Toujours la même chose…

And it is all over, and I am back on the taxi rank.

I am sanguine about this. It is all very lovely to be academic but we still need to make cash, and as far as I can tell, all of our lecturers are flat broke the whole of the time. We are flat broke as well, but that is because it is February. Things will get better.

Still, it is very odd to think that I woke up this morning in my little college room in Cambridge, checking my pigeon-hole for post and being polite to the porters. The porters seem to know everything about everything. It does not do to upset them. They are the gatekeepers with the keys to the kingdom, and know exactly who you are and where you are supposed to be as soon as you make the first genteel attention-catching cough at their window.

I was sorry to leave, of course I was. It has been a splendid time and I have thoroughly enjoyed every single minute, but the days have flown past at a speed that would do credit to a taxi driver in a hurry on a deserted road. My week disappeared so very fast, I feel as though I have hardly managed to achieve anything, although of course I have written things practically all day every day.

I will have a look when I go home to see if I can work out what I have achieved.

In fact I am still on my own even now, because Mark has gone to help Lucy move in to her new house. I called in on them on my way past this afternoon, and found them in a complete tizz of not being able to get the electric meter to work because it needed a card, and not being able to get the gas meter to work because the last tenant buzzed off owing millions of pounds, and not being able to put the bed together because the leg had broken off, and so on and so on. They fixed all of these things, slowly, during the course of the afternoon, and when I spoke to Mark this evening they had had fish and chips for dinner and were feeling more tranquil.

I unpacked some things and was helpful for a little while, but of course had to buzz off in the end because of work., and arrived home in the quiet darkness, when I had to start rushing about because I was late for work.

In fact I had hardly been in the house for two minutes when somebody rang up and wondered if I might come and get them in the taxi, so I abandoned everything and dashed off out to make my first fiver.

Obviously I came straight back. I lit the fire then, and made a flask of tea, and put some of my Cambridge clothes in the washing machine before I came back to work.

I am still wearing Cambridge clothes, which feels very peculiar. They are much like my normal clothes, except they are smart and tidy and ironed, without frayed bits or paint splashes, but I still feel as though I am dressed for Learning.

It is a bit strange to be home by myself, especially because I really am by myself. Lucy has got her cats back, and the dogs are in the camper van with Mark, and I do not need to have the smallest worry about standing in an accident, unless it turns out that Mark was not being very observant before he left.

He has painted the bathroom ceiling. I was very pleased indeed with this, it looks so sophisticated and civilised that I rang him up this evening and suggested that we had some gold taps to complete the picture. He said he thought he had seen a gold rail for a shower curtain in B&Q so that will have to do, but it is very splendid indeed. It is dark green, and looks really quite startlingly middle-class. I chose it myself, ages and ages ago, and Mark thinks it looks dark, but it doesn’t.

I am so pleased that I would not mind even if I found lots of other things that he had forgotten to do, which I haven’t. I am most impressed, because whilst I have been away he has been working during the day doing rural broadband, and working all night in the taxi, so I have no idea how he has managed it.

I am going to have to start managing things as well now.

The builders have left a huge pile of firewood in the alley.

Guess what I am going to do tomorrow.