I am sitting on the taxi rank all by myself.
This is because at the moment I am not exactly married to another taxi driver. I am married to a chap with a huge pile of bits and some oily overalls.
Mark’s taxi went off the road on Saturday night. I do not mean that it went off the road in the sort of way where it landed in a ditch or something, but in the way where there was so much blue smoke that even the other taxi drivers, who are an extraordinarily tolerant bunch when it comes to vehicular difficulties, felt constrained to mention it.
It was not possible to drive up the road any closer than about fifty yards behind Mark’s taxi, because the world disappeared in a massive cloud of choking blue exhaust smoke.
In the end it was clanking and cluttering so much that it became impossible to ignore, even for the most intoxicated of customers, and Mark reluctantly abandoned the taxi rank and went back home to start dismantling the engine.
This is not good news. Saturday nights are importantly lucrative.
He has now reduced the car to a collection of lots and lots of bits. There are wheels and pipes and wires, headlights and clips and unidentifiable plastic bits, and a very great deal of oil, all in a pile in the alley at the back of our house.
The oil is not in a pile obviously. The oil is in a bucket, apart from some of it, which Mark has left lying about all over the taxi rank.
Mark’s taxi needs a new engine.
We do not have a spare engine and so we are going to have to telephone some scrapyards and see if they have got one that they do not want.
That is tomorrow’s job, because everywhere was tiresomely shut today since it is Sunday. We are becoming a nation of Communists, when Putin invades and takes over he will hardly need to change anything.
Mark also thinks that it might be possible for him to take this engine to bits and work out what is the matter with it. He is very worried about it all and is lying under the car muttering to himself. He keeps saying things like Snapped Crank Seal and Clogged Inlet Valve Manifold and Perished Distributor Cap Sprocket.
I think that is what he is saying, although I am prepared to admit I might not truly have understood the exact nature of the problem.
Of course he will fix it in the end, he always does. He was feeling quite miserable about it this morning so I reminded him that he quite likes tinkering about with cars really, and he should just start to lighten up and enjoy himself. I am not sure that it helped much. Even when I made some cheese on toast for breakfast and watered the conservatory for him, he was still not very happy.
The water pump in the conservatory was not working so he had to fix that for me first, but it needed doing and I expect he is glad he has got it out of the way.
It was handy to have him at home so before he went dashing out to the taxi I got him to glue the leg back on my little jewelled tin crab and another leg back on the starfish on my Blackpool souvenir shell. Both of these have been broken for a while so it has been useful to have Mark hanging about thinking about fixing things.
Once he had finished fixing things in the house he rushed off to the remains of his taxi which he was desperate to get done before it rained, although of course he won’t really get it done because it is going to take days and days.
I told him that I have been very busy as well. I have been thinking hard about writing my story. We are both jolly well contributing to this marriage, and I don’t want him to forget it.
We are an equal partnership.
