It is very late and we have been so busy that I have not had time to write a single word.
I have not drunk my tea nor read my book nor checked my emails.
The evening has been wonderfully, profitably busy, and I am actually relieved to stop for a few minutes.
Even better, we have good weather. The air is warm and still, and almost without exception our customers are cheerful and benevolent.
It is summertime, and it is wonderful.
We have had another day crammed full of summer. Our friends were still here this morning, and we started the day with scrambled eggs, cooked with garlic butter and parsley, on thick slabs of fresh bread.
They went for a look around Bowness after breakfast. We declined to join them in this expedition, since we know fairly well what Bowness looks like, although I am prepared to concede that it may look different in the sunshine with families strolling along the streets, to the way it looks in the black of night with drunks being sick in doorways.
We do not see Bowness during the day very often, and it always surprises me to see how very civilised and tranquil it is. Nobody is fighting or doing a wee where they shouldn’t. It is an entirely different place.
A girl came on to the taxi rank and did a wee there last week. She just pulled her trousers down and got on with it, after which she hitched them up again and trotted after her friends, whilst we all watched in some surprise.
I know that men wee in the streets all the time, and therefore in the interests of equality we should not be astonished when girls do it, but it always surprises me anyway.
Drink is a marvellous thing.
I do not think anybody can have behaved in quite so undignified a manner whilst my friends were in Bowness this afternoon, because they came back saying what a nice little village it was, and having bought some cream cakes, which we ate immediately.
In the end they had to leave, of course, which we were sorry about, because it is lovely to spend days loafing about, drinking cups of tea or glasses of wine, and telling people your important opinions about things. I always like the last part very much. I have got lots to say for myself, especially when I have been drinking.
Once they had gone we had got to go out, so we rushed about getting ready. It was Mark’s mother’s birthday, and there was a family party at a pub some distance away. It was a surprise party. We had not realised that bit, so it was a stroke of good fortune that we had not mentioned it when she came to see us the other day.
It would have been a much nicer party if we had not needed to go to work.
The people who make the rules for the transport industry are very keen on operatives being sober enough to find the key slot so that they can start their car.
This meant that we could not relax and put our feet on the table and expand into story-telling intoxication.
We had half a glass of wine each, by way of being sociable, right at the beginning of the party, so that it would have worn off before we went home. Even then a stoutish sort of farming chap, to whom I believe we may be distantly related by marriage somehow, frowned, and explained that Mark ought to be drinking beer, since he is not a girl.
Mark does not drink beer. He is allergic to something in it, and it makes him horribly sick.
He is far more tactful than I am. He smiled politely and explained that it was a taste he had acquired in France. Even the farming chap was cosmopolitan enough to know that they Do Things Differently In Foreign Parts, and just scowled a bit and drifted off.
It was a nice party, with a buffet with egg and cress sandwiches, and lots of people talking about haymaking and land rovers and how the neighbours’ roof had gone rotten and collapsed. I would have liked to have stayed a bit longer, especially if we had been able to drink too much.
Of course we couldn’t, and in the end we had got to go.
We went to work.
You know the rest.
I haven’t taken a photograph today, you will have to have one left over from yesterday. It is a nice one.
