Merry anyway

I am very pleased to tell you that despite having started the night with a terrible sense of foreboding and gloom, things are not turning out too badly after all.

That is not to say that the gloom was not proved right. Indeed, I am sorry to have to tell you that it has been fully justified in just about every sense.

It has been a very quiet taxi week, and we have been staring at our dwindling finances with a creeping feeling of dread, hoping against all hope that somehow people would come and visit the Lake District for Christmas. All of these new arrivals might rush off to the local hostelries, spending the night in merry revelries and lifting their glasses in rambunctious outbursts of Christmas cheer, thus rendering themselves unfit to drive home, which is where I come in.

This has not happened at all.

It turned out that every other taxi driver for a couple of hundred miles thought the same, and so what few revellers there actually are have been shared out between about a dozen of us.

Profit margins, as a result, have been very slender so far.

I had become very downcast about this, but as it has happened, some lovely things have happened to cheer me up and to make me feel that the world is, after all, a splendid place.

The first was the discovery that Lucy is not coming home tomorrow, but tonight, and so we will have her company, and more importantly, assistance, in the last of the Christmas preparations tomorrow.

Elspeth and her family and Number One Daughter and her family are all coming over for a Christmas Eve Bash tomorrow night. We had been so worried about money that we had thought we might have to work, but tonight has made it entirely plain that there is no point whatsoever. We can loaf about at home tomorrow with a clear conscience.

This is a relief and a joy. It is Christmas. I do not need to worry about things which are out of my control, and so I can stop caring.

Hurrah.

The next lovely thing was a very nice chap getting in my taxi this evening. He writes poetry, some of it not bad at all, certainly better than any rubbish I have ever produced, and I had read some, and remarked upon it, with my newly-acquired skills of literary criticism from Cambridge. Did I mention I am studying at Cambridge? Well I am.

Oh goodness, the assignment.

Moving on swiftly.

The chap insisted on getting in my taxi even though it wasn’t my turn, and when we got back to his house he produced a box of toffee and splendid bottle of Sancerre which he said was in appreciation of my help with his poetry.

I was absolutely astonished and very pleased indeed, because frankly, readers, I was not very helpful at all, because the poetry was pretty good in the first place. In any case, I don’t know how much I would have to appreciate somebody to give them a bottle of Sancerre, but it would have to be a very lot, I can tell you. It isn’t even as if I had popped in and done all his ironing and cleaned his flat. It is the most decent wine that has come our way for months, and I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to drinking it.

Probably when we haven’t got visitors, so you need not pop round in an optimistic moment.

This pleased me very much indeed, and I kept digging it out of the door pocket and looking at it happily, until I had to collect Oliver from work and so gave it to him to take into the house out of the way.

I hope he has put it somewhere where Lucy won’t see it.

Oliver is doing very nicely at work. He has been paid well, there are lots of entertaining people there, and one of them is, he thinks, a girl. Also, he went to a carol service for Old Boys at his prep school last night, and had a splendid evening exploring his old school with all of his old school friends. Some of his teachers are also Old Boys, and were there to tell him how much he had grown, etc. Matron was there as well. She is not an Old Boy but has been at the school for thirty years and so everybody likes to see her.

Mark took him across, but the next time he goes he will probably be driving himself.

The other nice thing that happened tonight was that I had a retired union official get in the taxi. He wasn’t going very far so we didn’t exactly have an in-depth conversation, but we discovered, rather to my surprise, that we held very similar opinions about everything we discussed. He was once a member of the Labour Party but has withdrawn his membership in  disgust. I sympathised with that entirely. Also he was a jolly nice chap and I wished he had been going further. Anyway, at the end of the short journey he gave me twenty quid and wished me a merry Christmas. Given that this actually doubled my takings for the last two nights, I was cheered, encouraged and very grateful.

So there we go. I am still at work and so all is not lost for the evening anyway, it might still turn into a lucrative riot later on, but I don’t mind any more. People are so nice, and the world is so cheerful, that I am sitting here looking out at the world with a seasonally rosy glow in my stony taxi-driver heart.

It is Christmas, and I am feeling very pleased with the world. I have made apple pies and ice cream, mayonnaise and biscuits. I have tidied and hoovered and swept and I am nearly halfway through the ironing.

Life is jolly good. I don’t know if I will be writing in this tomorrow, since I am rather hoping to be in an alcoholic haze by the evening, but if not, then I will speak to you soon.

Have a jolly merry Christmas.