Washout

I am the very happy owner of a new soap dispenser.

That is to say, it isn’t here yet, and it is a different colour, but it is the same. It will have the same smooth rounded feeling in my hand, and be silky to the touch, and have pretty roses on it.

I bought it on eBay this evening, and just to make it even more splendid, my cousin saw it as well and was watching the auction run with bated breath, just in case anything went wrong at the last minute. This was somehow reassuring, as though there is safety in numbers, even on eBay, although really if a soapdishless millionaire had had their eye on it and bounced in at the last minute, we would have been scuppered.

All the same it was nice that she was there.

I was not watching the auction because of not having any internet on the taxi rank. I was sitting in nail-biting ignorance, hoping and hoping that nobody else in the world was longing to purchase a floral-patterned soap dispenser, until somebody got in the taxi and wanted to be taken somewhere. After that the roads were so excitingly full of water that I forgot, because some of it got into my taxi engine.

It has rained today, after which it carried on raining, and then it rained harder. By tonight it was raining with a tropical-hurricane determination, except slightly cooler. Well, quite a lot cooler.

The water sloshing into the engine was so ghastly that it made me forget all about the soap dispenser, because the taxi stopped with a terrible clunk.

To my massive relief it restarted, but a few minutes later, after the customers had buzzed off, it did it again.

I rang Mark, who said that it had got water in it, and that I was to drive home, very, very slowly.

I was not in the least surprised that the taxi was having a small rebellion. Some of the puddles were so deep that the wheels were becoming superfluous to requirements, and I could very easily have just rowed the taxi home if only we lived at the bottom of the hill rather than the top.

Mark arrived home not long afterwards, and unscrewed something under the bonnet. I revved the engine, and a lot of water shot out, along with some horrid-smelling blue smoke, which filled the alley and lingered unpleasantly in the taxi. Then he plugged his little diagnostic machine in, and turned the troubling  flashing lights off which were shouting at me to STOP, and everything was all right again.

Lucy had gone home, so I was having little spurts of worry about her as well. I couldn’t ring her up to find out how she was getting on, because she is a police officer, and hence far too upstanding to answer the telephone even if she is driving through torrents of wateriness and feeling scared.

I worried for ages, but in the end recollected that if her car was swept away in a flash flood she would probably give me a ring and let me know, as long as it was legal to do so.

I do hope so, even if she was sitting on the roof of her car.

We had a busy day together. 

One of the things that she needed to do when she came home was bake cakes.

If you have been a naughty police officer you have to pay a fine by bringing a cake for every other police officer in the police station. How they all manage to keep passing their bleep tests I have got no idea, because some of them are quite naughty.

Last week Lucy lost her warrant card.

She found it again pretty quickly, but too late for other police officers not to notice, and she was obliged to pay a cake fine.

We spent today baking buns filled with brandy-saturated fruit.

We put some of them in a box for her to take for the other police officers, and poured some more brandy over the rest for all of us to eat when we were not at work.

I ate one at work tonight anyway. 

It was jolly nice.

Lucy rang in the end and said that she had got back in one piece. Also my car kept going for all the rest of the evening, so all was well that ended well.

I have attached a picture of her luggage. It is a very odd feeling when your teenage children’s detritus looks like this.

She is a real grown up now.