The world is lovely.
It is almost Christmas.
I have had a week of erudite conversation and far too many good dinners.
Yet all good things must come to an end, and now I am sitting on the taxi rank, feeling completely flattened.
I do not mean flattened in a bad way, actually far from it. It is absolutely brilliant to be back home, in our own little house with the dogs and the fire and the fairy lights and the lovely contented feeling that is left behind when you have had a huge adventure and then it is over.
I am feeling flattened in the sense of the sort of flattened that happens when you are run over by a steamroller.
On reflection that really does not sound very nice either.
For a creative writing student – at Cambridge, did I mention that? – I am not doing very well with these metaphors. Probably I had better not bother about the picturesque metaphor. I will just explain instead.
I am astonishingly tired. It is an intense sort of tired where I just want to talk quietly, and to think about joyful, contented things. I am stricken with a happy awe at how lovely our house is, and how wonderful it feels and smells. Mark has kept everything beautifully clean. There are clean sheets on the bed, clean towels in the bathroom, and he has put some money in the bank. He has mended almost everything that was wrong with his taxi and the fireplace is piled high with wood. The windmill was spinning merrily this morning, and a watery winter sun was warming the divorce solar panel, which is not anything to do with divorce now that it is on the wall making the house beautifully warm instead of being in the yard, making grubby smears on my washing.
Maybe there was something in the water at Cambridge.
I would probably consider putting something in the water if I had got to be responsible for thousands of tiresome students all of whom believed firmly and noisily in the importance of black lives and the flexibility of gender and the modern relevance of Jeremy Corbyn.
I would serve tranquillisers with every meal.
We took the dogs out for a gentle walk around the park, except they were not feeling in the least gentle, and bounced around noisily and rolled in the mud. They behaved like idiots because we have had a lodger for a week or so, and I am sorry to say that he took them out a few times and let them do exactly what they liked.
He has gone now, and it turned out the dogs had forgotten that they are supposed to walk obediently to heel when summoned. They clowned about and hurtled about barking until we bellowed at them and growled in a sufficiently menacing manner for them to remember how Good Dogs have got to behave.
Things were calmer after that.
We went home and ambled around reorganising our lives.
I do not even mind about being on the taxi rank. My taxi smelled disgusting when I left it, because one of my customers on my last night at work dropped a large and revolting pizza all over the back. I got most of it cleaned up, but it was vile. Even worse, they were so repellently rude when they got out that I wished I had not been polite and forgiving. Actually I would have liked to have run them over, because the taxi smelled ghastly all the rest of the night, and obviously stayed that way whilst I was in Cambridge.
We discovered this when I got home last night, although we didn’t do anything about it even then. Mark emptied it out this afternoon and scraped the last of the onion and rotting peperami out from under the floor mats. He left all the doors and windows open to air out the smell whilst he was trying to fix the windscreen wiper motor on his taxi.
I was very grateful.
I do not think I like customers very much at all.
Maybe the water is starting to wear off.
