Another tranquil night on the taxi rank.
Obviously we are not expecting to make even the smallest of fortunes on a Wednesday night in the middle of December, and so we are not feeling concerned or disappointed by this turn of events.
Indeed, I am appreciating the uninterrupted peace and quiet. We have had a busy day, and it is nice to come to work for a rest.
More tea, and tonight, excitingly, it is accompanied by mince pies.
I have been baking.
Mince pies are an almighty faff.
They really are.
I made the mincemeat ages ago, but it needs the cloves and the nutmegs and the cinnamon sticks picking out before it is used. This is sticky, and there is always the possibility of missing one.
If you come to visit, bite into the mince pies with care. There may still be the danger of a rogue nutmeg.
Anyway, today I made mince pies.
One short sentence to tell you about a massive amount of backache-inducing messing about.
It took hours and hours of rolling and cutting and grating fat and dabbing with milk and forgetting to set the timer for the oven.
I had had enough by the end.
I can confess here that I threw the last of the pastry away. It had already been used, but could have been stuck back together to make more pies, and I did not do it. It sat lumpily on the work surface, looking unpromising and lardy, and suddenly I hated it.
I shoved it in the back of the stove and sighed with relief.
This was horribly wasteful and it will serve me right if we run out of mince pies just before some important event.
I don’t care.
The whole project was prompted when I got up this morning with the sudden improbable worry that the prison service might summon me back at any moment.
As you know, technically I am still in the employment of the prison service, but have been asked to stay out of the way of any prisons whilst they wonder what they ought to do about me next, and whether or not any amount of training will be enough to make me employable.
I am sure that you, the reader, has answered this question privately, to your own satisfaction, already.
Anyway, I woke up this morning suffused with anxiety that at any moment the telephone could ring, and that I could be summoned back to HMP Slade at a moment’s notice.
I like the idea of working in the prison service very much, but at the moment the prospect fills me with horror.
I really don’t want to go back at the moment.
This is because the prison service will have nothing useful that I can do. I have missed the course that I should have been attending, can’t go and do anything much in a prison without it, and would finish up sitting in the office, helping with paperwork.
I can’t think of anything more dreadful.
Whatever my career ambitions have been during the course of my life, working in an office has never been a part of them. I did it once, briefly, in my teens, and was so monumentally rubbish that I was discharged with some relief as soon as the holidays were over.
Filling in forms and adding up columns of numbers are not included amongst my strong points. Worse, I am rendered totally unsuitable by a low boredom threshold and an overdeveloped sense of humour.
I hope HMP Slade does not decide that putting me in the office would be a good idea.
The problem is that I have got lots and lots of interesting things to do at home at this time of year and now that I am not at work I am doing them with enthusiasm. The thought of having to stop doing them and spend my days sitting uselessly in an office is very depressing indeed.
It dawned on me this morning that if I were to be obliged to go back to work I would have to leave lots of Christmas preparations incomplete, and worse, could quite easily be asked to work over Christmas itself.
I decided that I would get everything important done as quickly as I possibly could, just in case.
Hence I have made seven dozen mince pies.
I won’t mind so much now even if HMP Slade does request my attendance. I can go with a clear conscience.
I haven’t made a Christmas cake yet, but nobody in our house really eats that anyway.
Mark has been insulating the loft, popping downstairs every now and again to sample mince pies. He has eaten nearly a dozen already.
Of course the loft was actually insulated anyway, mostly, but the person who did this years and years ago completely omitted to bother about the bit where the roof meets the wall. There was a whole long strip along the sides of the house which was innocent of any kind of protection and through which the drafts were reminiscent of houses in the nineteen seventies.
We have been wanting to do this for ages, and today Mark did it.
Anything to do with insulation is the vilest of vile jobs. It is dreadful stuff. We have been putting it off and tolerating the icy draft down the stairs.
It is done now, nicely in time for Christmas.
It has been a jolly busy day.
