I am on the taxi rank.
As it happens, we are fairly busy. The Government is doing their best to bankrupt taxi drivers at the moment by introducing a new nationwide bus fare of two pounds, no matter where anybody is going. Fortunately the bus service in Bowness is so superlatively rubbish that summer visitors, who are used to urban transport arrangements, are so mystified that most of them give up and get in taxis anyway.
It says on the bus stop: Every Twenty Minutes. It does not specify what is supposed to happen every twenty minutes, because quite clearly it is not the arrival of a bus. I know this, because it is right next to the taxi rank, and we are always looking up at people who have been there for so long that their sandals are beginning to sink into the tarmac. Lots of them come and get in taxis, despairingly, and say things like: We have been waiting for two and a half hours and there hasn’t been a bus anywhere.
I explain to them that it is one of those Cumbrian holiday activities, a sort of low budget version of going to Scotland to see if you can glimpse the Loch Ness Monster, you can come to the Lake District and see if a bus turns up.
I am not sympathetic. It is their own fault for being too mean to get in a taxi in the first place.
In the meantime it is quite pleasantly sunny here, although far, far cooler than in Surrey. I am wearing my dungarees and heavy shirt, and am still considering that the next time I take a fare past our house I might pop in and put a jersey on.
I have spent the much of the day washing. It has been a difficult sort of day, because actually it was the middle of the night when we got home and even later by the time we had unloaded the dogs and our various possessions out of the camper van and into the house. This is never a good feeling when the alarm starts crackling and spitting at seven in the morning, a mere four hours later. I did contemplate having a little snooze in the morning after Mark had gone to work, but the telephone rang non stop and the doorbell rang non stop and eventually I was glad I hadn’t bothered.
I should have gone and snoozed in the camper van, because when I went to clean it out it was an oasis of undisturbed tranquillity, but the sheets were in the washing machine so I didn’t.
Instead I dashed round clearing up Oliver’s abandoned things and went to work early. I did not spend the day cleaning the house. At the moment I am trying to maximise our income from the summer holiday tourists, and so I am going out to work as early as I can.
Somebody has got to make up for the buses.
You will be very pleased to hear that Oliver seems to be having a very lovely time in Korea. We have had lots of photographs, in which he seems to be surrounded by other grinning teenagers in the middle of an excitingly foreign-looking landscape, filled with oddly-shaped buildings and shops selling completely unidentifiable but undeniably exotic-looking goods. I do not know what he is doing on any of them, but he looks youthful and happy and the pictures will be very useful indeed when I come to making the Christmas calendars. Last year the other children complained that Oliver appeared in far too many of the pictures, which was because he had sent me loads of them. They are all going to have some catching up to do. I have had forty pictures this morning alone.
I think I might go to bed.
