Well, goodness me, we have had some adventures since last I wrote to you.
As you might be aware from various news organisations, Cumbria is currently buried under about fourteen feet of snow. Unlike almost everything else the BBC has said recently, that is actually true. We are Winterfell, we are the Cumbrian Pole, we are Nanook of the North.
To begin at the beginning, even though we are not Welsh I can say that if I like. Also nobody cares about stealing lines from the Welsh, since they introduced their twenty miles an hour speed limit we will never go there anyway, they would have to invade before I took any notice of them again.
Things started to go right when the Gods took a kindly interest in us on Friday night. We were sitting on the taxi rank doing almost completely nothing and shivering in the December lack of ambient warmth, when at half past eleven a chap came up to Mark’s taxi and said: Take me to Lincoln.
Mark rang me and wondered how much that might cost, but since I didn’t even know where Lincoln was I couldn’t help. I am embarrassed to admit that, I have got an O Level in Geography and everything, but I didn’t have the first idea.
Mark said that it was somewhere underneath Hull, and he set off.
After that there was no point in my shirking off early and I stayed out at work until three, after which I came home, tidied up, emptied the dogs and did some of my university prep work, I don’t know if I mentioned that I am doing a Master’s’s’ degree at Cambridge, but I am and sometimes I have some prep to do. I do this in between doing stacks of other busy things, usually on the taxi rank in between customers, I don’t suppose this is something that many Cambridge students do but it works for me.
in the end I went to bed at around five. The cats were upset to see that I was on my own and came to keep me company. By about six o’clock I got fed up with batting them off because they were sticking their claws in my ears and just went to sleep anyway.
Mark got home at about seven.
He had made a very lot of money, and I thought with relief that we would be able to mend the camper van and pay the credit card.
He said that there were little flurries of snow.
We woke up not very much later, at about half past ten, and the world had become white.
It carried on getting whiter and whiter all day.
It got whiter and whiter and whiter and whiter. It snowed and snowed and snowed, until we stopped being excited and started looking at it with a small, although still mildly pleasurable, thrill of trepidation.
After that it snowed a lot more, and all the roads closed.
This is not great when you are a taxi driver, and Saturday night’s pub takings are virtually your only source of income in the winter. We could not work. In any case we were so exhausted after the night before, we went to bed and slept for twelve hours.
I don’t know what it has said on the BBC but take it from me as being one who is pure of heart with no political agenda whatsoever, we have had about a foot of snow, probably because of Global Warming, it is everybody else’s fault for not recycling their plastic bags, the rotters.
Oh no, that was the BBC’s line. No, I meant to say: We have had a foot of snow, because sometimes the world is just like that. Probably it is because of the Israelis.
No, that was also the BBC line. I had better stop trying to come up with explanations and just tell you what it is like. I think the best reporting does this.
After it had snowed all day yesterday, today the world has frozen. The massive piles of snow everywhere where people have been trying to dig themselves out have set hard as rocks.
Mark went out this morning to try and dig desperate people out of the car park. I fed a cold and hungry lady on tea and toast. Lucy packed up and bravely fought her way through the snow to get to Manchester because she starts her new job tomorrow. She telephoned and said that once she got to the motorway there wasn’t anything to bother about. It seems that there isn’t any snow anywhere else, it is just here.
Mark said this afternoon that there was no point in risking both of the taxis, and so he has been working on his own. He has managed to get everywhere but it has been excruciatingly slow.
This is the thing. If we hadn’t had the run to Lincoln on Friday we would have been broke and utterly desperate by now. The Gods have looked after us like I can hardly tell you.
We are solvent. Lucy has got to her new job in plenty of time. We are warm and safe with our splendid log fire. Everything here is just fine.
I am going to go and light another grateful candle.
