We have had a taxi-filled weekend.
This is always a good thing because of the mortgage and the ever-astonishing electricity bill. I do not think we do very many electrical things, but it still seems to cost an absolute packet every month, and if I had been financially prescient I would have invested in an electricity company years ago.
The bills are so enormous I can’t help imagining that probably we have already done this. I expect when I finally die Octopus Energy will come and make a grateful speech at my funeral.
Anyway we have paid for this week’s electricity after a busy Saturday night, so that is another thing I don’t need to worry about.
It was a busy night. I had quite a lot of customers of the sort who say: Hello, fancy seeing you again, you took us back to our guest house the year before last, do you remember?
Obviously I don’t remember, not unless they have done something truly startling, and frankly even then I think probably I would struggle. I had some tiresome customers last night who refused to pay when requested. In this case it was a girl, of the sort who has inexplicably believed that her appearance might be improved by colouring herself orange. She was wearing a very tiny dress and had long blonde hair, sausage-shaped lips and eyelashes that could have been formed from the legs of tarantula spiders.
She leaned forward into the front, saying, with an air of triumph: You can have two quid. I’m not giving you any more. You can call the police if you like, what do you think anybody’s going to do about it? Nothing, that’s what, ha ha.
This is, regrettably true at the moment, especially this week.
This week our local constabulary is entirely occupied after the discovery of some body parts in a lay-by near Windermere campsite. They have closed the lay-by and filled it with police officers who are hunting through the long grass and litter and fallen leaves and used contraceptives and truck-driver wee to see if they could find any more.
Obviously we have all been very excited about this and have been counting our neighbours to see if anybody has become mysteriously missing, but with disappointingly boring results. The police were not supposed to be telling anybody what had happened, but this is Windermere and so of course before the last traffic cone had been put in place we all knew that it was somebody from Blackpool who was murdered by some other person from Blackpool and then dumped at a Windermere roadside in reckless defiance of the oft-repeated injunction to Take Your Litter Home.
Even more exciting, although possibly of doubtful veracity, is the story that somebody was stabbed in the Library Gardens. There is certainly some truth in this, because Mark was emptying the dogs when he encountered two youthful and doleful uniformed officers cautiously poking through the foliage with sticks. Curious to find out if this was a new and sinister turn in the council’s determination to persuade dog-owners to carry poo-bags, he asked what they were looking for. They told him mysteriously that they were not allowed to tell anybody, but he found out from a neighbour about five minutes later that they were looking for a knife hurled away from a fleeing perpetrator after some sort of brawl the previous evening.
We do not know what it was about but it sounds likely to have involved disgruntled foreigners, so we are not troubling ourselves with the details.
Hence I knew that there was no point whatsoever in troubling our Thin Blue Line with my minor taxi-related difficulties. With a sigh I turned the taxi round and explained to my customers that what I would do about it was to return them to the place where I had found them and they could jolly well walk home.
We set off, but a couple of minutes later they opened the back door to try and leap for freedom.
Obviously this is an undesirable state of affairs, so I stopped again.
The back door is a sliding variety, and had been newly-greased by Mark in his taxi-cleaning activities that very afternoon. Thus liberated it slid gracefully closed and bashed hard into the orange lady’s leg, which she had been unwisely poking through the opening.
It must have been a painful moment, even after a very great many glasses of vodka and Coke. We all gasped, except she screamed. Then, for some utterly unfathomable reason, she leaned across to her boyfriend, punched him several times, jumped out and tottered away.
He shouted something rude, and then dashed after her.
I wondered about calling the police, but thought that probably they would all be too busy picking up litter out of the long grass, and didn’t bother.
The point I was going to make was that after that I got another job and immediately forgot all about it until this evening, when I was desperately trying to think about things to tell you on these pages.
There has got to be a point to a story, I learned that at Cambridge.
I expect you are glad I was paying attention.
