My visitors have arrived.
As I think I told you, Lucy and Jack are staying with me for a few days.
It is supposed to be a holiday, but in true Lake District style, as soon as people heard that Jack was coming up for a couple of days, he was instantly offered work, and so he disappeared early this morning and was not seen again for the whole day.
I did not emerge until considerably later, and Lucy came with me on the walk over the fells. This was a happy start to the day, although I barely looked at anything because I was so busy chatting, and came back down uncomfortably aware that I had not given the wonderful autumn colours a single thought.
After the walk we had cake for breakfast. You know all about this cake so I will not bore you with further details here, but it was a most satisfactory breakfast, almost, although not quite, as good as porridge and yoghurt, and after we had finished we had an Expedition.
Somebody in Grasmere had put a message on the Grasmere Local page on the mighty Internet the other day, telling the world that they had a dresser which they no longer wanted and which they would like to give away to anybody who was short of a dresser but in possession of a substantial vehicle in which to shift it.
When I thought about it I realised that I qualified on both counts.
I am not short of dressers. I have got two very beautiful ones inherited from grandparents, but Lucy has just moved into a house and likes the idea of having some more cupboard space in which to dump her rapidly increasing collection of junk.
When I sent her the picture she thought it was magnificent, and agreed that it would make a very perfect addition to her house.
Hence today we flattened the back seats down in my taxi, which is fairly substantial, being a Citroen Berlingo with a huge boot space, and chugged off through the autumn mists to Grasmere.
The dresser was in a little guest house at the foot of Dunmail Raise.
It was bigger than it had looked in its picture, the dresser, not the guest house, obviously.
It weighed a very lot.
Of course the intention had been to bring Jack with us, but for all his muscle might have been useful, we could not possibly have fitted three of us in the car along with the enormous dresser, so we thought it was probably just as well that we hadn’t.
We shoved and tugged and heaved, and finally dumped it in the back of the taxi, with millimeters to spare.
The boot just about closed.
Getting it out at the other end was quite another thing.
Jack was home by then, and volunteered to help. Between us we shoved and tugged and heaved all over again, and managed to scrape it out of the car.
Then we hoisted it up and lugged it painfully into the house.
We were going to put it in the living room, but it was too big to go around the corner.
We began to wonder if it would go in Lucy’s house at all, because there is not a very big manoeuvring space around the door.
In the end we decided that that problem would wait for another day. We stood the dresser in the kitchen, because of there being absolutely no space for it anywhere else at all, and there isn’t really space in the kitchen, every task now seems to involve some uncomfortable squeezing around a dresser and tripping over the dogs.
Jack’s father has got a van and has very kindly agreed to drive up on Sunday and collect it, because there is not the smallest ghost of a possibility that it could be jammed into Jack’s small convertible Saab, even if they left the top down.
It is a very nice dresser, so that is all right.
It will look magnificent in their living room.
If they can get it through the door, that is.
LATE NIGHT ADDITION
Lots of thanks to the very nice lady who reads these pages, but whose name I am sorry to say that I don’t know, and who joined in the fray this evening with a very shouty customer who was being reluctantly ejected from my taxi. She helpfully removed his pizza from the front seat and insisted that he departed, which he did, with a very lot of bawling.
The reason for their ejection was that he had asked me to pick his girlfriend up from Dominos, which I did, only to discover that apart from a leather jacket and shirt, she was wearing nothing else at all. I have been a taxi driver far too long to be surprised by this sort of sartorial choice, and when she dumped some garment on the floor I ignored her.
Her boyfriend wondered why she had removed her trousers.
She explained, in rather robust Anglo-Saxon terms, that she had just taken them off for an impromptu outdoor bathroom visit and accidentally leaked all over them.
They were in front of the heater. As the smell began to drift through I decided that some odours are even beyond the capacity of In Car Air Fresheners, and stopped and required them to get out. They were less than enthusiastic about this, until the above-mentioned lady opened the door and helpfully offered her encouragement.
The two went, but with poor grace.
They were still at the taxi rank when I got back, and bellowed with rage when they recognised me, but fortunately somebody flagged me from the other side of the road.
You must love your job, people say to me.
Just living the dream, I assure them.
