I am dropping you a few hasty lines before Mark returns home.
The weather today has been so unutterably awful that there did not seem any point in both of us going off to sit on the taxi rank, and indeed, when I rang Mark a short while ago, he seems to have had a very peaceful evening indeed, reading his book and drinking tea with almost no interruptions whatsoever.
He has been the only taxi on the taxi rank, which makes the decision not to join him a sensible one. If everybody else stays at home, then the lone driver takes every passenger. If there are two drivers they will collect merely half each. This means, on nights like this, that it takes me and Mark twice the effort to make exactly the same amount of money. It is only worth both of us being there if another driver turns up, which they didn’t. If they had, then I would have dashed out to work, and we would, between us, have taken two thirds of the passengers. Young people studying for your GCSEs take note, a certain amount of mathematical literacy comes in very useful occasionally, no matter what you think now.
Fortunately taxi drivers are entirely predictable, and so far it seems as though nobody else has bothered.
In the meantime I have hammered out a few grim and bloody lines of my dissertation and spent the rest of the evening painting. I do not quite know why I am finding it so difficult to write. I can see the pictures perfectly clearly, and know what I want to say, but the words are coming out as snarled and effortful as trying to shove a thighbone through an ancient mince-grinder.
I have not been murdering anybody, just so you know. That simile is left over from my days of butchering our own livestock, when I used to make our own sausages. Lamb were the finest, with mint from the garden.
Anyway, obviously I have not been either murdering people or even painting all day. I have spent much of the day doing harmless, if mildly uninspiring domestic activities. I have made two sorts of biscuits and some chilli mayonnaise. Also we have begun the arduous process of restocking the cupboards before the ragged hand of winter starts doing its own paintings, and this morning we went to the cash and carry.
This is about thirty seconds’ walk away from our house, as indeed everything is in Windermere, but we went in the car because everything we wanted to purchase came in massive sacks and weighed about half a ton.
We have resupplied ourselves with flour. We have bread flour and plain flour, rice flour and cornflour, and also custard powder, which is really just cornflour with dried egg and vanilla flavouring, so it is just another sort of flour really. I use a very lot of all of these, and have stacked them neatly under my desk. Occasionally during the evening I have leaned back in my chair and rested my feet on them, and the smug contentment which results knows no bounds.
I think we will need to make a second, identical trip once more before the winter nights start enlarging the number of their hours and the storms start discharging themselves over Ibbetson Towers, so we have decided to have a special Saving Up Cash Envelope for the purpose. Mark will forget to put anything into it but I will remember and by the time the Dark Nights have drawn in, I will be able to afford to make a return trip.
Tonight feels very much as though the dark nights are coming sooner than we had thought. It is not at all cold, indeed, the weather is surprisingly warm, but there is a determined umbrella-demolishing wind, and gallons and gallons of rain sloshing down. Partly I did not want to go out to work this evening because Mark discovered halfway through the afternoon that I had left the window open on my taxi. I am hoping it will have dried by the next time I need to get in it but I know it won’t really, and also that I will have forgotten by then, and will have a consequent nasty surprise.
Still, that is tomorrow’s problem.
Can you tell that my thoughts have taken a Cambridgy sort of turn again? I have quite surprised myself with my own poetic lyricism, except it isn’t my own, obviously, it is inspired quotations from other, more successful poets.
It is not difficult to be a more successful poet than I am.
Certainly Shakespeare managed it.
