Today I did not go back to bed. I cleaned my grubby taxi out instead.
Actually I did go back to bed, but only for twenty minutes in the afternoon, when I got to the point when my eyes simply would not stay open any longer. I knew that it was all right to go back to bed then, because I was expecting the lodger to come round to visit. This would be better at waking me up than an alarm, because you cannot just put visitors on Snooze for another few minutes.
I have got to try harder to keep my taxi clean at the moment, because it is still daylight when I go to work, and customers can see if it is full of other people’s chip wrappers and cigarette ends and mobile telephones.
I had a nice adventure with a lost mobile phone today.
I found it in the back of the taxi last week, when we came back from our holiday. It had been lying there all by itself in the meantime with the battery slowly going flat.
I have got a drawer full of lost mobile phones, all locked with flat batteries, which makes it absolutely impossible to trace the owners, and so I just leave them there on the vague chance that one day somebody will hunt down our house on the Find My Phone page and demand their return. This has never happened yet.
This may be because the Find My Phone thing is absolutely rubbish. When Mark lost his we tried it and spent ages crossly trailing around a wet field full of cow poo in the pitch darkness, about three miles away from the place where the phone eventually turned up. The screen on my phone kept telling me that we were absolutely just next to it, but it was completely fibbing, because we weren’t. Also we were wet and our boots smelled horrible.
This phone, however, had the very useful feature that the last number to have called it showed up on the screen when I switched it on. Somebody had rung the phone nine times, and their number was displayed in full.
I rang them up.
Shortly after that the phone’s owner called me back, beside himself with happiness, explaining that he thought he might have lost the phone in a taxi in the Lake District at weekend.
I agreed that he might have done this.
I told him to send a stamped addressed envelope with plenty of padding and I would wrap the phone up and post it back to him.
This arrived this morning.
To my complete astonishment, also in the envelope was a cheque for fifty quid.
There was a little note expressing completely undeserved gratitude for my kindness.
I wrote put a note in with the phone that said “it was nothing and goodness me you shouldn’t have how very kind” and then put the cheque in the bank hastily, in case he changed his mind.
I like going to the bank anyway, especially when the manager is not there because she growls if things get too raucous when it is my friend behind the counter. They were surprised to see me because I have been there once this week already and pretended to be astonished that I had got enough money to come twice.
All in all it was quite a sociable sort of day. On the way back from the bank I spent ages chatting to one of our neighbours, the one with the thrillingly rascally adventures. It is always riveting to hear about the things that he has been up to. I am sure that such activities would make these pages more interesting, but all the same it makes me feel very relieved that I am sensibly married.
After that the lodger came round, and the afternoon passed so quickly that it was hardly any time at all before Mark came home and we realised that we were getting late for work. She dashed off, and I fed Mark. He has gone to his maths class and I am on the taxi rank.
The picture is the springtime getting into the swing of things. I took it in the Library Gardens this afternoon.
If you look carefully you can see the camper van in the background.
