I am pleased to announce that once again I have my own computer. Any difficulties you might still have with reading the text are now entirely your own problems, and you can get new glasses in Boots these days even without a prescription.
It is a quiet Sunday evening on the taxi rank. I am not at all sorry about this, because last night became unexpectedly very thrilling shortly after midnight.
We had a massive, heavy deluge of rain. I got very wet indeed just by getting out of my car to borrow Mark’s card machine. The raindrops were enormous, fat and splashy, and coming down hard.
After about fifteen minutes of this, slowly the rain turned to snow.
The snowflakes were as large, and presumably as heavy, as the raindrops had been.
It was quite astonishing. Huge snowflakes, some of them easily an inch across, hurtled down, so densely that it became almost impossible to see enough to drive, and after a while they began to settle.
The gritting lorries had been out, but the heavy rain that had preceded the blizzard had washed all of the salt away.
In less than an hour the roads had started to be very exciting, a bit like the way the Pepsi Max in Blackpool is exciting, only without the encouraging Health & Safety certificate that says you will probably be all right when you get off at the other end.
My taxi does not have anything so reassuring, and it was not on a rail. It was being piloted by me, and suddenly it was skating about all over the place, twirling and sliding like an over-excited Hot Ice showgirl, just to go on with the Blackpool similes.
This is not the moment to give up and take your taxi home. This is the moment when every dopey girl who has come out into the December night wearing black and gold strapless underwear, high heeled sandals and no coat, suddenly realises how much she would like to go home in a taxi.
Secretly thinking that anybody who has been that stupid would be no loss to the gene pool is unkind and unworthy of me, and I should guard against such uncharitable musings.
This is the moment when they all forget that last week they argued about the price, called you some unrepeatable names, and had to root about in the bottom of their handbags to find £8.70 for a ten pounds fare.
This is a good moment to be a taxi driver.
That is to say, it is a good moment to be a reckless taxi driver. There are a lot of hills here, and when they are all covered with a couple of inches of snow laid over a freezing glass waterfall, you have got to be determined. You have got to get a good run and hold your foot down and steer into the skids.
I skidded past two car loads of stranded bouncers and one police van on my way up the steepest of the hills. I did not think that I would make it, but I did, and my customers in the back, who were frightened that they would be stranded in their underwear fifteen miles from home, whooped and cheered with relief. They were so pleased that when we actually got there, they managed to raise enough money between them to pay the entire fare.
I got everybody home. Mark went out to Cartmel Fell, which is a bleak mountainside at the bottom end of the lake, and rang me on his way back down to tell me that he had no idea at all where he was. The whirling snow against the iron dark made it almost impossible to see past the end of the bonnet, still less see what he might be sliding into, and the road was too steep for him to be able to drive back again if it had all gone wrong,
We have been doing this for too long to be truly worried, but it can be challenging at times, and we were not sorry to get home. There are some nights, and last night was one, when this is by no means a foregone conclusion.
It was rather splendid to come into our warm house out of the snow and look at our kitchen-free living room, our Christmas tree, and our tall log pile. It is entirely atavistic to think smugly about one’s fridge full of food, because this is the Lake District, not the Mongolian Steppes, and Sainsbury’s is not likely to empty out at any time soon.
All the same, I felt very pleased with us.
It is a satisfyingly wealthy feeling.
