I have been doing bills.
I have discovered that without the presence of Mark and Oliver, the electricity bill has dropped from a hundred and seventy quid to eighty four.
They haven’t even been gone for a whole month.
The water bill has dropped from fifty five quid to forty.
I am trying not to think how lovely it is to be on my own.
Even better than that, I unearthed the council tax bill, which had been inaccessibly buried under a mass of online passcodes and Personal Numbers and Memorable Words and Usernames, and discovered, to my profound astonishment, that we had paid it.
We had even, generously, given them a bit too much.
I might add a bit more to it, because they always send us the first bill of the year in the middle of March when we have never got any money, so it might be sensible to fob them off until the tourists reappear in the warmer weather in April.
I hope it will be warmer weather. Last April was rubbish. Nobody came for ages.
This week, however, which has been balmily sunny and warm, has seen us trampled under a stampede of tourists. I do not mind tourists, as long as they drive at a reasonable speed and do not chug along at five miles an hour admiring the Langdale Pikes in the distance and marvelling at the sunshine on the lake. In fact, this week their presence has been quite encouraging, because as soon as the sun disappeared it became chilly, the way it does in September, and they had all come out in their underwear and wanted a taxi home.
Most of the other taxi drivers had got bored by half past ten, and I had actually made sufficient profit to pay for the MOT and even had change to collect my funeral clothes from the dry cleaner.
I do like the dry cleaner’s. They have lots of fascinating machinery, hissing and steaming and pressing and churning out beautifully flat pillowcases and curtains. I especially liked a cupboard into which they propelled a tall dummy wearing my jacket, and which brought it out again without a single crease. I would like one at home. I would never need to faff about ironing things again.
I liked the huge rolling machine as well. I have got one of those but it is so difficult to haul it out of the cupboard that I never bother. We would need to build an extension and leave it out all the time.
Maybe one day.
I have also had a happy adventure.
I can’t remember if I told you that when we brought the camper van home after its long crumble in my mother’s driveway, we could not park it in its usual place on Ellerthwaite Square, in the middle of the village, because there were lots of other cars parked there.
It takes up a space and a half, so you have got to have a lot of room.
We shoved it on a back street, but it was miles away and I have been feeling sad about it. I like to pass it regularly when I am at work. I can look at it and feel happy and remember that one day we will go on holiday.
Last night, at around ten o’clock, as if by magic, its parking space reappeared.
I was more excited than I can tell you. I swerved my taxi into it and jammed on the brakes, carefully making sure that it was occupying every single inch of space, like a husband in bed.
I ignored an importunate couple who trotted up begging me to take them to Bowness in my taxi, and dashed off to run around the Library Gardens to the spot where the camper van had been abandoned.
This was an anxious moment for lots of reasons.
It had been parked on a hill, facing upwards, and it did not have a handbrake, because Mark has not done that yet, and also he had gloomily proclaimed that it probably would not start and I would need jump leads.
I do not have any jump leads. The camper might be secreting some, but I do not know where they are.
It is not easy to start something that is in gear whilst keeping one’s foot firmly stamped on the brake.
Fortunately Mark, anticipating this difficulty, had left it jammed against the kerb.
Even more fortunately, it started.
I was so pleased I drove all the wrong way around the one-way car park in order to get it out as fast as I could, but it did not let me down.
A couple of minutes later it was back in its own home.
I was more pleased than I could say.
Little by little my world is becoming all right.
