It is very late, and very cold.
My taxi has not defrosted all day.
It is long after midnight. Mark has gone home and I am on the taxi rank by myself.
By myself apart from other taxi drivers, I mean. There are three of us, and we are ignoring one another. It is much easier to do that now that we can watch films on our telephones, privately in our taxis.
When I first started driving a taxi mobile phones had not been invented. When we got out to the distant fells we had to stop at phone boxes to find out what our next job was, and when we got back to the taxi rank we had to talk to one another.
I am not sure that this was necessarily a good thing. There are few things more dispiriting than being stuck for two hours on a taxi rank next to some brainless idiot whose conversational opener at ten in the morning is to want to know what you might have put on your sandwiches for later. Netflix is wonderful in comparison to the Good Old Days.
We all knew one another very well indeed when I first started driving a taxi. I learned very quickly who was most likely to rob me, which was everybody, who would ruthlessly spread interesting gossip about me no matter how painful or untrue, also everybody, and who would tell potential customers that I was diseased or out on bail or had a record number of accidents. That was everybody as well. It did not take me long to learn that my colleagues were a collection of the least scrupulous individuals still free to walk the streets, and not very much longer before I worked out how to fit right in.
We do not have nearly so much to do with one another these days. Most of my colleagues from those days got old, and I would like to say they have retired, but they didn’t . Mostly they died, right behind the wheel of the taxi, or at any rate, ten minutes after they had got out. Taxi drivers don’t retire.
I do not know most of the young taxi drivers at all. We talk far less than we used to. When I first started driving a taxi, it was considered shockingly bad manners not to wind your window down when somebody pulled into the space next to you. Now we all ignore one another and play games on our mobile phones.
I do not do this. I do not like game-playing at all. I read my book and the cyber-newspaper and write to you.
Tonight I have made the colossal mistake of reading a scary book.
I did not mean to do this. I do not like filling my head with anxiety-inducing rubbish. I thought when I picked it off the library shelf that it was an interesting if admittedly depressing story about the aftermath of a plane crash and its impact on people’s lives.
It has turned out to be an improbable account of alien invasion and ghostly demonic possession.
This was not only irritatingly uninteresting, it also had several spine-chillingly scary moments. I almost told you what they were, but there is no point in you being scared as well. Now I will find myself anxiously looking behind me when take the dogs around the Library Gardens later, in case any hollow-eyed scary creature lurks behind me.
This is so tiresome. First of all we do not have ghosts in the Library Gardens, and secondly even if we did, it is monumentally unlikely that I would have failed to notice them until the very moment when I had just put down a rubbish book dealing with drifting and wailing. It is a mistake to read this sort of drivel, and even worse to watch it, and I am cross with myself.
All the same, it is quite nice to be sitting quietly here. I have spent the whole day cleaning, and it is nice not to be doing anything much.
I have been washing inferno-stains from windows and furniture. It is nice to have it gone. A single swipe with a cloth on any mirror turned the cloth a horrible brown colour.
Mark was working, and the Mrs. Number Two Daughters had gone off on a long trek with their friend Jade and the dogs, up to Stickle Tarn and over the fells in the sunshine. I was vaguely envious, but would not dream of spending a day ambling about in the sunshine whilst Mark was labouring, and so stayed behind and wiped things until it was time to come to work.
I have not earned very much, but I have eaten a very large number of Quality Street sweets provided by the Mrs. Number Two Daughters, which was very thoughtful indeed and much appreciated. I can feel myself becoming portlier even as I write.
I think I will go and get a different book.
Have a picture of the aforementioned Mrs. Number Two Daughters.
