I have had a university class today. I am doing a Master’s’s’ degree at Cambridge, you know, and today I had an online Zoom class.
This needed a lot of planning. I had to leave a note on the door telling Amazon just to dump their parcel of camper van tap-valves on the doorstep and then creep away silently. I had to tell Mark that he was not to ask for sausage sandwiches, tea or physical affection all afternoon. The course bit was only two hours really but I thought I would have a bit of peace.
After that I had to make a pot of tea, collect my prepared work together and produce sufficient Zen to be settled and calm and impressive in front of my computer. Obviously this did not work and when the camera switched on I was disappointed to find that I still looked exactly like a mad and harassed elderly lady in ridiculous orange dungarees with a cat pacing back and forth in front of her.
I did have the tea, however, which was splendid, although stupidly I forgot to crank the fire up and so by the end of the course I was absolutely frozen from sitting still and trying to look intellectual for two hours.
Mark was frozen as well but that was because he was outside in the road mending his taxi.
He is going to work on it for a bit longer this evening whilst I am at work. The Weather page on my telephone says that it is quite warm in Windermere, but it is a complete and utter lie, the writers must be ex-BBC journalists, either that or they have not been outside today, because we have got another hard frost and everywhere is white and glittering. The mounds of snow piled on the sides of the roads are filthy, but absolutely rock hard, as if some huge monster had emptied a sack of glacial boulders over Windermere. The heap of snow beside the camper van is taller than I am. It is not clement weather.
We went to get our Christmas tree tonight, and despite my sheepskin boots and fur coat I was still shivering. The men had lit an enormous flaming brazier, which smelled of smoky pine, and I huddled beside it whilst Mark loaded the tree into the back of the taxi. It was rather splendid really, the skies were clear and endless and black, and the frozen snow looked whiter in the dark. It was lovely to have the Christmas tree. Another year, and we are still here.
The other thing that we did today was to get our taxi medicals done. I am telling you this here so that if the Council lose the paperwork in a couple of years time and pretend that we are un-certified non-medicated illegals, I can make a triumphant check back through these pages and produce the evidence with a flourish. They did this last year and almost put us out of business until their mistake was conclusively shouted at them, so I do not want to take any risks.
It was a very nice medical. It was not our own doctor but a very nice locum doctor who shared our opinions about it being very important to be able to decide not to come to work if one wishes. We agreed, in a mutually self-congratulatory way, that being wage slaves was no way to live, although I have earned so little in my carefree commitmentless existence lately that my opinions might come to modify a little soon unless things improve.
Anyway, we chatted to the doctor for ages, because it cost two hundred and fifty quid so we were all in agreement that we ought to get our money’s worth, and the doctor added that he might have to do something worse if he wasn’t chatting to us. You will be pleased to hear that we have passed with a clean bill of health and neither of us is too fat or too blood-pressured or anything else dodgy. All we have to do now is to find another five hundred quid to give to the council and we will be able to be taxi drivers again in January.
How happy I am.
Dear Future me. It was today, 6th December, and the date is on the paperwork so don’t let the council convince you otherwise.
Stand up for yourself.
