Flour

I am having a frustrating day.

I have neither saved up enough money for a new television, nor have I finished the painting.

I can hardly believe how quickly the day runs out before it is time to go to work. 

I thought that I would quickly make some biscuits and then get on with the painting.

Of course it did not work like that. Biscuit manufacture is a thoughtfully long-winded and sticky sort of process, with nuts and cherries to be chopped and, custard powder and flour to be weighed and mixed, butter and chocolate to be melted and spices to be carefully added.

The chocolate is one of the fiddly things, because it means you haven’t finished making biscuits even when they are out of the oven and cooling on the side. I made raspberry-and-cherry shortbread and almond tiffin  today, and they both require a thick layer of salty chocolate to be spread on to the top.

Well, obviously they don’t actually require it, but I imagine that we would all agree that they are far more satisfactory if it is there.

There is almost no point to biscuits that come without a substantial coating of chocolate. 

By the time I had washed up and tidied up, and faffed with the biscuits, and run outside to rescue the washing from the Weather Gods, and then lit the fire to dry it in the house, somehow there was hardly any day left at all.

I was quite determined not to be defeated, so I set my Magdalen Laundries story to play on the telephone whilst I painted a couple more blue stripes. This was a happy conclusion to the day. It was quite a smug feeling to be gainfully occupied whilst also being horrified about the things that benighted savages obviously thought were all right back in the nineteen seventies. 

I am very glad that we live now and that almost nobody is gripped by agonies of worrying about their sins, or what horrors they can inflict upon themselves by means of repentance. It seems a very unhappy way to carry on.

I had to give the painting-and-listening up quite quickly, because of raising the money for a television, or more probably, to pay for re-licensing my taxi at the end of next week. I would rather have a television, but I suppose the taxi will be more sensible.

I dashed off out to the taxi rank, where happily nobody wanted a taxi for ages, and I had plenty of time to drink my tea and gaze dreamily out over the lake. 

Our customers are all wearing masks now, even though they don’t have to until tomorrow. It is an odd sort of thing, because they don’t talk any more.

I am no great lover of conversations with taxi customers, and will pretend to be deaf to deter the more stupid ones, but I had not expected how peculiar I would find the silence.

People explain where they are going through the window before they get in. Then they put on their masks and sit in silence. Nobody wants to know if I have been busy, or what time I finish.

Nobody even asked if I live locally, to which I always reply that no, I am here on my holidays.

It is as if the mask has put a wall between us. 

I can’t really hear the occasional ones who do say things anyway, because the masks muffle their voices, and then they are drowned out by the sound of the engine.

I don’t know how I feel about this. I think it might be more of a loss than I had expected that it would be. 

Later I had a customer who was not wearing a mask and who told me that he was a supermarket manager.

I said that I was fed up with trailing all the way to Kendal to shop, only to find that they have run out of everything, and asked him to explain the empty shelves.

They are not going to be over any time soon, he told me wearily, because of factories socially distancing. This means that there are not so many people busily making things. Sometimes they even have to close down completely if some tiresome employee goes and gets a positive test.

I thought about this for a long while afterwards.

I have ordered a sack of flour on Amazon.

Have a picture of the Library Gardens this morning.