Once again I have been left in charge of the taxi phone.
I am not having a nice time. It keeps ringing and people keep wanting taxis.
I am not equipped to provide this. For a start there is no sign of Trevor, and Mark is still at work. There is just me, and my lack of customer service abilities.
Customers are a complete nuisance. They keep wanting a taxi in half an hour’s time, which means that I have got to remember them for a whole half hour, and worse, not get distracted into doing something else in the meantime. How terribly frustrating, when I have taken a booking for some piddling little job taking somebody with a bad leg just round the corner, to have to turn down thirty quid to go to Hawkshead.
I am fed up with it already. I have not told anybody to buzz off, but when one customer asked if I was in Australia, I agreed that I was, and he hung up. I was pleased about that. He sounded mental.
I usually come to work for a rest and a bit of peace and quiet, this is a bit too exciting for words. I have got a pile of mending that I was hoping to do, and haven’t, and I am just at a good bit in my book, and I have hardly had any time at all to write to you.
I am being helped out occasionally by the booking chap from Ace Taxis, who is himself a taxi driver when he is not recovering from an operation, and who is amused at my incompetence. I do not know, for instance, what possessed me to take a booking to collect nine people when I know perfectly well that there is just me, and I have only got four seats.
Trevor has just turned up. I have just called him and palmed a load of bookings off on him. I had to shout. I hope he had his hearing aid in.
It has not even been a tranquil day. When I went to the butcher’s this morning he told me that they can’t get meat at the moment, because everybody at the wholesaler is self-isolating and it has had to shut.
This is the most ghastly nuisance. A friend of ours is self-isolating because he was in the same room as some idiot who went for a bat flu test and failed. He is supposed to stay shut in his bedroom by himself for two weeks.
I am longing to go out and do things, but quite frankly, I don’t dare. Two weeks of compulsory unemployment in solitary confinement is a very high price to pay for a dinner out. I might even have to pay it if I was foolish enough to pay a visit to the library.
I think that Matt Hancock ought to be made to do it as well, who knows what insanitary bacteria he might have picked up during his activities over the last few months.
I do not understand how he plucked up the nerve to put his mouth right next to hers like that. I do not mean because he is ugly, although obviously that is always a consideration. I don’t know which was more of a surprise, the discovery that he is not as frightened of bat flu as he has been telling us that we should be, or the fact that somebody had found him attractive enough to marry him in the first place.
I mean because he has spent weeks and weeks telling everybody that it is too dangerous even to breathe in the same shop as somebody else without first putting a bag on your head. He has absolutely assured a terrified nation that the risk of catching a germ is so terrible that it doesn’t matter if somebody is dying. It is too perilous even to hold their hand and whisper a last farewell. I know lots of people who have listened to him and have been too frightened even to hug their own families.
He must be very brave, under those circumstances, to apply what I think must have been mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to one of his staff.
I suppose it doesn’t matter that much. The august Daily Telegraph tells me that ministers are in any case on a VIP scheme which means that they don’t need to self-isolate on their own in their bedrooms if Test and Trace pings them. That is handy.
We can manage without the butchers, but without good old Matt Hancock we’d be sunk.
Have a picture of the conservatory.
