Another compulsory holiday coming up.
Would you think that I was an idle layabout if I were to tell you that secretly I am very pleased indeed?
I must confess that when career options were presented to us at school, ‘driving a taxi’ never made it on to my list at all. Indeed, as I recall, it was somewhere beneath ‘fairy princess’. In the event, as it has turned out, as career choices go I could have done a lot worse. I can start and stop working exactly when I like, or at least when I have made enough money for bread and milk and a tenner towards the gas bill. I never need to apologise to anybody for anything, or to listen to some self-important idiot droning on about how they have reviewed my performance and what they feel is exactly wrong with my work ethic. Also I meet the entrance criteria perfectly, which is, as you know, to have been sacked from everything else.
I spend my working hours either sitting next to the lake or alternatively driving around the Lake District, and if I don’t like a customer I can just stop and tell them to get out. I do this sometimes, if people have quite astonishingly unpleasant opinions or persist in wishing to discuss their sexual organs. This last happens less frequently now that I am older, although I do get the occasional crowd of young men who think that they are going to surprise me with their rascalliness. Indeed, I had one young gentleman who jumped out and ran away without paying, and when I pursued him back home and his father answered the door, we had a jolly laugh about the time when his father had done exactly the same thing, twenty years previously.
On the whole it is a fairly satisfactory way of earning a living, and by and large I am happy to get on with it. However, over the last few weeks it has been unspeakably dreary.
It is quite pleasant to earn a living driving a taxi, especially at the moment, when most people are friendly and courteous and have not got noses running from an excess of cocaine, or Jaeger-bomb vomit dripping off their trousers. The thing is that on the whole I am not earning a living. I am doing a lot of sitting about reading books and talking to other taxi drivers and writing to you.
I am very glad to stop this. It feels like a terrific waste of time to sit on a taxi rank for ages and ages, and then to come home and discover that I have made fourteen pounds and thirty pence, and worse, that everybody has paid with a twenty pound note and I do not have any change left.
In short, being at work is rubbish if you are not earning any money.
This evening Boris has decided that I do not have to bother any more.
I shall stay at home and mend things and clean things and paint things and feel contented with my world.
I am very pleased indeed.
Of course it won’t really be a holiday, because Mark will be back at work next week. He should have been back at work this week, but the yard and the shed had got into such an appalling state that in the end we decided that perhaps he ought to stay at home just to clear it all up, and he hasn’t finished yet.
He has been cutting up all of the firewood that has been stacked so deep against the shed that we could hardly get in and out of the yard any more. There were window frames and door frames and old fences and roof timbers, and about six fire doors that the builders opposite us had taken out of an old hotel.
Fire doors make absolutely brilliant firewood. They burn hot and slow.
We have got a huge double-layered stack of cut firewood stored in the yard now, underneath a new roof that he has made to keep it dry.
It all helps to save our money for the school fees.
I swept up the sawdust that Mark was walking in and out on his boots, and went to the Post Office to buy some more stamps, because the price goes up next week, you read it here first, and a new diary.
Not this sort of diary, obviously. A proper paper sort of diary, with a red cover, into which I will write all of our appointments, with my fountain pen.
The diary lives on my desk, and runs the house, because I have not really grasped the whole idea of planning your life on the telephone. I know that it ought to be easier and more efficient, but I really like having the week spread out in front of me every time I sit down at the desk. It means that I can see at a glance how long it is before I have got to start worrying about an MOT that is due, and I have got much more of an idea of planning ahead if I have got to turn so many pages to get there.
I keep all of our important information written in the back of it, like the code for Oliver’s Roblox and the password for the household internet network. I think that this is probably the most effective way of hiding it from computer hackers. You can’t steal our wi-fi passwords if you are sweltering in a cramped call centre in Nigeria. You have got to break into our house and go and hunt for them.
If you are thinking of breaking into our house you are probably pretty keen anyway, and good luck getting past the dogs.
I have just finished my evening on the taxi rank now, rather earlier than usual due to the long and tedious absence of customers, and I am going to start writing things into it.
A whole new red-bound year is sitting blankly on my desk, waiting for me to fill it with my future.
So far it says: Renew BT contract 27th May.
How exciting it promises to be.
Have a picture of some boring Lake District winteriness.
