Food for thought

It has been Mother’s Day and I have been beset by good wishes from my offspring, one of which, from Number One Daughter, included a book voucher for Waterstones. This pleased me very much indeed and I am pleased to say that it has rendered the not-competition a draw. Congratulations to you both.

It is so long since I have had spare book-money that I am not exactly sure what I want to do with it, and have wasted the last hour on the taxi rank lost in literary contemplation on Google.

Actually it was not very literary. Literary literature generally involves agonising investigations of the author’s sense of despairing gloom, usually written without sufficient attention to grammar and the correct placing of capital letters. My preferred type of literature rarely gets more contemplative than the Thursday Murder Club. Also I like to know what happens in the end. One of the books we were obliged to read for the course involved a prolonged story which declined to tell us what happened in the end, and invited us to use our creative faculties to work it out for ourselves. Fortunately I had purchased it second-hand, at a bargain rate, presumably since nobody else wanted to read it either, but I still felt terribly cheated out of my £1.99, and thought that the author was an idle rotter. This put me in a minority of one when the rest of the class waxed lyrical about what a brilliant concept this had been. I defended my low-brow principles throughout, but I don’t think anybody was convinced.

I am going to tell people what happens in the end of my story, and have been stumping about on the fells this afternoon considering it.

It was the afternoon because I did not get up sufficiently early to think anything this morning. I worked until late and was still snoring at half past ten, after which I chucked the washing into the machine and trudged off up the hills. I do not have coffee in the mornings now that Mark is not here. It takes up too much time in a very busy day, and in any case the dogs know that they are going to go out soon, and get impatient. Impatient dogs are a nuisance. They mill about under my feet with their tails waving until one of them decides to leap on the other and then they have a fight. This is not a tranquil way to greet the day.

I don’t eat breakfast until I get back, by which time I am generally ravenous. We eat breakfast in the office. I take mine up on a plate and read the newspaper and my emails whilst I am eating it, and Rosie brings hers up a mouthful at a time and then drops it on the carpet for a leisurely picnic at my feet. Roger Poopy does not bring anything up at all, but sits in lofty idleness beside Rosie and eats half of her picnic. She has to scamper up and down the stairs a dozen times, with her mouth full of dog biscuits to be spat out and shared. If I were kindly I would bring her dish up, but she is a terribly messy eater, so I won’t.

Mark rang to tell me about his oil rig adventures. He watched a seal eating a stingray. He said it was flappy, and difficult to manage, and a seagull kept trying to join in. The seals had brought their breakfast up to eat beside the oil rig so that they could watch what was going on, like me with the morning newspaper.

I had peanut butter sandwiches. One of the other taxi drivers is also newly single as well. He lives with his sister who has gone away for a while, and so he is also living on a diet of peanut butter sandwiches, with occasional cheese on toast intervals when I feel like a cooked dinner. We have been sitting together on the taxi rank discussing the various satisfactions of living alone.

I am not at all lonely or bored, although I will be pleased when Mark comes back, not least because of my taxi’s continuing and tiresome squeak. We have discussed this on the taxi rank and reached the consensus that a squeak is nothing to worry about until it becomes a clunk. That is the moment when I will have to go down to visit Robin at Troutbeck Bridge garage, who does moonlight repairs in between garage shifts, and beg for some assistance, but I am sanguine about this. Mark will be back in a couple of weeks and will have nothing more pressing to do than investigate squeaks and occasionally take me out to dinner.

It will be a very fine moment.