The thing about a very short day is that there are no thrilling highlights with which to regale you.
We went to bed at six o’clock this morning and got out of it again at two. This, by which I mean the last bit, the getting up, not the going to bed, obviously, was not done with any great enthusiasm. Things were not helped by finding that Rosie had managed not only to discover the box in which I keep my tights for smart occasions, but somehow to remove the lid and scatter the contents all over the floor.
I have no idea how she managed to do that.
I did not look at the tights. I just shoved them all back and put the lid on again. That can be a surprise at Christmas, which is likely to be the next time I will need a pair.
We rolled our eyes and made coffee, after which the dogs were allowed to return to the bedroom. The two grown up dogs settled down for a sensible rest-and-relax on their towel on our bed, and the small tiresome poopy leaped about all over the place, biting everybody’s ears and trying to drag the towel out from underneath them.
Mark took a picture. This is her being very sad that nobody else wants to bounce about having a lovely time. You can just see the end of Roger Poopy’s father. He is trying to wriggle as far away from her as he possibly can because he has just had his tail eaten. 
In the end we got up, and Mark took the dogs off to the farm whilst I cleared up the mess. Most of the mess had been caused when Rosie, who has only just learned how to go downstairs, fell down them. She careered across the kitchen, ran into the dog bowl and spread dried dog food all over the floor.
I swept it up and moved everything that might otherwise be interesting to investigate. She likes the bags that we take to work, and has had to be removed several times after burrowing into them and eating the interesting things that she finds there, being car keys, hand sanitiser, Mark’s useful bits of broadband, and change for the taxis. I have warned her that she is not to eat five pound notes, but she is very determined to get into the cash boxes and find out why not.
We are on our way out to work as I write. It has stopped raining, which is good fortune, and I am hoping for a peaceful night. We had a chap came to the taxi rank last night, wanting to go to Millom, which is about sixty pounds away, but such a tediously winding country road that both Mark and I declined. The novice taxi driver who took him in the end was gone for hours and hours.
This improved our evening considerably, because the taxi rank was empty of almost everybody except us. We do not do high-speed rural driving any more, although when we were young taxi drivers, we used to race home along the Coniston road in the small hours of the morning, paring a half-hour journey down to twelve minutes. This is clearly such a lunatic and dangerous activity that now we are elderly and sensible we have become far more sedate. We find that the tyres last considerably longer in consequence.
Interestingly, the modern young taxi drivers do not do these things. They are all cautious and careful, and you would not wish to get stuck behind any of them on a busy night, even by our sedate and careful standards. Some of the young chaps drive like girls.
When we were young the older taxi drivers were mad and reckless, with bashed-up faces and scars from a thousand fights. One driver had his nose broken so often that it was practically flat and he could not keep his glasses on. When we were employing drivers, tea break conversations inevitably drifted back to everybody’s shared recollections of Borstal, some of which were entirely fascinating, there is an Old School Tie ethos and a dodgy Old Boys network that would put Eton to shame.
The youngsters today will never grow into taxi drivers like that. Most of them go home early because they do not like the late-night fights.
I am glad about this.
When it comes to the taxi rank, the more the merrier is most definitely not the case.
I am going to go and sit on it.
