I have been on the taxi rank for ages and ages and ages, but I have not had any customers.
I have eaten almost all of my dinner, and read an inspiring story about somebody who murdered their children. This is not because I have become especially ghoulish, but because, as I think I told you, we are studying crime writing in our class this term.
I spent much of yesterday with my tongue sticking out, trying to compose a crime story based around my place of work, which was this week’s writing assignment.
I see so many crimes at my place of work that it was difficult to pick my favourite. In the end I settled for a story loosely based on something that really happened, when a chap wanted to go somewhere and asked me to wait for him until he came out. When he returned he was covered in blood and brushing bits of tooth off his knuckles.
He paid up and gave me a sizeable tip and so I considered him a good customer rather than otherwise. I only ever saw him once again after that, on a police photofit of somebody who had robbed a shop in Kendal with a shotgun.
I had thought him rather a nice chap, polite and courteous and well-dressed, so I upped his status to murderer and downgraded the taxi driver to emotionally disturbed idiot, and handed it in last night.
The other taxi driver in the group wrote about plotting to murder a chap who had run off without paying. I sympathised with this wholeheartedly, and was highly amused by the horrified response of the other students to the brief description he had written of a Day In The Life Of A Taxi Driver. It appeared that nobody thought murder was an excessive response to his tribulations.
I said that I thought their running mile was at a good rate and suggested that he sent a threatening letter including an admin charge instead.
Apart from that, today’s project has been to write a story about food and drink. This one has been hanging over me for ages and has got to be in on Wednesday. We have got to rush up to Gordonstoun and back tomorrow, and so I am cutting it very fine.
With this in mind I took the dogs for a long tramp up the fell this morning. I do my best story-thinking whilst walking, certainly a house full of Oliver and Mark does not lend itself to inspired clarity of prose.
The dogs do not help much either, if I am honest. Roger Poopy is just fine but his father is ancient and doddery and keeps forgetting where he is going, and ambling off in the direction of where he has just been. He was upset anyway, because it appeared that he had forgotten to have a wee when we chucked them into the yard first thing this morning, and when he came back in, after a little while he had an accident on the kitchen floor.
I was very cross with him, which was what made him upset, in a confused, senile sort of way, and the resulting state of anxiety lasted all the way up the fell. I had a pocket full of Good Dog Sausages, by way of encouragement, but he kept forgetting those as well, and getting mown down by Roger Poopy charging towards me in the hope that if he was especially good he might get his father’s sausage as well.
In the end I managed to write about half of the story and iron Oliver’s clothes for going back to school, whilst Mark and Oliver took the Christmas tree down.
I am glad that it is gone. I have had a truly splendid Christmas, but it is such a relief that it is finally over.
Just Oliver to get back to school now, and the world will be quiet again.
We thought that we might start doing some renovations to the conservatory.
