I am on the taxi rank but I do not think that I will stay here for very long.
There is a limit to my pleasure in my own company, and this evening there are neither other drivers nor customers. There is just me, and my book, and now you.
I was late for work, in the end, having busily flapped about and forgotten what I was doing, and in any case got carried away chatting to the lodger, who has been to see me.
We are not in a Government-induced state of solitary confinement any more, so it is all right to tell you about it. It is now legal to have cups of tea with our friends, how benevolent Boris has become.
In fact it was really nice. I was supposed to be shifting books up the stairs out of Oliver’s bedroom into the loft. I did not at all want to do this, because there were a very lot of them.
I really do mean a lot, probably about three or four hundred, and they were heavy. I have now got a Kindle, and it is splendid in many ways, not least when one comes to carry it upstairs, but somehow it is not quite the same, and so we still have books as well. One cannot run a speculative eye along the shelves of a Kindle, wondering which title, exactly, might suit one’s mood of the evening.
Also it cannot match the excited jubilation of the beginning of the holidays, when the very first thing that must be done every time is a family visit to Waterstones. The entire holiday budget is immediately blown on a huge stack of books that somebody, probably Mark, is going to have to carry in his rucksack on the cycle ride along the promenade back to the camper van which has been abandoned, joyously, by the Tower.
I cannot imagine any happiness quite as intense as this, when after a day of doughnuts and swimming in the icy sea, and ambling along the pier, we descend into the companionable silence of new books, and probably a glass of wine, for an evening in the camper van. I am not sure that life has a greater contentment on offer.
Anyway, I had carried about half of them up the stairs when fortunately the lodger popped round, and so I was obliged to loaf about with a cup of tea instead.
I couldn’t ask the lodger to help because she has still only got one usable hand at the moment, and I would not have liked to make her feel uncomfortable about such disability.
Hence I was regretfully compelled to down tools and sit by the fireside, drinking tea instead. I thought it was my social duty. It would not have been at all fair to have obliged her to watch me exercising my able-bodied privilege. Instead, courteously, I thought, I did not even mention that I had an afternoon of breathless hard labour calling on my attention.
I thought perhaps that Mark might help me with the rest tomorrow.
Instead I made some biscuits and mayonnaise whilst we talked. This had the advantage of making me feel that I was being useful and productive whilst requiring almost no physical effort whatsoever. I did not even wash up. I just chucked everything in the dishwasher for later.
LATER NOTE: I ceased to write then, because somebody got in the taxi. I had been sitting in peaceful tranquillity for so long that I had forgotten about customers, and was so surprised that I almost jumped out of my trousers.
I had been there for almost three hours, and did not fancy coming back to sit behind the six other taxis who had materialised on the taxi rank in the meantime, so I gave up and went home, which is where I am now.
I have since wasted the evening drinking wine and chatting with Mark and Number One Son-In-Law, and although I am no wealthier, I am feeling very contented with the world, because we are now on holiday.
Tomorrow Mark is not working, and we might set off for Scotland and Oliver, if we finish all of our huge pile of waiting jobs in time. Probably we won’t, most likely it will be the morning after, but from this moment on we are free.
It is a splendid feeling.
Have a picture of a bit less snow.
