I have reluctantly and crossly abandoned Symon the Black and turned my attention to Alan Dean and his Wonderful Magic Lamp.
I have tried and tried and simply can’t reduce any part of Symon the Black to three thousand words. I am at six thousand words and nowhere near finished, and it is filling my head like the expanding foam that we squirted into the hole in the windowsill, which is to say, that it is beginning to splurge out of every single orifice and become rather a nuisance.
Hence it has not been easy to drag my attention away to something else.
This afternoon, not long after I got up, because it is weekend, and the morning was not part of my agenda, I started writing the story of Alan Dean.
I hate him, which is really not his fault, poor, blameless Alan Dean. I hate him for being a boring teenager with three wishes instead of a mutilated savage in the middle of a dark magical world full of intrigue and incest.
I am writing it anyway. He is just about to start cleaning his new lamp.
I was pleasantly interrupted by Number One Daughter calling me from Jordan. This was an exciting thing to happen, because I know almost nothing whatsoever about Jordan, except that it is a pop singer and also in the Bible.
It turns out that it is an antique land where plenty beside remains. She has been bobbing about in the Dead Sea, and taken a trip to see a place called Petra. I had never heard of this place, but it turns out to be the most astonishing valley of temples and other stunning creations, all wonderfully carved out of massive sandstone cliffs. It is one of the Seven Wonders Of The World. I do not know what any of the other six are, perhaps I will look it up later.
Also the Dead Sea is the lowest place on Earth. You can’t go any lower without going underwater.
Never say that you do not learn anything from these pages, it is all here somewhere if only you can be bothered to keep looking.
Anyway, she is having a splendid adventure, teaching the Jordanian Army to lift weights and jog up and down the parade ground, what an ace thing to be doing.
We are not having exciting adventures, which is why I am telling you about Number One Daughter’s. I am far too old to have fitness adventures in the desert. I took the dogs for a walk up over the fell this morning whilst Mark was bashing pallets apart in the yard, because the builders have left us loads and loads of firewood just lately, and it is taking for ever to get it all sorted out. We had cheese on toast for breakfast and now we are going to go and sit on the taxi rank.
We sat there last night and had a few minor adventures of our own. I stopped with customers in my taxi to pick up a screaming girl who was desperately flagging us down, and who appeared to be being beaten up by her boyfriend.
We were all agreed after she got out that none of us blamed him in the least and actually could quite cheerfully have given her a punch on the nose on our own account. This was because she insisted on being taken back to her hotel, which was in the opposite direction to my original customers, and then refused to contribute anything towards the fare. She said that I was being quite horribly unreasonable when explained that taxis needed to be paid for, because she felt so upset, and burst into tears again.
In the end the first set of customers paid for her. They said this was because they were gentlemanly and I said it was because they were being complete mugs. Personally I would have taken her back to the angry chap and told him to get on with it.
Right, I am off for another thrilling night.
Taxis and Alan Dean. Ho hum.
