In the end last night turned out rather nicely.
I had a fairly quiet night, and was just about to get bored and slope off when one of them other drivers came across. He had got a job going to Preston, and he wondered if I would cover his company’s work, so of course I agreed.
This turned out rather splendidly, not least because one of the first jobs was a drug run for some hotel staff.
If ever you order a taxi, just to pick up something from your mate and then to come straight back again, especially in the middle of the night, the taxi driver will know, although certainly not care, that you are probably going to purchase some drugs.
Especially since there are some addresses which have a lot of mates just dropping in for a minute or two and then going away again.
Last night’s drug dealer was slow, and the meter was running, and it clocked up forty quid by the time the kitchen porter was back at his hotel room, presumably clutching a handful of ganja. I was very pleased about this, the forty quid, not the ganja, obviously, and it cheered up my whole night. He was a nice kitchen porter, and told me stories about his time in prison, for assault not drugs, and we agreed that it was a good job he had not punched the sous-chef that afternoon.
After that there were several intoxicated persons, because there was a party at the nightclub, and it was the small hours of the morning before I trundled back home again, feeling unexpectedly wealthy.
It was raining. I did not want to take the dogs off around the Library Gardens for their late-night emptying, because it was very wet indeed. I mean lashing sort of wet, the sort that stings your face and trickles down the back of your neck. It was so wet that the rain bashed its way in through a corner of the conservatory roof later and trickled down the wall into a plug socket, so when I woke up this morning we did not have electricity.
Oliver said later that it had gone off halfway through his shower, but fortunately he was pretty much rinsed off, so it didn’t matter.
It has been his last day. Tomorrow he is going to go back to school. He celebrated the occasion by going next door, where our very kind next door neighbour has been helping him with his A Level revision and had promised to talk through twenty-five-mark questions with him. In an act of divine thoughtfulness, we happen to live next door to one of the senior markers for A Level Business Studies, and he has been encouraging Oliver to be clear and precise and not to fill his answers with wittering. I was very grateful, and with any luck he will do brilliantly well in the exam and Cambridge will be very sorry he has not applied to them for a place.
Talking of Cambridge, I have occupied much of my day with work I am trying to get done before class on Wednesday. I don’t know if I mentioned that I am studying for a Master’s’s’ degree at Cambridge, well, I am. I have almost finished, to my enormous sadness, I would very much like to carry on writing essays and thinking hard and seriously about utterly inconsequential literary trivia for the rest of my life, but of course it is not to be. We are at the end. I am busily dissertating in every spare minute I have, although I suspect I could do with listening to our neighbour a bit and take the advice he is offering to Oliver.
I managed to dry the Clean Sheets in the yard, because it will not have escaped your attention that it is Monday again, how quickly they come around. This was done in several episodes, all of which ended in the cliff-hanging moment of whether or not I would get them indoors before they were actually drenched again, but when the sun did appear the wind blew so helpfully that eventually they dried, and I forgave the Weather Gods, who after all need something to amuse them in Windermere in April.
After that we have been packing. We have filled an enormous suitcase with shirts and socks and underwear, so much that when we tried to get it downstairs the wheels buckled. I shall be sad to lose him. He is very helpful and is good company, and doesn’t mind that my catering abilities rarely stretch beyond pizza.
At least it won’t be raining at Gordonstoun. Mark is up there and said that the weather is pretty good.
He is going to have a nasty surprise when he gets back here.
