I have somehow managed to get myself so tired that by the end of the afternoon I was fighting off sleep on the taxi rank.
It was not that it had been a terribly busy day. Indeed, it had been much like most days, largely filled with laundry-based activities, cleaning up, and cooking. This does not sound like an awful lot, but I have to rush around to get it all finished and get out on to the taxi rank early.
I have been starting work in the middle of the afternoon at the moment, to make up for the lack of nightclub. This means that although the day’s activities start off at a leisurely sort of pace, walking the dogs and chatting to the Peppers, by three o’clock they have accelerated to a rolling-eyed frantic dash, like the 25:1 outsider in the Derby when all of the favourites have fallen.
I cooked a chicken to be eaten on sandwiches, or just in chunks by Oliver in starving growth-spurt moments. I made a curry, and I made a cheesecake, which I flavoured with the new blackcurrant jam. Then I washed everything up and tried to make the kitchen look like a picture in Country Life magazine so that it would be welcoming for Mark and Oliver coming home.
They would not have noticed what it looked like really. It was fine for my satisfaction alone.
Then I sloshed tea into a flask, chucked a couple of biscuits into my bag and belted off out to work.
I had not been there for very long at all before I realised that I was starting to nod off.
This was rather an alarming state of affairs, because it was not the middle of the night. I was not at the exciting alcohol-fuelled end of a long and busy shift. It was a sunny afternoon in the Lake District, filled with merry hikers tramping up and down the shoreline, and I looked as though I had overdone the sherry at lunchtime.
I drifted in and out of a doze for absolutely ages, whilst trying, probably not terribly successfully, to appear alert and occupied to the outside world. It is important to do this for the benefit of other taxi drivers, who are quite villainous enough to steal my turn if they think I am not paying attention. I know this because it is what I would do.
Also it is a good idea to deceive potential customers, who quite reasonably, prefer their driver to be awake.
I do not think I was terrifically successful. I dug a library book out of the boot and propped it open on my knee and turned my head away from the window, whilst trying to shield my eyes with my hand. In this less than ideally restful pose, I drifted into brief oblivion, until eventually I woke myself up with an loud, and completely unexpected, snore.
I looked around with a jump, but it must have been me, because there were no other taxi drivers anywhere to be seen, and no customers either. Certainly not snoring ones, usually they come much later and after a very great deal of beer.
I was pleased to discover that I had not been dribbling.
I thought that it might wake me up to write to you, reading having been beyond my abilities for the last couple of hours, but that did not work terribly well either. Even with my glasses on, the words blurred and swam across the screen.
I thought that maybe I would wait for one more customer, since I was at the front of the taxi queue, and then go home and collapse on the bed, just for an hour, so that I could get up and come back to work before Mark and Oliver came home. Nobody would ever know of my wicked idleness then, and it would be as if it had never been.
I am a bad person.
Of course after that, absolutely no customers turned up for ages. I even poured myself a large cup of tea, which is usually the number one first class way of attracting a customer.
I drank the tea, and stared at the book, and dozed.
Eventually a customer turned up who was going in exactly the wrong direction.
I took them and returned wearily to the taxi rank.
I yawned and stared vacantly at pages of books, watched the people strolling along the promenade, and longed to go home.
In the end of course Mark and Oliver turned up, which put an end to any possible shirk being discreet and undetectable.
I stayed on the taxi rank until I thought they had settled themselves in nicely, and then I went home to join them.
I realised then that I had not written to you.
I thought I would just tell you how tired I was and then go to bed.
I am really tired.
I am going to bed.
Have a picture of the dogs.
