I do not know if you are going to find these words when you wake up in the morning.
I am having Issues.
I am on the taxi rank, but for some reason best known only to itself, my computer is refusing to allow me to visit my own website, no matter how I try. I have a horrid suspicion that even when I go home and try again I might have the same problem, and I do not have the smallest intention of sitting up for half of the night trying to talk to the American hosting company on the telephone. They are very helpful and pleasant, and insist that I should have a nice day even though they are perfectly well aware that I have spent most of it on the telephone listening to them saying Umm Humm whilst they press different buttons somewhere in America. I do not want to talk to them all the same, so I am hoping it will all have resolved itself by the time I return.
Really I ought not to mind sitting up to talk to them, because I have only had half of a day so far anyway.
This was because we had a late night last night, and in consequence, did not wake up until two in the afternoon.
Obviously we were as horrified by this as you will be. It is embarrassing to be opening the curtains in one’s dressing gown at that time, and worse to have to check first to see if anybody is looking.
I was pleased all the same, I can’t tell you how lovely it felt to have had so much sleep.
We shouted up the stairs for Oliver who was also still asleep.
Morning coffee did not happen almost until afternoon-tea time.
This did not matter. We had a busy night last night, filled with wet customers and steamed-up windows, and I was not at all sorry when it was over, some time at around half-past four. After that there was dog-emptying and financial consideration, and the damp grey light of morning was filtering through the curtains even before we crawled into bed.
When we eventually did emerge, Mark and Oliver disappeared off to the farm to glue some more bits back on to Oliver’s car, and I had a visitor. This was nice because of being a shirk, and instead of doing all the things I was supposed to be doing, I could loaf about drinking tea and making sympathetic noises.
The visitor was our ex-lodger, who has recently started a cleaning business for hotels in the village, and who is just discovering some of the more tiresome aspects of human nature. You do not learn about these things until you are trying to make money out of people. This is the point at which you discover that actually, if you are hoping to retain some vestiges of being a sweet-natured lovely human being, you will starve to death very quickly.
We shared stories about horrid customers. I had one last night, except I have been self-employed for a long time now and so he did not turn out to be a taxi customer. In the end he was a pedestrian. He stuck his head in through my window and fiercely demanded to know why I would not take five passengers, and expressed his opinion that I was merely trying to make him and his friends spend twice as much money on transport, because I was a wicked robber.
I smiled sweetly, added some succinct Anglo-Saxon expressions, and wound the window up, missing his neck, regrettably, which he withdrew in the nick of time. When he and his friends decided, very shortly afterwards due to the torrential rain, that they would get two taxis after all, I was the only taxi left on the rank. I wound the window down a little way to hear his friend’s apologies and explanations, explained that misfortunately I was judging all of them by their friend’s inconsiderate speeches, so none of them were getting into my taxi, and locked the doors.
They hung around disconsolately for a little while, occasionally explaining their sodden unhappiness to their rude friend, and in the end trudged off through the puddles into the night.
I waved to them as they departed.
It is now very late, and I have been writing this on the Notebook pages of my computer. I am going to go home and see if the real computer, the big one on my desk, will let me copy them on to my website so that they will reach your inbox in time for cornflakes.
Fingers crossed.
PS. I fixed it. My iPad had installed a helpful new security update. It stops everything from working. I have uninstalled it now.
