In the end I went to work last night.
Mark had not finished nailing a new ball joint to my taxi, so I went in his. Eventually he did finish it, but I was so busy that I did not go home. Instead I got into my own comfortably familiar taxi and went back to work.
Mark and Oliver went off to the farm to play at handbrake turns.
I was at work until midnight, which was not a nice feeling when the alarm went off this morning.
Once Mark had buzzed off to work I turned my attention to all of the things that I really did not want to do. There were lots and lots of these, starting with making mayonnaise and everybody’s dinner, pegging the washing on the line and cooking sausages. We are setting off to Scotland after work tomorrow night, and so we will need to have sausages. Mark needs sausages whatever he is doing, which is just as well, because they are about all my culinary abilities can manage at the moment.
After I had done all of those things, I took my taxi back to Kendal to show the chap at the garage that it was now worthy of an MOT. This turned out to be rather more time consuming than I had expected, because the lady behind the desk, who is even grumpier at work than I am, said that they were too busy to look at it. She said that she had told Mark he had got to telephone before he brought it back, a piece of information which had clearly sailed right past him unheeded in its invisibility cloak. Probably I wouldn’t have telephoned anyway even if I had known, because the lady on the desk always tells you on the telephone that everything is impossible, whereas if you are actually there sometimes they do it just to get rid of you.
I smiled weakly and asked how long it would be. She said that I had better just go and find something else to do because it might be all day, and it wasn’t her problem.
I went and sat on the bench outside in the sunshine. I tried to make some more inroads into my terrifyingly-looming assignment, but the sun was so warm that after five minutes my computer overheated and that was the end of that, so I read my book.
This was very pleasant apart from the gnawing, agonising worry that time for completing my assignment was running out, and I needed to get home and get on with it. I almost said it was running out very quickly, but of course it wasn’t. It was running out at the same speed at which time always runs out, that is, at the rate of sixty seconds every minute.
After a couple of hours the office lady went off to have her lunch and the kind chap who does MOT testing looked at it in a hurry whilst she was out. He gave me a pass certificate and so I was free.
I went belting round to the supermarket for things to take with us and to feed to everybody on the journey. Obviously I could have done this whilst I was waiting, but it is about half a mile to the supermarket, and I was too idle. This is one of the enormous benefits of having a sore foot, one can be idle with a clear conscience.
I dashed home and finished getting our taxi picnic ready. Then I took Oliver to work.
At four o’clock I started working on my assignment again, but of course I had got to be at work by six, so it was all a bit hasty.
I am about to go back to it now, in between providing taxis for idle people who have got a bad leg and can’t walk just around the corner.
Oh. I think I might be one of those.
Ah.
