It is 2019.

2018 sped past me in a blur of adventure, with occasional uneventful interludes of dusting and shopping and sitting on the taxi rank, which, as it happens, is where I am now.

It is still double time in a taxi, and so we are at work. 

It is very quiet today, especially after the colossal drunken bun-fight of last night. We talked to another taxi driver this afternoon, whilst wandering around the park with the dogs. She had started work this morning at much the time that we had finished, and described desperate youths, fiercely hungover and trying not to vomit, being collected from all over Kendal without the first idea of how they had got there, but frantic to get back to Windermere in time for work. 

She said that several of them were care assistants from different old people’s homes. If you have an elderly relative in one of these establishments today you might be prudent to pop round and check that they have got all of their clothes on the right way up. If ever I finish up in one myself I think the best policy would be to get so drunk myself on New Year’s Eve that I won’t care what happens the next morning.

We had a celebratory glass of wine when we got home last night. It was not much of a celebration, because it was wine out of a box that I had purchased whilst shopping in Asda on a tight budget, and was truly dreadful. Mark said that it was drinkable as long as you kept your tongue safely out of the way, and he was about right. 

The second glass was better.

We had celebrated the New Year by diving in at home to collect the children, and assembling all together at the side of the lake to watch the midnight fireworks. I like fireworks very much indeed, they have become so much more spectacular since my childhood. They are probably my most favourite part of Disneyland, and I am looking forward to the day when we manage to make them look as though they are magical dragons, the way Gandalf did in Tolkein’s book. 

We might have to go somewhere else to watch them when they do. Windermere is not always among the first to catch on to a new idea.

A large crowd had gathered on the pier, including all of the taxi drivers. We do this every year. Nobody is allowed to park on the pier at night except for taxis and the police, and it is handy on New Year’s Eve because we are in exactly the right place for the hundreds of customers who don’t fancy walking home in the middle of the night when the fireworks finish.

We hugged each other and took some dreadful photographs of ourselves, the best of which is attached to this page. Then 2018 was properly over, and 2019 had really begun. I hurried up the hill at top speed to dump the children somewhere near our house, and then dashed back to work.

We did not stop again until it was almost morning, which was when we did the glass-of-wine-and-collapse. I have been in my taxi for so many hours this Christmas that I think I am starting to get bedsores. 

It was lovely, though. We had done so very well that some of my worst financial worries have melted away like exploded fireworks in the dawn.

This has been the best possible start to the new year.

I spend a very great deal of my life thinking anxiously about not having enough money, and today, and at least until tomorrow, this is not a problem. We can pay all of our bills when the banks open in the morning.

It feels as though a big weight has dissolved away from my shoulders.

Of course it won’t last very long. It is January now, the very quietest time of the year, and next week we will be broke again: but that is next week and this is now. Today I can sit in my taxi with absolute ease and comfort, apart from the bedsores, because I know that everything I earn is a nice bonus, and has not already been gulped into the voracious maw of the school fees monster.

We might buy some drainpipe to put in Mark’s trench.

That would take us another step closer to having a splendid new conservatory.

What a brilliant start to a new year.