I had forgotten that it was bank holiday weekend.
We are frantically busy, so no diary tonight. I have tried to write this three or four times now, with no success.
There is sunshine in Windermere and the entire world has turned up for a visit.
Some of them are going to stay rather longer than they expected because of misfortunes, there have been several accidents and last night some people were irritatingly run over just next to the taxi rank.
I am sure it was terrible and shocking but I would have been more sympathetic if they had done it somewhere else. The taxi rank was full of flashing blue lights and short-tempered policemen for ages after that. Neither of the run-over people appeared to have died, they were too conversational for that, and frankly, I am surprised that it did not happen half a dozen times more than it did. Bank holidays are special times when everybody deliberately walks about just behind reversing taxis. Sometimes they even bend over to pat their dog or pick up a penny from the pavement, just to make sure they are entirely and completely invisible.
These people were not run over by a taxi, we were all very relieved to notice. It was some other tourist.
The police were even grumpier half an hour later when some other, presumably intoxicated driver, failed to notice the approaching junction after they left the nightclub, and just carried on into the hedge. They closed that bit of road off as well.
It is now two o’clock in the morning and I have been interrupted so many times in the composition of this that I have stopped trying. Few things are more tiresome than drunken Persons From Porlock leering over your shoulder and trying to see what you might be writing, before explaining that they have a bad leg and can’t possibly walk, and that their girlfriend is not going to be sick, honest. After that they don’t have any money, the taxi on the way here charged less, they want their dog to ride on their knee and not in the boot, and they wonder if I live here and have had a busy night and might finish late.
I do not dignify any of this drivel with conversational responses, other than declining to take the dog and probably the girlfriend as well. The rest of it I ignore, and generally, after they have been obliged to repeat the same trivia several times at full volume, they desist, and the night proceeds peacefully.
I am going to go. There are some people staggering about outside the nightclub, and I can hear them wittering vaguely about taxis. That is going to mean me.
How lovely.
