Blancmange

I have got it.

This time I am not exaggerating for dramatically comical effect. I have got a cough, a temperature, and an aching chest. It hurts to breathe.

A tiresomely dramatic part of my being thinks that this is really quite exciting. I am On Trend, possibly for the first time in my life, I am in the first wave of fashion.

I do not think that I am likely to die. It is uncomfortable and dreary rather than agonising. I feel as though my head has had blancmange poured in through my ears, as if everything inside it is sloshing about a bit. When I turn my head to look at something it takes the blancmange a moment or two to catch up and settle down again.

I have taken some drugs which has subdued the temperature sufficiently for me to write to you, and when I have finished I am going to go to bed.

We woke up to a world in which everything predictable had disappeared. I was not feeling ill then, it started to happen at around lunchtime. We had worked last night, in a sort of hanging-about-on-the-taxi-rank sort of way, but when we came home we decided that we would not go back there again.

This was because the only customers we had, and are likely to have, are people who are ignoring the Government’s ban on pubs and clubs.

They are the indifferent, the alcoholics, the worst of our customer base. They are not people who are ever going to wash their hands, and probably don’t know the words to Happy Birthday To You anyway.

It was an evening of a very few, very drunk, rude and loutish oiks. One of them had had an accident in his trousers. He wanted to shake my hand when he got out, but I declined, and a wicked part of me wishes that I had now.

We talked about it when we got home, and thought that we did not want to sit there every night for months and earn nothing. There will always be a handful of customers whilst the pubs are open, but not nearly enough for us to live, and they will not be nice.

Mark and Ted talked this morning, and thought that they would be able to carry on for a while, so there will be some income from that. It will not be very much, but it will be a start.

In the event it does not matter for the next couple of weeks now, because we ought not to go anywhere.

We have got to go somewhere because we have got to collect Oliver from school in a couple of days.

We have decided that we will go in the camper van. We will wear gloves if we have got to use petrol pumps, but apart from that we will not get out.

We will get to school and telephone Oliver and he will have to come out to us. Then he can get into the Bat Flu Plague Ship, and we will drive away.

We went out today as well. We went to the field and loaded my taxi with firewood to keep us warm, and Mark’s with soil and muck for the self-sufficiency project in the conservatory. We might even need this now. We are planting seeds that we can plant out on the field later on. We will need this because we do not earn money any more.

It was dark and exhilarating, in an end-of-the-world sort of way. The skies were a grim slate-grey, and a chill wind howled. I found a rat’s nest in the stack of firewood, which Roger Poopy thought was wonderfully exciting, even though all of the rats had gone. This was horrible, and blew stinking ratty dust into my eyes, until Mark scooped it all out and threw it over the wall. I was glad the rats had gone. It would have been dreadful to have disturbed a mother rat and her babies, who did not ask to be born rats and to be loathed by everybody.

It is all peculiar and disorientating. We do not have to unload the taxis. We can use my taxi as a woodshed, because we are not going to be going anywhere. Even when we are not isolated we will not be driving taxis because there will not be anybody to take home.

My world has shifted and I do not know whether to be thrilled or despairing. Mark said that I could stay at home and write a book when he goes out to work for Ted, so maybe I will. Once the blancmange has gone.

We have never, ever had two weeks without driving taxis. We have driven taxis for longer than twenty years, and in all of that time if we have missed five or six weekends it is as many.

We might not drive taxis again for months.

It is very peculiar indeed.