Holiday chocolates

Winter is upon us.

I am sitting in the taxi rank in one of the quietest nights in the history of being a taxi driver.

Everybody has gone home.

Obviously I mean ‘everybody except taxi drivers’. There are a lot of taxi drivers here.

Everybody who is not a taxi driver, and who has not gone home because they live here, has not gone to the pub. They have not gone anywhere, except probably to bed early.

We have been here for three and a half hours now, and I have made £3.70.

We are not going to go home, despite the absence of customers, because I have washed our sheets. This is an issue that needs to be taken into consideration when planning our day’s activities. It means that we can’t possibly feel that we have had enough of the day and would like an early night, because they are not dry yet. The house is festooned in pillowcases and towels, mostly dangling hopefully over the stove. I have been feeding bits of Christmas tree into the fire, which burns with a satisfyingly hot crackle, but by early evening when we came out to work they were still damp, so we might as well stay here.

The season of mists and taxi fruitlessness has thoroughly arrived.

I know that mis-quote is about autumn not winter, but this is my diary, and if I want to use out-of-season quotes I will.

It is a good idea to be out at work anyway, because of trying to earn some holiday pocket money. We are leaving tomorrow, probably at night.

It is bound to be at night, because there is not the smallest chance that we will be ready any sooner. Today has been a whirlwind of trying to get ourselves ready, which failed utterly, mostly because we did not get started until half past one in the afternoon, which was when we got up.

The picture shows Mark’s activities, or at least a small snapshot of them. He has been replacing bits of camper van taps which cracked in the frosts, but the picture shows one of the new headlights. We have had to order new headlights for it, because the old ones were rubbish. I mean really rubbish, the sort of rubbish where you can’t actually see where you are going, and made the MOT man make threatening ‘don’t ever bring it back like that again’ noises.

This does not make for relaxed driving.

We bought the new ones on eBay, but as is always the case with things for the camper van, everybody stopped making the old ones years and years ago. These are a new improved design, which means that they do not fit.

He has had to manufacture some new fittings for them. I suggested glue and string, which usually works quite well, but he has run out of glue and said that he does not want to risk a beautiful new headlight bouncing out and rolling off down some Scottish mountainside, so he has made some properly authentic fittings. He made a circle with some copper pipe and stuck some screw holes to it, and now the whole thing fits rather splendidly.

The problem is that instead of being a job which takes an hour, it has now taken him most of the day, not that there was much day anyway. He has not managed to get firewood or fix anything else on the camper van.

We are going to have to get up earlier tomorrow.

I have got to get up early anyway because I have got to go to Kendal to collect my new vests from Marks & Spencer. I am improbably excited about this.

I could have collected them today, but I did not have time. I was busy making things to take with us.

I made two sorts of biscuits, some mayonnaise and some chocolates. As you know, we made a huge pile of chocolates at Christmas. This is such a revolting sticky undertaking that by the time we have finished we do not at all want to eat any. Indeed, the whole idea of chocolate becomes quite repellent for a few weeks, or at least until I have cleaned the last splashes off the side of the cooker.

We know that this happens, because we make chocolates every year. I do not like having sticky hands, and the whole chocolate-manufacturing activity is punctuated by frantic dashes to the sink to scrub layers of sweet oily coating off my fingers. I hate this feeling, which makes Mark laugh.

The result of all this is that we do not eat the Christmas chocolates. We give them away.

This year I saved some of the fillings and some of the raw chocolate, and today I made some holiday chocolates for us.

There were only a few, so I did not feel as though my whole self was coated in sticky. It is a splendid thing to have done. We will not just be on holiday. We will be on holiday with chocolates and beautiful bright new headlights.

It is going to be lovely.