The problem with being a diarist on a day which does not start until the middle of the afternoon, is that there really is not very much raw material to go at.
Of course I could always write about last night, although even that was not very exciting. The highlights were so dull that they might be better described as dimlights.
I think the most interesting event was taking a young woman home who had neither enough cash to pay for her journey, nor, it turned out, a door key.
I waited and waited whilst she rang the doorbell and called on her telephone and bashed on the front door, all the while yelling: Dad, Dad, at the open window upstairs.
Eventually a querulous voice faltered down: Who is it? Who’s there?
Goodness alone knows who he thought it might be, perhaps he had about twenty children and was not expecting any of them to wake him up in the middle of the night.
This might be so, it was a Housing Association house, not in the wealthiest of areas.
In fact actually there are a couple of taxi drivers like that. I don’t think any of them have scored as many as twenty children, but I know of one who boasts nine. Fortunately most of them are grown up now, and producing children of their own. I do not expect he keeps much track of those.
I am glad I do not have nine children. That would be a very depressing quantity of laundry, not to mention colossal consumption of sausages and pizzas. We think we might get a takeaway tonight, when everybody has finished work, because it is Lucy’s last night and we would like to celebrate, but we would not be able to do that if there were nine of us, not even if we refused the dogs a share of the prawn crackers.
Other than that the night was uneventful. One of the taxi drivers has returned from a prolonged Christmas holiday in some part of Eastern Europe, presumably not the part which with which the Russians are attempting a corporate merger, and was shivering convulsively after about fifteen minutes of our splendid British Summertime. It appears that his taxi has crumbled to bits during his absence, which is what they do, and we occupied much of the evening in an interested huddle around the bonnet, speculating cluelessly about what might be the matter, until Mark brought his diagnostic machine down and worked it out.
It is very quiet at the moment. Either everybody has dashed off on holiday abroad or they are all feeling the pecuniary gifts of our beloved leaders, because there is hardly anybody visiting the Lake District at the moment. Mark even buzzed off to work this afternoon, to see what might happen, but returned after three hours and a single customer.
I think he was hoping for a quiet afternoon by the lake rather than financial success, so it did not matter. Work is undoubtedly the most idle option in our household, it is what you do when you want some undisturbed tranquillity to get on with your book.
In Mark’s case this afternoon I suspect that he wanted to watch some bloke on YouTube telling him how to build a nuclear reactor, and knew that I would be cynical.
I stayed at home because I had discovered a list of short films on my college website that our screenwriting tutor wished us to watch. These confirmed me in my opinion that I am a complete Philistine, because I thought the whole lot were utterly awful and if I could not do better than those I would take the Hara-kiri option.
Mostly they were in black and white with sub-titles, set in places that really needed redecorating, and consisted of people wondering if perhaps they wished to go to bed with one another.
The answer in every single case should definitely have been no, but inevitably wasn’t, leaving me aghast, not for the first time, at the stupidity of the human race, both those who made such brainless decisions, and worse, those who thought it would be a good idea to make films about it.
If ever I make a film it will be about sensible people paying off their mortgage and remembering to change the sheets every week and perhaps going for walks every now and then.
It is no good saying that this would be dull.
How many years have you been reading these pages?
