None of last night’s seriously intoxicated after-midnight customers noticed, let alone complained, about the sudden imposition of Double Time taxi fares.
I have, however, just transported one irate whinger who was so infuriated that he demanded my name and taxi details in order to make a complaint to the council, all of which I willingly supplied, along with the council’s telephone number. They don’t answer telephone calls but he can find that out for himself.
I was entirely sanguine about the whole ranting episode, because I have made £23.60 for a ten minute journey. I like double time very much.
It is quiet now, and the hordes have departed back to Newcastle and Wigan and Liverpool. I am not sorry about this. There was even litter on our fell walk this morning, and I like it best when there are still things to buy in the shops.
Lucy has come to stay with me for a few days, which is lovely. We were both supposed to be doing college work this afternoon but we didn’t. We were so exhausted, she after a busy weekend protecting the public from wickedness, and me after a busy weekend extracting their cash, we both went to sleep instead.
This was a bit difficult in my case because it is Clean Sheets Day, so my bed was stripped and the duvet cover was steaming above the stove because of the rain. I slept in it anyway, I was so tired that I could have slept in the dogs’ bed, along with all the bits of chewed up stick and the residual revolting smell. It was daylight by the time I got to bed last night, and some tiresome bird was tweeting its head off in the front garden, but I did not care and slept soundly until some tiresome chap wanting to talk about diesel emissions telephoned at nine o’clock this morning.
It is a good job you cannot do violence to people over the telephone otherwise I would be in prison by now. I could not go back to sleep then, because of worrying about suits and shirts and credit cards, and so I got up, wearily, and stripped the sheets off for the washing.
I even dusted, although it was not a sort of dusting that my grandmother would have recognised, more a cursory sort of wipe, done without enthusiasm with the facecloth out of the bathroom, which still turned a rather depressing shade of grey. I did not hoover, it was just too difficult. I am planning a thorough sleep tonight and then perhaps hoovering will become possible again.
We had our walk over the fells, all tinged with anxiety because Lucy realised halfway round that she had lost her telephone. This was a moment of panic, not least because her telephone did not then know that she had been virtuously exceeding her recommended number of steps and would still think she was indolently sitting in her bedroom drinking coffee and eating biscuits.
We walked around the fells and then went back to the beginning and started again but the telephone was nowhere to be seen. We gave up eventually, and trailed back down, much to the confusion of the dogs. Roger Poopy was so surprised and unsettled by the whole unpredictable misadventure that he spent the next hour sucking Rosie’s fur in distress.
Lucy found the telephone in the kitchen where she had put it when she put her jacket on, so that worked out all right in the end, and we had even had some bonus exercise, albeit unobserved by her all-seeing telephone, into the bargain.
It counts her steps and then tells her she ought to go for a last trot around the garden before bedtime if she hasn’t done enough. I would have dumped it in a bucket of water by now, how infuriatingly patronising.
I am sorry to have to report that I am still not thin.
Perhaps I ought to discuss it with my telephone.
