keep pressing the wrong buttons when customers get in. The brakes are different and I keep jolting to a surprise lurching standstill. There are no peppermints in it, or a spare handkerchief, the radio is set to something which is playing irritating music, and I can’t find The Archers.
Worst of all, the heater doesn’t work.
It is freezing.
Mark has been going on about this heater not working for a while, but apart from making sympathetic noises I have ignored him, because it is never likely to be my problem to hunt out the right size of spanner to fix it. He doesn’t mind the cold very much after years of being a farmer, and so even though he has grumbled about it whilst he has been in his taxi, he has forgotten about it the second he has got out.
I am so cold that my nose hurts. The skies are clear and a bitter wind is scudding through the village in chill little gusts. The village is quiet, and I am by myself.
I don’t mind being by myself, because it is giving me time to write to you. All the same, I like life better when Mark is around to share the occasional cup of tea and grumble.
Mark is not at work, not in the driving a taxi sense. Obviously he is working, probably considerably harder than I am. He is at the farm fixing my taxi.
It all happened last night, when my last run was two intoxicated young gentlemen going to Langdale, which is a mountain valley on the other side of nowhere.
The journey out was fairly uneventful, excepting that my passengers were singing some songs so entirely obscene that even I felt my ears curling as I listened. In the end I got fed up, of the tunelessness as much as the lyrics, and explained that I was going to put some music on that we could all sing to. I happened to have Songs From Mary Poppins on my car stereo, so I switched it on and turned the volume up and sang along myself. After a few nonplussed moments my passengers joined in, after which the journey progressed happily.
I had deposited them somewhere near the place they thought they were probably going to, and was on my way back along the deserted remote roads when the taxi unexpectedly jumped out of fourth gear.
I thought at first I had not clicked it in properly, and tried again, only for the same thing to happen.
I was a million miles from anywhere that might count as civilisation, even by Lake District standards, and I had no telephone signal. I can tell you that after that I progressed very gingerly indeed. I changed into third gear, with some difficulty, and chugged home.
Of course the gearbox has given up. I had known that this was likely to happen because it has not been quite right for a while. There has been just an edge of reluctance as I changed gear, indicating a disinclination to carry on for very much longer. Since my taxi has done just short of two hundred and fifty thousand miles this is only tiresome, and not especially surprising.
I made it home without disaster, to my relief, and Mark said that it was a jolly good thing really because we still have a shed and a donor taxi. In two weeks we won’t have either, so it has been a complete blessing, how ghastly that would have been
Hence this morning when we got up I packed him up a flask and some chocolate, and he ate an enormous breakfast and buzzed off with the dogs.
It is evening now, and I am on the taxi rank. We have agreed that we will stop working when he has either replaced the gearbox or alternatively got too cold to carry on, whichever comes first. In the spirit of marital support I have cooked an enormous dinner so that when he gets home we will be able to eat hot food instead of just picnic.
He thinks it will probably be about eleven o’ clock. It is taking ages because of course he has got two gearboxes to take out, not just one. He has got to remove the donor one and the broken one before he can install the donor one. It is a long job.
I think I would rather be shivering on the taxi rank.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy.
