I do like Oliver’s girlfriend.
She is interesting and artistic and very easy to like. Oliver had got to buzz off to work this morning, and Mark went shortly afterwards, and so we have had one another’s company ever since.
We took the dogs out and had a cup of tea and talked and talked, and then I had got to get on with my domestic pre-work activities, and she had some work to do. She is doing an animation for a film. Her drawings are very, very good. I do hope that she manages to make her fortune, she jolly well deserves to.
Anyway, I like her very much, I think we ought to keep her.
In other news, my toe nail has finally come off. This did not happen in a gentle, natural, slipping-its-moorings sort of way, but with a bellow of agony when Rosie jumped on it. In the place where I once had a toenail, I now have a frayed and battered patch of dried up black and yellow ugliness. It is so ugly even I do not like to look at it, and have been averting my eyes. I am usually ghoulishly interested in physical manifestations of my body’s misadventures, but not this one. This one makes me shudder just when I glance at it by accident.
It is still too sore to be bagged up in a sock out of the way. I am just going to have to keep my gaze turned towards the heavens until it gets better.
It has been a fairly short day, mostly because yesterday went on for at least a day and a half, and we did not go to bed until this morning had fairly thoroughly begun, at least if you happened to be a bird. Most of them were up and milling about chirpily as we were yawning and rubbing our eyes.
Last night turned into a moderately profitable evening, but most of our customers were cheerful and civilised, so it was all right. My very last customer of the night was a girl who could barely sit still in the taxi because of bouncing with excited happiness.
She had just been in the nightclub for the first time.
It does not usually have that effect on people. Most people, especially ones from places where there are real nightclubs, come out saying things like Well that was rubbish and cost me nearly a hundred quid. This girl did not. This girl thought it had been the most wonderful night of her life.
She has epilepsy, and had just had her drugs raised to a full dose.
Until this point she has never been able to go into anywhere with flashing lights. Almost everywhere, every cinema, every theatre, every concert, every nightclub, has a warning sign on the door telling you that you must not go in if you are epileptic because of the flashing lights which will send your brain into an electrical panic and you will have a fit.
Last night, because of the drugs, she could try it for the first time. The nightclub is full of flashing coloured lights, and she has never been able to go it. She did not know that the drugs would work, and was very frightened she might have a seizure, but she was hoping very much that they would, and so decided to be brave.
The drugs worked.
She spent the night hopping around the dance floor, squeaking and giggling with all of the other girls, just as if she did not have epilepsy at all. The lights flashed and the music crashed, and she just carried on dancing.
Her excitement and happiness was practically bubbling out of her ears, like a pan of soap making that has been allowed to do too much exothermic reacting and then needs cleaning up from the entire work surface, the cooker, the floor and bits of the ceiling. Now, she explained, she knew she could do anything and go anywhere. It was not the Bowness local night club that was important. What mattered was that her epilepsy-prison door had suddenly been flung open, and she could go to concerts and the theatre and the cinema, and in a year’s time, she could begin to learn to drive.
I agreed with her that this was an auspicious moment, and drove away feeling very glad on her behalf.
I don’t think anybody has ever had a better night out in Bowness.
I was very happy to have been a part of it.
