I have returned to the strange twilight existence of taxi driving.
Well, I haven’t actually driven anywhere, obviously, apart from down the hill to the taxi rank, but the principle is sound. I am here, and all I need to do is wait for a sufficiently long time and somebody will want to go somewhere, and hopefully give me some money.
I would be very pleased at that outcome.
I am not holding my breath, however.
The daytime taxi drivers all buzzed off home with hollow laughs long before the rank filled up with the night shift. It seems that the average wage today has been about sixty pence an hour.
It might get better tonight.
To my absolute joy, Mark took a day off today. This was not because he has suddenly become too idle to go to work, but because we had to go to see the doctor for our taxi medical.
I am pleased to tell you that we both passed, by the way, because the council do not demand particularly high standards of fitness from their drivers. These days the medical is no more demanding than: “Can you walk whilst scratching your head at the same time? It is all right if you have to stop and concentrate.”
It did not take very long, but nevertheless was a wallop out of the middle of the day which would have been tiresome if he had needed to come back from Barrow to do it.
Instead he stayed at home and made a mess.
I was pleased at the mess, because it meant that things were progressing.
We have taken Lucy’s bedroom apart.
This was because her bed had got the most awful collapsed mattress that you could expect to find anywhere in the civilised world. It was in the state that you might expect from a mattress that had been enthusiastically bounced on by two children and a dog for a number of years. When you sat on it you practically sank to the floor, and I do not think a single unbroken spring remained.
We had suggested to her that we might put a double bed in there, and she agreed that this would be a good idea. She said, devastatingly, that she was no longer a little girl, and that her bedroom requirements had changed.
Somewhere to dump your suitcase, plug your phone in to charge, change your contact lenses and sleep undisturbed until lunchtime seemed to be the thing.
We had to take her desk out to make room.
She does not need a huge desk space any longer, because she does not need to do homework or draw pictures of Japanese cartoon characters or write teenage poetry. An armchair with somewhere to put her feet up and watch a film on her laptop is better.
We have left a little bit of the desk, in the opposite corner, mostly because it will be a good place to dump a suitcase.
It is going to be very much better but it is still a little bit sad.
It all needs painting and cleaning.
We are going to bring the double bed down from the loft. This has been a guest space for ages, mostly empty because we do not have any guests, but when went up the other day I discovered that the wind has been blowing in under the eaves, and the room is liberally coated with fibre glass insulation dust.
It is utterly horrible, and I do not think that anybody should stay in there, even if we clean it up.
We are going to use it as storage space instead, and if anybody comes to visit they can stay in Lucy’s room, because Lucy is not in it very often now.
She is not a little girl any more.
We emptied the bedroom and made a huge mess, and then it was time to go to the doctor’s.
The waiting room has become one of the most cheerless places in Windermere.
There are fences and warning notices everywhere. You cannot stand near the reception desk, and indeed, the receptionist refused to open the glass window, even though we were eight feet away behind a fence, and spoke to us in sign language. I did not really mind that, taxi drivers do something similar when a drunk nuisance wants to get in.
All of the nice bits of a doctor’s waiting room have gone. The chairs were yards and yards apart, and there are no magazines any more, so I could not read about famous people having parties. I have never heard of anybody at these parties unless the Queen was there, but I like to look at them anyway. The parties look uncomfortably boring, but everybody at them is always very beautiful, so they are nice to see in photographs.
I would never dream of purchasing the magazines, and I am certainly never likely to be invited to one of the parties, so I am sorry about their absence from the doctor’s waiting room.
I don’t suppose anybody is having parties any more anyway.
LATER NOTE: It did get better, although not very much, and I am going home with enough money to purchase milk and cheese tomorrow, as long as I do not want very exciting cheese. The night has been horribly enlivened by the middle of Windermere, including our camper van, being cordoned off by the police, because of a dreadful accident.
Two people have been killed by a driver who hit them when they were crossing the road, and then drove away without stopping.
It is more awful than can be imagined. We think that the driver was probably drunk, otherwise they would probably have been brave enough to stop.
Also the train was delayed because somebody had chucked themselves underneath it.
Sometimes the world is just awash with little tragedies.
I am going to bed tonight with all of my family intact and robustly cheerful. They are all happy and managing their lives very well.
I do not think that anybody could ask for more.
The world is being good to us.
Have a picture of some dogs who could say the same.
