I have been making Christmas chocolates.
This job has been neglected for days and days. Usually I have not only made them, but posted them to people by now. This is because they are not really Christmas chocolates, but December chocolates, because some of us are now too old to have a Winnie-the-Pooh advent calendar bought for us in a last minute panic by a parent who has only just realised that it is December.
Therefore if anybody who is reading this has been rushing to the door mat behind the letter box every morning, only to be disappointed by the absence of peculiarly mis-shapen apple-and-grape flavoured chocolates, do not despair. They will be set and ready to post very soon.
At any rate, I hope they will. When I tried one just before I came to work it should have set, and it hadn’t. It was supposed to look like a beautiful smooth Christmas chocolate, and actually it looked a bit like a miniature version of one of Roger Poopy’s accidents.
In fact it was really very sticky indeed and I had to scrape it out of its paper case with a knife. Obviously I ate it anyway, and it was jolly good, but I might have to revise the recipe and have another go before I send them. It is not good to eat chocolates that make you want to surreptitiously wipe your hands on your trousers.
It is a messy job, and took ages to clean up, because there were chocolate smears all over everything, especially me. Number One Daughter rang whilst I was trying to scrape brown splatters off the work surface to tell me smugly that she had made her own chocolates ages ago, and that she was going to send us her dog as a Christmas guest. Sometimes it is hard to be a gracious parent.
Mark cleaned the taxis whilst I made the kitchen sticky. I have driven to York and back a couple of times in my taxi, and it was so salt-encrusted it was practically camouflaged against the road surface. It was so gritty to the touch that even the fingerprints on the boot did not reveal the paintwork, only the sub-layer of grit below.
He hoovered them and washed the dashboards and squirted the seats with the special perfume we bought for the purpose in Disneyland. This is the scent of the Disneyland Hotel, and it makes me feel happy even though I am actually in my taxi.
It is splendid to be in a clean taxi, it makes being at work feel lovely. If I didn’t have a million other things to do I would clean my taxi out every day, so that it gleamed and I could feel proud. Some of the drivers do actually do this, but they are all single men from Eastern Europe, and have not got anything else to occupy themselves. I did used to look after my taxis myself, but that was before I was married.
I am on the taxi rank now, and the night is looking promising. It is only nine o’ clock, and there has been one fight on the taxi rank already. I was reading my book, and so missed the best of it, because you get used to ignoring things like that after a while. I was once on Ambleside taxi rank with two other taxis when the police came dashing across and asked us which way they had gone.
Which way who had gone, we all wondered.
The three men with shotguns who have just done an armed robbery in the bank opposite, the police said, crossly.
Not one of us had noticed a thing, which is not surprising since presumably the robbers had a perfectly adequate getaway car and had shown no interest in getting a taxi.
Perhaps it is my own fault that my life is not more exciting.
