I am finding it very difficult to be polite to taxi customers this evening.
This is because I am perfectly contented, sitting here in my taxi in the evening sunshine. I have got my flask of chai and my book, and have no wish whatsoever to go anywhere at all.
Irritatingly, people keep coming up and wanting me to take them to places. I am agreeing, reluctantly, but feel no obligation to give them the benefit of my conversation into the bargain, and am limiting my responses to the occasional grunt. In any case I do not see why people keep telling me that the sun is shining, as if I couldn’t see it for myself. They can even see that I know already, because I am wearing my shorts.
It is wearisome. I think perhaps I would have been better to stay at home.
Obviously I would not have earned any money there, which is why I didn’t.
Still I have had a very happy day, until other people joined in, obviously. It started at a bit of a run because it was Clean Sheets Day, and I was trying to get everything washed before I went for my walk: and in my haste I made the colossal error of judgement of putting Oliver’s school sheets in with mine.
Oliver’s school bedding is all bright red. This was because the Gordonstoun laundry just dumps all bedding in massive sacks back at Duffus House, and boys have got to dig through it to find their own. You can imagine the resulting scrum.
After the first term, when Oliver lost all of his sheets, we purchased some new sets in red, so that he could find them instantly even in the most disorganised puddle of laundry all over the Duffus House pool table. This worked brilliantly, and his laundry could be easily located from that moment onwards.
I thought that after five years of being regularly boiled in the school laundry its leaking days would have been over, and so shoved it in with ours, but regrettably I was mistaken. Every single item of laundry came out a delicate shade of pink.
This was especially irritating because I do not bother to wash Mark’s pillowcases whilst he is not here. There does not seem any point since he is not using them.
Now his pillowcases are still a subtle shade of spring green, and mine are Embarrassment Pink.
I have pondered what I should do about this but failed to find a solution which does not involve the purchase of new bed linen, so probably when I have saved up a bit I will employ that one. Oliver can have the pink sheet on his own bed, because his sheet is too small anyway, and it will more or less match his quilt.
Ho hum.
Once I had shoved the laundry in the machine we hurried off over the fell. I was rushing because I wanted to dash back and write my dissertation, which is due to be submitted in a few days, and so time for faffing about is more or less over. It is written, really. I know I am flapping about it, but I could send it in its present state and still expect a fairly reasonable mark.
Obviously I wouldn’t dream of doing that, though. It must be polished to a finely glowing sheen, and so these last days are to be occupied doing exactly that.
I occupied a very contented afternoon, reading and re-reading, changing the structures of sentences and adding or deleting the odd word here and there, a sort of literary nit-picking, which I enjoyed very much.
By the end of the afternoon I had hit the word count exactly with both pieces, which I found remarkably satisfying, in an obsessive, anal sort of way. We are allowed an extra five hundred words over the mark on one piece, three hundred on the other, and I had finished up precisely with that.
I even started working my way through the bibliography, which was a wobbly sort of affair involving considerable balancing on the stool to tug books off the high shelves. In the end it proved so perilous that it became easier just to look publication dates up online.
It would not be good to have a plummet, however the literary world might benefit. It might be some time before anybody found me.
I am planning to finish it off tomorrow.
If there is no diary entry tomorrow night you could consider calling an ambulance.
