Revelless

Under the circumstances I am not at my most joyful.

I am sitting, a trifle forlornly, on the taxi rank.

I am not even in my own taxi. I am in Mark’s taxi. I had to clean it before I got in it and it still smells of stale sandwiches and sawdust.

I went to work in my own taxi, and then halfway through Bowness, in the horrible sleeting rain, there was a dreadful bang, and an awful noise of dragging metal.

I stopped, somewhat embarrassingly, on the taxi rank.

Fortunately it was raining too much for any of the other drivers to get out and start making helpful comments.  

I had to ring Mark. This was not my finest hour either, because we had been having a minor domestic. He had promised to do all sorts of very helpful things with his special day off, and had not done any of them. I was feeling grumpy, and I did not wish to put my pride aside and humble myself into requesting a rescue.

I rang him anyway, because it occurred to me that if one of us was going to lie underneath a taxi in the pouring rain, I would prefer it not to be me.

It turned out that the awful noise was being caused by a broken spring, the sort that means you cannot drive the car forward because the spring then jams into the wheel and bursts the tyre. 

We have had this problem before. Both of us, at different times, have had to slope out collect a car in the wee small hours, when nobody is looking, and then reverse a couple of miles home. 

It is easier than you might think, although it is most sensible to wait until the police have buzzed off to do something else, preferably in Kendal.

This time Mark changed the wheel for an old one which would not matter, and then bashed the spring out of the way. After these modifications he drove it home in the normal way, and we will have to ring Autoparts on Monday.

It really does not matter. We are not earning anything anyway.

I have got his taxi and am sitting on the taxi rank. I have been sitting here for ages and ages and ages. It is Saturday night, but it is so quiet that some of the restaurants have not even bothered to open, and there is no Christmas revelry. I am not surprised about this. I do not think that there is very much to celebrate at the moment.

I did not listen to the Prime Minister this evening, because these days he just gives me a headache, and a sort of wearily cross feeling, but I discovered online afterwards that he has found a newly dreadful strain of bat flu. This is exactly the same as the old strain of bat flu but attacks when you are Christmas shopping.

I am getting very cross with this government. Suddenly we seem to have an awful lot of rules. It seems to be very easy to break rules even if you are just living a normal life. 

Also they do seem very keen on locking people up, maybe Boris was shut in the broom cupboard at home when he was a naughty toddler. Even chickens are not allowed out of doors any more, and what is worse, poultry farmers are allowed to lie on the egg packaging about what their chickens do in their spare time when they are not laying eggs. All that the time that you might be imagining that they are happily having dust baths and trying to hide in trees out of the rain, actually they could easily be locked miserably in dreadful poo-encrusted barns. 

I do not think that the government ought to be encouraging people to tell fibs. Somebody should shove Boris back in his broom cupboard until he is sorry.

Fortunately we had not planned anything exciting at Christmas anyway. Lucy is coming home, but she is allowed to because she lives with us, even though we have not yet finished painting her bedroom. I am feeling relieved about this, although desperately sorry for people whose exciting plans have all just been wiped away.

In keeping with putting a seasonal damper on things, yesterday I read that this very same government has considered the possibility of banning not only wet firewood, which does not burn anyway, but all wood burning, completely and for ever, although it seems that they have decided not to go ahead at the moment.

Imagine not being able to have a log fire at Christmas. Not just in your house, but anywhere at all, ever.

This is because some ingenious scientists have recently discovered that a wood burning stove creates small particles which are released into the atmosphere when the door is opened, polluting the air and making you cough if you breathe them in.

I wonder if they were given a grant for this ground-breaking observation.

Anybody who has ever wiped our kitchen dresser could have told them about that.

All the same, it is important to follow the science. I am glad that the government is keeping up with it.

I haven’t taken a picture. Have one of Scotland to remind us all of what we are missing now that it is illegal to visit. It is a View From A Bridge.