So we are into 2024. The celebratory season is now almost over, and I can promise you that I am feeling very relieved.
It has all been lovely but I have been looking forward to January. January is the month when we have our actual holiday. Christmas is all very splendid but could not be described as a holiday, no matter how creatively one might define holidays.
Indeed, I do not think that there is a time of year when we could be busier. Quite apart from the adventure of visitors and catering, there are presents to be wrapped, theatre visits to be organised, cards to be manufactured and posted, and of course, several taxi-driving bank holidays which require our fullest attention.
With that in mind we crawled into bed at the end of the New Year celebrations, and slept until half past one this afternoon. The consequence of this was that it had already gone dark by the time I had managed to organise breakfast. If we do not get some reasonable daylight quite soon I should think we will start incubating rickets.
The children are not very much better than we are. They celebrated the New Year last night with a small house party which included themselves and Elspeth’s daughter and an enormous pile of board games. I loathe board games, and card games as well, with an irrational passion which I can hardly put into words here, and so the children have never really played any. In consequence they are always disproportionately pleased whenever anybody else suggests them.
They are allowed to play them if they like. I would rather have a trip to the dentist. Or be required to Explain My Workings to the Inland Revenue. Or read Ulysses . Or have a New Year’s Day swim in the lake. Or clean dog poo off my shoes. You get the idea.
We went to work whilst they shuffled cards or threw dice or whatever it was that they did, and then we assembled together in Bowness for the fireworks at midnight.
I love fireworks. Especially modern fireworks, which are so utterly brilliantly spectacular. If ever there was an event to which I would like to invite my ten-year-old self, it would be the New Year’s Eve fireworks. This year they were so splendid that they made me cry, and I had to wipe my eyes hastily before we started loading drunk people again and telling them heartlessly that it was double time, and that taxi drivers do not get seasonal goodwill.
We did not do seasonal goodwill tonight either, especially since it was still double time. We have had a woman trailing hopefully around the taxi rank who had a black eye and was dripping blood all over the place. She explained that her husband did it and so she would like to escape from him in a free taxi back to Liverpool, an invitation which we all heartlessly declined. We suggested that she called her mother, the police or an ambulance, or all three, but none of those fitted the bill, she wanted a taxi. In the end, after some frantic telephone calling, she managed to coerce some poor, backboneless sap from Liverpool to drive all the way up here to come and get her, at which point she wandered off into the night. I saw a taxi with a Liverpool plate on it some hours afterwards, circling around emptily, probably she had passed out under a bench by then.
Charity begins at home, and if you are a Liverpool taxi driver really it, and you, ought to stay there.
Happy New Year to all, that’s what I say.
