It has been a day of great good fortune.
This was not because anything especially thrillingly fortunate happened, it has just been a jolly sight happier than the last few.
In the first place, it is always lovely to wake up in the morning and not to have the horrible spectre of a bank holiday, with all of its attendant trials, looming over me. Easter is over, and the extra millions of drivers have buzzed off. Obviously the council have seized the opportunity to dig up all of the roads again, the first traffic lights appeared last night at about half past eleven, and we woke up this morning to find the alley behind the house is inexplicably closed off, but these matters are but a trifle. No longer do I have to worry about hundreds of half-witted holiday makers who will hover about for ages on the pavement and then push their prams into the path of the reversing taxi. The pavements will not be splattered with a misfortunate blend of dropped toddlers’ ice creams and stag-party vomit, and the shelves in the shops are once again being replenished with bread and other useful staples.
The bank holiday visitors are all gone.
It is a lovely feeling.
The migraine is still lurking, but it is being battered into submission by a cocktail of drugs, and I have stuck a Tiger Balm plaster on my neck, just for good measure.
I am feeling up-beat rather than merely beat-up.
Things were improved when Oliver announced this morning that he had got an interview in Kendal for a new job. He is following in Lucy’s family tradition and becoming a door supervisor. This is the modern word for Bouncer, like calling a cleaner a domestic technician.
I had got a long-ordered book waiting in Waterstones for me, and was glad of the excuse to go into town and collect it.
Oliver made himself look sharply smart and polished, and I dropped him off at the security office and settled myself to wait in my taxi with a good book, a flask of chai and a box of chocolate buttons. This is my stand-by setting for much of life really, and the time was passing contentedly when another taxi pulled in next to me and asked if this was where the taxi meters were getting changed.
Taxi fares go up today.
I had forgotten this. Indeed, I had forgotten absolutely everything about it, and was quite astonished to think that such a fortunate day had arrived already.
We looked it up, and discovered that the meter-change was happening in the next lay-by along the road, and so we both hurtled off there, and before Oliver had finished being interviewed, I had a freshly-upgraded meter set to charge a newly extortionate amount of cash to people with regrettably bad legs.
This is always an ecstatic sort of moment, even if all of our customers have now buzzed off back to Wigan. Also it was nice to see the meter fitting man, with whom I have a long acquaintance after almost thirty years of taxi driving, and we exchanged stories. He asked after my Wild Daughter, and I had to have a quick mental sift through my offspring before I settled on Number Two, and updated him on her activities. He chortled heartily and said that he was always sure that she would make a million pounds one day.
He is not alone in that expectation.
When Oliver came out I did not need to ask him how he had got on, because he was wearing a new coat with the security company’s name on it, and clutching a handful of shirts and clip-on ties.
In the true style of Lake District interviews, they had said: Are you Oliver? Here’s your uniform.
He starts this weekend, and is wallowing in guilt because of leaving the pub to do their own washing up. I am quite sure they will survive without him, especially since he will be going back to school soon, but he is still feeling troubled.
All the same, he is quite certain that he will enjoy standing in the pub doorway stopping fights far more than he will enjoy standing over the kitchen sink scrubbing cauliflower cheese off plates.
When he had done we dashed into town for my book, and then home again, because he had an online webinar with the Army. I do not exactly know what a webinar is, but it sounded important, so we had got to be back, and he came out of it feeling flushed with enthusiasm for all things adventurous and military.
Norland had exactly this effect a couple of weeks ago, and he has got the police interview looming large as well, so I am expecting some excitement about police-related employment as soon as he comes out of that one.
It is such a difficult choice. He is not so much standing at a crossroads. It is more like trying to navigate his way out of Paris on a Vendredi rush hour.
I am looking forward to seeing the outcome.
