Serial

I wonder if one ought now to say that the nights are drawing out.

Obviously this does not make much sense, and sounds as though the hours of darkness have become prolonged rather than otherwise. This is clearly not the case, because it is after five and, thinking of drawing things, I have not yet needed to draw the curtains.

I have drawn the ones in the living room and our bedroom, because we do not need daylight in there. Indeed, we are contemplating returning to bed for a brief snooze before work, and if we get time to do that then most certainly we will not be needing daylight, not that there will be any by then.

I don’t suppose that we will really, but I am still sunk deep into winter-hibernatory mode, and it would be very nice if we could.

The nice thing about the peace and quiet of winter is that of course the taxi rank is still very peaceful, and I have been devouring our university set books with as much enthusiasm as I have applied to consuming the home made salty fudge and brandy-soaked cake. This is not necessarily a good thing, because as you know we are learning how to write about crimes, and almost all of our books have been about murders.

Obviously this is because murder is the only properly exciting crime. It is hard to get a hundred thousand suspenseful words out of bicycle theft, for example, or somebody vandalising the bus stop, even though those are the only sorts of real crimes that most of us ever come across.

Despite never featuring in novels, they are jolly irritating, and if ever I find out who it was who pinched Oliver’s bike a couple of years ago I will be having some seriously sharp words in their ear, I can tell you.

The problem with reading books about murders all of the time is that they are upsetting and scary. There are not nearly as many murders in the Lake District as there are bicycle thefts, and there are not many of those. We have still never got round to chaining our bikes up and nobody has pinched them, although that might be because they are rusty and the brakes on mine make an irritating squeaky noise.

There was a murder here in Windermere once, but that was not a serial killer, it was two drunk blokes who had a fight over a woman from Liverpool and it all went horribly badly wrong.

The book I am reading is making me worry about serial killers all the time, as if they might be hiding behind the benches in the Library Gardens at night, although I expect they would have to wrap up warmly first.

I had a bloke in my taxi last night who I thought might be a serial killer, because he got in just before anybody in my book had found that Ted Bundy did it probably, and he was drunk with a peculiar hat and an absence of dress sense. My customer, not Ted Bundy, obviously.

He did not turn out to be a serial killer, or at any rate if he was then he must have been off duty last night, because he did not batter me to death with a steel bar and then bite bits of me off, which had been Ted Bundy’s preferred way of occupying an otherwise dull evening. He just had no money and grumbled when we had to do an extra journey to the cash machine at Sainsbury’s.

I will be very glad when we have finished doing the murdery part off the course and can move on to the next bit, which is about fantasy writing. I will not be in the least troubled by stories of elves and dwarves in the Library Gardens after dark.

You are not supposed to have dwarves in stories any more, and poor Snow White has been closed down by Disney and only allowed to reopen because Snow White has become ethnically diverse and the non-consensual kiss has been censored out.

She is now probably the sort of snow that you might prefer to avoid when building a snowman.

Sometimes it is very difficult not to be old fashioned.

We are not going to have time for an extra sleep. Number Two daughter has just telephoned to give us an exciting tour of her brand new very own house. This was far more exciting.

We are going to go to work now.