Swim

It is Bank Holiday weekend, and actually quite astonishingly busy. I am not at all looking forward to trying to squeeze seven hundred words of deathless prose in between taking people with a bad leg to their hotel, which is only a little way around the corner…not far…it’s just the hill…

I have got a massive bag of sewing stuffed under my seat in the hope that I might manage to affix the legend IBBETSON to a stack of items of underclothing, but frankly, there is not a chance. With the benefit of hindsight it is entirely apparent that I was being ridiculously over-optimistic.

Of course it is brilliantly useful to be earning money, and has the happy satisfaction of having novelty value into the bargain, but I am having a little panic about the nameless thermal underwear.

Maybe I could do some sewing in bed after work.

I have not done any sewing today. I did the usual rushing about thing, making sure that everybody was fed and had clean clothes to wear, and my tiresome job of the day was to dry out my taxi.

One of the very last customers of the night, a Spanish gentleman who fortunately sat in the front seat, was wet through.

I did not notice until he got in and sat down, by which point it was too late.

He wanted to go to Sawrey, which is fifty quid at that time of night, and so I decided not to make a fuss about the wet.

Sawrey is on the other side of Windermere lake, just south of Hawkshead.

My customer was wet because he had decided to economise on the taxi fare and swim across.

It was the middle of the night, bitterly cold for the time of year, and you will not be at all surprised to learn that he was drunk.

He had set off to swim across, got about a hundred yards and fortunately, changed his mind, probably because he was frightened, and turned around.

He struggled to get back to the shore, in his heavy wet clothes and shoes.

He made it, obviously, since he was in my taxi. His phone was soaked, his wallet was soaked, and he was shivering.

Fortunately his wet bank card worked in the ATM, otherwise he would have been walking home, wet or not, and I would have regarded it as one of those probably-good-for-the-gene-pool things when I had read in the newspaper about a frozen corpse being found the next day.

I told him he was an idiot.

He was Spanish enough to be completely unabashed, and explained, probably completely untruthfully, that he was a good strong swimmer, but he had just not been able to find his way in the dark.

I did not feel inclined to change my opinion.

Twenty years of Spanish swimming pools does not exactly prepare you for the grim cold of Windermere, which is deep and unforgiving. There is nobody to help you at that time of night. He would have sunk unobserved into its dark abyss, and his body very probably never found.

I do not think he even knew how close he had come to death, because he was young and brainless and drunk.

From my point of view the upshot of it was that I had to dry my passenger seat with the hairdryer this afternoon.

I was not pleased about this, because it made me late for work. Actually I was already late for work. I became later when I remembered I needed to dry my seat out.

I have taken a photograph of a bag of underwear.

How very upmarket these pages have become.