I am on the taxi rank, and sniffing in irritation.
This is because I have forgotten my handkerchief.
I am beginning to wonder if it might be acceptable to use one’s sleeve in such circumstances. It is entirely possible that if I popped down the taxi rank a couple of cars Mark would let me borrow his, but I am not exactly certain that I want to. It might have been rather enthusiastically used already.
I think I might have a rag under my seat…
Not to worry, the night goes on.
Life in Windermere has slowly creaked back to normality. Mark went off back to his rural broadbanding today, and I took the dogs for a long trail across the fell. They have not had very much exercise whilst we have been flapping about with the taxi, and had become tiresomely fidgety. Worse, yesterday Roger Poopy would not come with me when I turned around at the far side of the park to come home, but stood where he was, switching his longing gaze beseechingly between me and School Knott Fell.
It was raining, and I was busy, so I was unmoved, but of course guilt had to overwhelm me in the end, and so this morning we continued onwards and upwards, much to Roger Poopy’s joy and his father’s reluctant irritation.
This was entirely mutual. Few things are more annoying on a lengthy walk than having to stop every ten steps and wait for a recalcitrant dog who is dawdling a couple of hundred yards behind and pretending to be a lot deafer than he actually is. I got very cross with him in the end and rushed back and bellowed at him to Get On With It, at which point he leaped in the air with surprise, then produced a surprising turn of speed and legged it in the wrong direction.
It took me ages to catch him and to persuade him that he need not be frightened, and it was all right for him to come along with us instead of rushing off back home in a frantic panic all by himself. Partly it was difficult to convince him because I was doing it through the most tightly clenched teeth, and did not mean a word of it. Actually I would have liked to have drowned him in the tarn.
I did not drown him in the tarn, which I thought was a splendid demonstration of self-restraint.
We came back to the day’s labours, which were remarkably low-key, coming as they did after a couple of weeks of intensive post-plumbing restorative domestic labours. As it is the house is tidy, there was still dinner in the fridge left over from my parents’ visit, and I had done all of the laundry. Better still, my parents had very kindly sent a donation towards the cost of re-establishing our taxi business, and we were actually solvent again. As Mark said this evening, we are now merely broke, which is a million times better off than we were last week. Once again the numbers have become positive, and here we are ready to earn some more, how splendid life is.
It was a very pleasing sort of day.
Such domestic tranquillity reigned that I managed to spend some of this afternoon looking through some of my course work for the next time I go to Cambridge, which will be in about three or four weeks’ time. Obviously I didn’t do any of it, but I have found it, glanced at it, scowled at it, and promised myself that I will get round to it, which probably I will, in a last minute panic in the taxi on the night before I go. The next module is not poetry, thank goodness, but about creative short story writing. I like doing this, and am looking forward to it.
I am not exactly sorry to think that I will never need to compose another poem ever again.
I have crossed Greeting Card Writer off my list of potential careers for when I grow up.
