I am going to start off with a rant.
If you do not wish to be subject to cross grumblings, you had better skip the first few paragraphs.
I discovered this morning, to my complete lack of surprise, that apart from door supervisors, being bouncers in the common parlance, the group with the highest death rate from Bat Flu is, obviously, taxi drivers.
Higher than healthcare workers, higher than care home workers, higher than supermarket workers, higher than the police.
Admittedly this might be partly due to all taxi drivers spending their lives sitting about doing nothing much except smoking, and eating Haribos and reduced-price sandwiches from Tesco. All the same, we do not seem to be getting much public sympathy. Nobody seems to be clapping for taxi drivers, or offering generous payouts to the relatives of dead doormen.
I don’t imagine that anybody anywhere is making a special effort to provide taxi drivers with PPE, even though the cars in the towns and cities are still working. My understanding of the rules is that we are not even allowed to go to the drive-in testing. This is only available to more glorious careers, pursued by those who listened at school.
In fact, as far as I can see, the public interest in that statistic has been ‘none at all’.
Obviously it interests me. Taxi drivers are wide open to it. We knew when it first came in that we were right in the line of fire, and indeed, Cumbria has finished up with a huge incidence of bat flu, one of the worst in the country. If you know any taxi drivers, especially Cumbrian ones, stay away from us. We are almost certainly sozzled with disease.
Still less impressed by the advice issued by our beloved leader yesterday, being that everybody can now go where they like as long as they don’t do anything interesting or spend any money on non-essentials.
We are gloomily awaiting a weekend packed with thousands of cars, the supermarkets emptied, most especially of cans of cheap lager. There will be disease-ridden people everywhere, bank-holiday scale litter, and none of us able to make a penny out of it. Of course they will all come in their cars, because of the social distancing on public transport. They will be a total nuisance and then go home.
I have been feeling very irate and grumbly today, had you spotted that? Our tranquillity is about to be blown out of the water. We think that we had better do some panic-buying hoarding before the weekend, because once the ravening hoards arrive, there will be nothing left.
I have cheered myself up by painting our bedroom.
For the benefit of those who admire my taste in home ornamentation, I can tell you that it is striped. It is going to be green, pink and yellow, a bit like a circus tent, and I am very excited about it indeed.
Mark has not been helping. Last time I painted the bedroom I painted a horizontal stripe around it, and he insisted that I did it by marking it out with masking tape. As you probably know, this gives the stripe the wrong sort of edge, and I resisted strongly, but since he sleeps in there as well in the end his interference won, and I hated it for ever, and him for quite some time.
This time he thought perhaps he had better not interfere.
I have been doing the green stripes. You can see them in the picture. The pink behind it is going to be replaced by a less grubby pink. Actually it will be the same shade of pink, but watered down with some white. The green has also been watered down with white. I don’t know yet how much yellow we have got, so that might be quite pastel as well.
It is in its very earliest stages at the moment. More updates will follow.
We had to write a sonnet for Oliver’s homework tonight. I was newly-impressed with Shakespeare, who wrote dozens of the things. Oliver only had to write one, and it took three of us ages, all going: dah dah, dah dah, dah dah…no, that doesn’t scan, what rhymes with born? well, why can’t you say porn in a school poem? How about horn, no, just as bad…what rhymes with alone? did you know there is no rhyme for orange in the English language?
It took an hour and a couple of glasses of wine, I hope we get a Merit mark.
More pictures tomorrow.
