It is Saturday night and we are unexpectedly busy. Every time I pull on to the taxi rank somebody starts marching purposefully towards the taxi almost before I have had time to forage about under my seat for my flask of tea and bag of chocolate buttons.
We seem to have had an evening of saying all of the taxi driver things that you say in reply to stupid customer questions, like: “no, I don’t live here, I’m here on my holidays,” and “no, the taxi isn’t free. It’s going to cost you a lot of money,” and even: “No, I’m not a taxi. The car is the taxi. I am the taxi driver,” and my personal favourite, in response to the eternal query about whether or not we know where the Stag’s Head is: “yes, thanks.”
I do not know why we all behave like this. Fortunately public expectations of customer service are profoundly low from taxi drivers. I do not think I would do very well in an industry where I was supposed to smile and be charming. I try quite hard to avoid engagement with customers. If they are truly determined to talk to me I pretend to be deaf. They get fed up of shouting fairly quickly.
This is mostly because conversations with people who have been drinking all night tend not to be especially fascinating. Somebody in the back of my taxi this evening actually said that she didn’t think people really lived here, as if the Lake District were some sort of rural Disneyland, and we all take off our Peter Rabbit costumes at night and catch the bus to somewhere else.
All the same I am jolly glad that they are here, because of my extravagant spending habits. It is a relief to have a merry gush of tourist cash sloshing into our pot after the winter time trickle.
I have been doing more setting my house in order today. I have done the filling-the-cupboards bit, and now we have a pan of chilli and a tin full of biscuits and a tray of salty chocolate, blended with mango yoghurt. This last sounds surprising but it is splendid, I promise you. As well as these treasures we also have a plate stacked high with sausages. There were thirty of them, but Mark was hungry so there probably aren’t any more.
We did not do anything else to the conservatory. Mark cleaned the taxis out whilst I was cooking, and then we took everything off the dresser and washed it all. Mark polished the dresser with beeswax polish, which made the house smell lovely, and made me feel pleased with the world.
I am even more pleased with the world in this paragraph, because it is just after midnight and this is the first time I have stopped for long enough to write anything since just before seven. There has been a queue of customers on the taxi rank for practically the entire night, and they have had to wait long enough for them to start getting cross with one another, and some of them seemed to be about to have an actual fight when I drove off a little while ago. I am not yet a millionaire, but we will have made a jolly encouraging contribution towards the school uniform bill by the time the night is over.
I do not need to tell you what a magnificently cheering thing this is.
We have been so busy that I have not even had time to eat my picnic, and now it is half past three.
This has been brilliant. Not only am I going to be rich, I will be thin as well at this rate
It is the sort of night when driving a taxi is a jolly good job, I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do it.
Long may it continue.
It is a quarter past five now, and I have just finished. I am very tired now. I am not even going to edit this to make it sound more coherent and less like something that was interrupted fifty times during the writing. I am going to put it online quickly and go to bed.
Hurrah for driving a taxi.
I haven’t taken a picture. Have a picture of the dogs.
