I am in the improbable position of secretly rather hoping for rain.
This is not a usual state of affairs for a taxi driver on a bank holiday weekend.
In fact it won’t make very much difference whether it rains or not this weekend, since I am not hoping to go to the pub. Things are still very quiet here, and people are getting a bit anxious about it.
This is so much the case that this morning, when I mentioned that the weather forecast predicted rain for the whole of the week ahead, somebody actually said to us, in all seriousness, that we would be very gullible to believe it.
The weather forecast, they explained, was being tampered with by the government as a means of encouraging us to stay at home during the holiday period.
I was both intrigued and charmed by this conclusion, which certainly seems to indicate that trust in our current government is at an all time low, most especially since the chap in question is a perfectly rational and sensible individual who does not indulge in recreational drugs.
I have no idea if he is right, and am sharing the suggestion with you in order that we can all keep an eye on the discrepancies between the weather and the actual forecast.
I had never considered that our beloved leader might be throwing his weight about at the Met Office and applying government censorship to the weather forecasts. It is a peculiar concept and I will be very interested to see how it works out. For your information, we have been warned to expect heavy rain all next week, starting on Sunday night.
Watch this space.
This is not the reason that I am hoping for rain, although the hope has been a little tempered by the knowledge that my washing is still pegged on the line in the garden.
The reason is that, emboldened by my successful mechanical activities the other day, today I defended to branch out.
The windscreen wiper on my taxi has been flapping and scraping horribly. Mark ordered another from Autoparts, and it has been sitting on the bench in the garden ever since.
This morning I decided that I could be an Independent Woman, and I would fit it myself.
I looked carefully at the windscreen wiper, and thought that probably all I would need would be a small spanner, but when I came to it it was even less complicated than that.
There was a little clip on the wiper blade. I unclipped it and pulled it off. Then I shoved the new one in the slot and it clicked into place.
I did the same with the other one.
Readers, it was as simple as that.
All these years I have been admiring Mark because of his mechanical genius, and it turns out that it is the easiest thing in the world.
I was very pleased with myself.
There were some track rod ends on the bench as well, but I was not quite sure where to put those, so I left them there.
Ever since then I have been hoping for rain so that I can try them out, but so far without results.
This is the Lake District. It has got to happen soon. It can’t just be a flagrant piece of government propaganda.
I came out to work in great excitement, not only because of the windscreen wipers, but also because it is my very first night of my new radio.
Regular readers will almost certainly not recall that I bought this on eBay in a moment of self indulgence, in order that I could listen to stories whilst driving, instead of the tiresome BBC with their rascally unreliable weather forecasts.
Obviously I bought one for Mark as well.
This was last March. It was before the first imposition of house arrest.
It might have taken some time, but Mark has got round to it in the end. That is to say, he has done mine. Nobody is nagging him to fit his.
It took almost five minutes.
We will not go on and on about this.
Anyway, I now have a new radio. It is linked to my telephone and can tell stories. It is not linked to the radio aerial, and so the BBC are missing. It will also answer the phone whilst I am driving, although I am not yet very good at this, and I have had several old-lady moments reminiscent of trying to telephone my own grandparents, who had occasional difficulties working out which way up to hold the receiver.
LATER NOTE: Good news all round. It rained, but only a little and I got my washing in just in time. The windscreen wipers worked brilliantly, quite the best windscreen wipers have ever had. Also the radio is mostly working, except for radio, obviously.
I am going to go away and listen to a story.
Have a picture of Mark at work.
