There are piles and piles of post-holiday washing, and it is raining.
I have pegged some underneath the demi-roof in the new conservatory, and draped the rest all over the house. All of it is hanging limply and failing to dry.
I could light the fire but it is too hot.
If some of it does not dry tonight we will be walking about in the nude tomorrow. This will not matter for Oliver, who lives in his dressing gown and underpants anyway, but we were hoping to get on with the conservatory construction even despite the rain. We do not wish to invite ridicule from the neighbours and even slightly-too-small shorts offer some small protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous construction mishaps.
We have looked on the weather forecast pages, and it is going to rain for the next two weeks, we are going to have to blow on the washing ourselves. This is predictable for August, but sad anyway. Oliver is hoping for one of his friends to come and stay, so we will want to go and have adventures, and we will not want to go swimming in the lakes if they are not warm. I do not much like swimming in the lakes unless they are very warm indeed, actually, preferably after about a month of eighty degree sunshine. I will have to cover myself in goose fat, which used to happen to my grandfather every winter.
We did not get up very early, and when we did we seemed to spend ages setting our lives back to normal after our holiday. I wrote some letters and faffed about with my current project, which is compiling a list of email addresses for all of Oliver’s class at school. They have all had a school address up until now, which of course has gone, and I volunteered to chase parents into providing new ones.
This is proving difficult because half of them seem to be sailing around the Med on their yachts without phone signal. It has taken several weeks, but I am down to the last three now. This is pleasing, although if the rest of them are anything like Oliver they will never, ever bother to write to one another. They all seem to live inside Oliver’s computer anyway.
In the end I abandoned it to get ready for work. There is never much time for doing anything on Saturdays, it is always a bit of an ineffectual scramble, although you might be impressed to hear that over the course of the last couple of days I have sewn the first twenty seven name labels on his uniform. I am impressed with myself about this, which I have got to be, because nobody else anywhere will ever admire it.
We sat on the taxi rank and drank tea, which is where I am now. This has been a bit disjointed because we have been quite busy, and I have not been able to write very much without being interrupted.
There seem to be a lot of muppets visiting Bowness this evening. Anybody who announces on their CV or their audition for Miss World or their careers advice interview, that they ‘like meeting people’ ought to be obliged to drive a taxi for a while.
A girl has just run down the road past me, screaming, in the most colourful language, the request for everybody, by which I presume she means the other drunk drugged people, to go away and leave her alone.
She overturned a rubbish bin in her flight.
Sometimes I know exactly how she feels.
Obviously I don’t want everybody to leave me alone, because I am a taxi driver and if people don’t get in my taxi then I won’t make any money. All the same it would be good if they would get in and just sit very quietly until it was time to get out. Not dropping kebab and chips all over the back seat would be good as well.
I have just had a couple having the most savage argument in the back, the sort where people say the most cruel things to one another. Then the girl, who was very drunk and not wearing a seatbelt, slid off the seat when we went round a corner, after which they both turned and started to shout at me.
I did not take this meekly. I explained that after having listened to their entire argument I thought they were both excessively unpleasant, and that I preferred bad-tempered people not to take their mean-spiritedness out on me. They were getting out then, and they flung a tenner at me and told me to keep the change, so I added, haughtily, that I did not want a tip from obnoxious vulgar people like them.
They refused to take it back and got out in an awful temper, which I considered to be a win all round really, since it left me in possession both of the cash and my dignity.
It all helps to fund the school fees.
Have some pictures of the holiday that we are not having any more.
