We are going to have a night off.
I had completely forgotten about this until somewhere about halfway through the afternoon, and it was like suddenly remembering that it is Christmas tomorrow.
I mean the sort of remembering that you do when you are eight, not when you are elderly with a massive host of forgotten chores and an overdraft. Once one has reached this stage of life one’s rapture about Christmas Eve becomes somewhat modified with these recollections.
Obviously I do still get excited about Christmas, but it is a more theoretical sort of excitement, when I think how excited I would be if somebody else had mopped the kitchen or if a bomb had permanently destroyed the Barclaycard records office.
Anyway, I was pleased and excited when I recalled that tonight, at least, I would not be working.
This is because we have got the Bank Holiday looming large ahead, and because Mark is sick of nailing engines back together, and I am sick of mopping up oily footprints and being a sole breadwinner. Once the weekend comes you need not expect to hear anything from me. I will be busy trying to separate tourists from the contents of their Barclaycards.
Tonight we are going to drink wine and eat pasta. Our nights off are delightfully predictable. I have been to the butcher and bought some bacon to go in the pasta, and he tipped me off that they will have some jolly good dog bones tomorrow, so I ought to pop back. I will try not to forget about that. They will keep the dogs occupied whilst we are busy over the weekend.
I am going to try and earn enough money to pay the electricity bill and also get a haircut. This has become to terribly delayed due to other expenses that I can barely see where I am going. It is so long that I have had to tie it out of the way in an elastic, because of not being able to bear the tickling on the back of my neck. It is weeks and weeks since I first noticed that I was beginning to resemble a birds’ nest, and frankly, an ostrich could live in it now.
In between sitting in my taxi, I have been occupying the last few days scowling at my story. I realised just as I reached the last ten thousand words that a good chunk of it was pretentious rubbish and needed to be scrapped. Worse, it needed to be scrapped before I wrote any more.
I scrapped it and re-wrote it. I know that this does not sound much like work, but I have begun to move in the sort of academic circles which consider that thinking is also work, and I am pretending to agree with them. Secretly I know that this is nonsense. Sitting in a comfortable chair bashing the ends off one’s fingers on a keyboard does not even begin to compare with hauling firewood or hoisting engines back under car bonnets, but if I think hard enough and come up with something that is not quite so pretentious, I might be able to sell it. I will then be able to bask in the knowledge that I have found a sort of idleness that is lucrative. I never cease to be thrilled by the Cambridge belief that sitting around writing things whilst drinking cups of tea by a fireside, qualifies as work.
Sometimes they include Talking To People in the definition. I think that is brilliant. Some taxi customers expect me to include that for nothing, although of course I never do, at least not unless they tipped me a fiver last time. Some people who aren’t even taxi customers want me to talk to them. Some idiot came to the window last night and wanted to know what time the bus came. I have got a good withering look that I save for that sort of query, and I used it as I pointed towards the place where the timetable was suspended from the post, but I am not sure that she noticed. Some people are just not intellectuals.
I am going to be an intellectual one day.
I am going to have a certificate.
Not tonight. Tonight I will have a glass of wine. That will be just as good.
