It is a wet night on the taxi rank.
Not a creature is stirring, not even a kitchen porter on a night off. It is very, very quiet.
I do not mind this because of having plenty to keep me occupied. I have read my online newspaper, and had a quiet worry about politics. I do wish that they would get the election over and done with so that we can go back to all the boring things we complain about. I would be very glad just to have normal things for which to blame politicians again, like potholes in the road or the library being closed on Monday afternoons. I do not in the least like all of this anxiety about whether or not we are going to run out of medicines, close all our schools, sell British Steel and become a third world country if we, the electorate, make the Wrong Decision at the ballot box in December.
Perhaps I ought not to read the newspaper. It only makes me anxious.
I have not spent the whole day being anxious. Number Two Daughter arrives tomorrow, and I have been trying to fill the fridge with cooked things. I am always astonished at the amount of time that this occupies. It should not take all afternoon to make chocolate biscuits and mayonnaise, but it does.
Obviously it does not. There are lots of other little side activities going on at the same time, like hanging up washing and emptying teabags. I like having our own refillable teabags very much, but it is a lot of tiddling about. Also washing has become a bit of a nuisance. I have had to take the drying rack down because it is coated in a layer of oily soot. I have washed it but it needs painting really. Obviously I did not get around to this. I got the paint out and a paintbrush and then it was all just too difficult, so I didn’t do it.
Hence there is washing draped about in odd places all over the house. There are shirts hanging from the bannisters and knickers dangling off the bookcase. I was hoping that we would not have any visitors to notice this, because it does make us look a bit eccentric, but of course we did. I got soaked to the skin whilst emptying the dogs this morning, but kept my clothes on to dry on me, because there was nowhere to hang them up, and it was another thing that just became too difficult.
I ought not to mind this. Oliver is having a week of lessons in Seamanship this week, instead of things like History and Latin. He is not sitting in a nice warm classroom but out in the lashing rain and gales, stowing the bowlines, or whatever sailors do.
I do hope he has remembered his thermal underwear.
I stopped writing there in order to have a little snooze, and was woken up by Mark hopping in at midnight to tell me that he was going home and to make sure that I was only asleep and not dead from exhaust fumes or anything.
He has gone now. He has had to finish early because he has got to get up for work in the morning. This is always a bit rubbish because of course I get up with him to make sandwiches and tea so that he is not hungry and cold at work.The theory is that I will go back to bed once he has gone, but of course I never do. I should do really because I get terribly cross and grumpy when I have not had enough sleep.
It is still very quiet. I have done two jobs. I have put some fuel in the car and so I have still got to make a bit more before I manage to scrape my way back up to a total take of zero. I did not miss anything whilst I was asleep. Mark was in the car next to me the whole time.
I am going to go and snooze outside the nightclub.
Have a picture of the footpath slowly becoming a stream on my walk.
