I do not think that I have ever, ever seen this many people in the Lake District before.
If you are thinking of coming here for some wandering lonely as a cloud, forget it. You would indeed be wandering as lonely as a cloud, because the clouds that usually turn up here are hunting in packs.
Everything is full. The pubs are full. The rubbish bins are full and overflowing into sticky heaps, surrounded by buzzing flies. The car parks are full. The roads are full. Not only is every parking space filled, but along the roads by the lake, the double yellow lines are full, presumably with cars whose owners thought that a thirty pounds fine would be a reasonable price to pay for a day’s parking.
Actually, not everything is full. At the petrol station most of the pumps are empty now, and the cash machines are empty, especially the ones closest to the pubs. It is important to keep an eye on these, because I do not want to be driving round in helpless circles at the end of the night with grumbling customers, frantically searching for one which might still have a tenner left.
We thought, with some horror on the taxi rank, how staggeringly, wonderfully fortunate we are to live here, and can just stroll out and breathe in the blossom-scented air every single day of our lives. How awful it must be if you could not even see the lake, never mind gather your children and dogs and go off to splash about in it, unless first you had driven for miles and miles in choking lines of crawling traffic, and then had to queue endlessly for everything, for parking and food and ice cream and drinks.
The queue for the ice cream shop snakes down the road for thirty yards. I am very glad I am the sort of person who makes my own.
Anyway, the point is that Bowness is absolutely bursting with people, and lots of them are getting in my taxi. We will be on the Forbes Rich List in next to no time if this carries on.
Hurrah.
The reason for all of this, of course, is the glorious, wonderful sunshine. Summer has arrived to the extent at which I have actually casted my clouts, even though it is a couple of days early.
I am not wearing my thermal vest nor my sheepskin boots. In fact I am wearing a lovely reddish-brown loose cotton dress, which caused some amusement in our house this morning when Lucy came downstairs wearing an identical dress.
We went together to take the dogs out to be emptied in the park, and Mark said that it was like being part of the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale, and all we needed was some hats.
Disappointingly I have not needed my lovely cashmere cardigan. I wore it last night, and even then I was almost too warm. I persisted anyway, because it felt so soft and lovely, but today I have just folded it up lovingly and put it in the boot. It has had to be wrapped up, because there is a comfortable dog bed in the boot so that people do not bring their tiresome muddy dogs into the taxi, and I have just had a large dribbly boxer dog in there. Fortunately my beautiful cardigan was well hidden, and is safe. If the evening becomes cool later on I will be able to wear it.
I do not know whether I would like to have the opportunity or not.
It is so busy that I have even had to put some fuel in my taxi. I used more last night than I have used in all of the last two weeks together. I had forgotten that keeping an eye on the fuel gauge is an important part of driving a taxi, and it was quite a shocking surprise to notice the red light coming in as I was driving home.
I am home now, and it is over. I stopped writing there, and did not get time to write any more for the entire night.
It has all been quite splendid. Not only are we now decidedly solvent again, but it is so nice to be out amongst other taxi drivers. I had forgotten that most of them are such rogues, and it was lovely. Months of being trapped at home, not really talking to people had left me starting to believe the stuff I read in the newspapers. I had started to imagine that people cared about social causes and not offending people and which colours of life might or might not matter.
Taxi drivers, I have recollected, are not beset by any such concerns. We like people to pay and not to be sick. Absolutely anything else is of supreme unimportance.
I do like being back at work.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy on his holidays.
