I am on Mark’s tiresome computer again.
This is because he is not on the taxi rank but at home, bashing the loft about. It is not finished.
He is not going to finish it tomorrow either because he has got to go and earn some money. He says that he will try and get it done when he comes home, so tomorrow is going to be a long night.
I am not sorry that he is going to be out of the way for a day really. It will give me a chance to clear all of the mess up. This will be my last clean before Oliver comes home next week, and I want to make everywhere look shiny and polished in time for Christmas. It is difficult to do this when Mark is in the house. He seems to exude sawdust in the way that Tinker Bell sprinkles glitter.
Everywhere is in grave need of a sweep and hoover by now, because it is That Time Of Year and the dogs have had their seasonal Christmas delight of a bowl of walnuts, two, actually, because they finished the first in a single day, although fortunately the novelty is beginning to wear off now. They are inexplicably passionate about these, and every carpet has been made perilous for the barefoot, because it is strewn with millions of shards of walnut shell.
Roger has never truly grasped that it is important to share, and he growls at Rosie whenever she tiptoes up to the bowl to pick a walnut for herself. He has got several, tucked into his cushion, at which she has been casting longing glances, but he is immovable, walnuts are for sensible grown-up dogs only. Small excitable idiots need not apply.
Of course we have been explaining to him that it is far more blessed to give than to receive, but I am not certain that he is listening, and we have had to resort to passing the bowl over his head so that Rosie can get her nose into it. Roger is, in any case, beset with gloom because Lucy went back this afternoon.
It has been very splendid to have her at home, although she has been weary after all of her new adventures, for a young person she has got a very lot to be worrying about.
In fact I think they all do rather well for young people. I carry young people in my taxi all of the time, and some of them make me feel very glad that I will probably be dead by the time they start running the world. I took a little group the other night, a young couple who had dumped their three week old baby on its grandparents for the weekend, and a chap, who was equally youthful but had still been invited to take on the weighty responsibility of godfather to the abandoned infant.
In the wonderfully egotistical way of young people, who can’t imagine anything more interesting than their own concerns, the couple were talking about their baby. The young godfather was equally smitten with its charms, although none of them were so smitten that they were actually staying at home and looking after it instead of buzzing off to the Lake District for the weekend. The couple fondly imagined that the godfather’s family would like nothing more than for them to bring their baby round to visit them, in order that they might be permitted to admire it.
The godfather said that he was sure that nothing could be more delightful. Then he frowned.
They must not under any circumstances, he said, take the baby to visit his grandmother, oh no, absolutely not. That would be absolutely unsuitable. It was not at all a fit place for children. Dreadful. Completely and absolutely to be avoided in all circumstances.
I was only eavesdropping and so could not ask why, but fortunately the couple saved me the bother.
The young man shook his head sorrowfully.
She smokes, he confessed sadly.
Unbelievable as it might seem, he continued, sometimes, when the weather is really bad, she even smokes in the house and stands with the door open, as if that was enough. No, I’m afraid a child could not ever be taken there.
The young couple gasped in horrified agreement, and I gasped with the effort of not laughing. No priest in a confessional could have sounded more doleful about the wickedness of others.
He sighed.
She doesn’t do it maliciously, he explained, in the way a low-budget barrister might explain that a mass murderer was regrettably suffering from an undiagnosed personality disorder at the time of the killings. She’s just old. She’s sixty. She just doesn’t know any better.
One day these people will run the world, I reflected, as I left them at their hotel.
I wondered if their baby was missing them.
