Frustrated

I am on the taxi rank feeling frustrated.

This is because I have got absolutely loads and loads to do at home, and instead of doing any of it, I am sitting here not doing anything at all. 

I would not mind if we were earning any money, but we have been here since before the Archers started, and so far I have not made a penny. Since I have had to drive down here, and have run the engine occasionally when I have started to get cold, in fact I am making a loss.

This is unspeakably tiresome, because I want to be at home doing useful and interesting things.

I can’t be at home. As taxi drivers invariably say to one another, you have to be in it to win it. This is obviously correct, but you can also be in it and come out with nothing but a cold nose and a carbon footprint that has gone up by a couple of sizes, which is what is happening to me at the moment. 

It is making me cross.

Of course I have had a whole day of doing useful and interesting things, but I ran out of day before I had finished them. I have washed sheets and made biscuits and made chocolates, and this morning I applied for another job.

I do not think that you need to hold your breath, readers. 

I saw the advert at the last minute. It was the closing date today, and it looked like such a splendid idea that I spent a couple of hours this morning trying to cobble together an application that would make me look appealing. This was not as easy as you might imagine. They wanted to know my complete employment history, which I couldn’t remember. I had to spend a long time engaged in the sort of deep thought process where you don’t realise that you are frowning deeply until after a while your forehead starts to hurt. I made lots of notes on a bit of paper and then crossed them out and made some more. It is twenty years since I last had any kind of job worthy of mention, and of those I have had, without exception my former employers are all either dead, bankrupt or disappeared. 

I had to  come up with some people who might write me a reference anyway, and even that wasn’t exactly easy, because they have got to be sensible, respectable and not related to you, which narrowed the list considerably, down to almost ‘nobody at all’, actually.

Fortunately there is always Elspeth, who broadly meets those criteria. I spoke to her this evening and told her that I had borrowed her name and address to stick on the bottom of a job application, and I could hear her rolling her eyes even over the telephone. Then she laughed. She laughed a lot.

This did not inspire me with confidence, readers.

I do not expect that I will be invited for interview, but if I am, it is a comfort to know that I will have some respectable blue boots to wear.

It is now the very middle of the night and I am writing this on my way to bed.

I got one solitary job from the taxi rank, and Mark suggested that I went home and got on with doing things. He said that he would stay on the taxi rank in order that we had a clear conscience about earning cash, and come home at bed time.

I said that I might feel guilty about doing things at home whilst he was stuck at work, and he said that I did not need to, because he was watching a good film on his computer which he did not expect would be interrupted very often. He thought that this might be a nicer way of spending the evening than going home and getting on with domestic chores.

It was after eleven when he came home, and he had been right about the film.

Readers, we are ten pounds wealthier.

I shall buy some sausages in the morning.

Have a picture of the lake. I know you have seen the lake before but it is the only picture I have got.