I am having a Difficult Night.
It is dreadful.
I am in Mark’s taxi, and it is Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong.
Everything is in the wrong place, the ceiling light has been replaced by a stick-on torch, you can’t turn on the engine unless you have got your foot on the clutch, and there is nowhere to put anything. My flask is not neatly stowed on the overhead shelf but is rattling around underneath my seat. For some reason the manufacturers of Toledos did not see fit to install useful shelving over the top of the driver’s head, or even a handy cupboard between the two front seats, both of which useful assets can be boasted by my taxi.
I don’t know why anybody has ever bought anything else.
Presumably Mark is having an even worse time than I am. He is not in a taxi at all, but is underneath one. This is my taxi, obviously, which has got its MOT tomorrow, and is not in a good way.
It isn’t that there is anything huge wrong with it. Rather there are a dozen small things wrong with it, all of which involve taking other bits off in order to get to them and to mend them.
So far he has fixed the windscreen washer and the boot catch, he has welded up the exhaust and when I left him he was beginning to poke a screwdriver at some wires to find out why the ABS light is on.
It is on because there is a broken wire, the challenge is to find out which wire it is.
It is taking a long time because he had to go to the scrap yard for some new bits first. Obviously he had to disengage the bits from their previous owners before he brought them home to attach them to my taxi, and these things are not quick.
I am beginning to think these pages should be called The MOT Diaries. MOTs seem to happen even more often than dusting.
In fact dusting happened today as well, although not as much as perhaps there should have been. I took advantage of Mark’s absence to do all of the tedious domestic chores that should have been done on Monday when instead I was meeting Mark at the airport, being dusting and sausage-cooking and watering the poor neglected conservatory.
I even cleaned out the air purifiers. These are peculiar fan-like machines whose task it is to remove dust from the air. I didn’t think that they did very much until I cleaned them out today, but I can promise you, if I had inhaled all of that lot I would have been coughing like a bat-flu sufferer. The filters were wearing a disgustingly thick fluffy coat of black grime, sucked in from the fire, and saved in order to demonstrate their usefulness to me when I finally put sufficient effort into housework to investigate.
It has actually been rather a splendid day, cold and crisp and clean, which is good not only for taxi-fixing, but also for ambling thoughtfully about the fells with the dogs, which is what I did whilst Mark was at the scrap yard. I was pleased to have the sunshine, because I was a trifle downcast this morning, as we have only got a very few days before Mark leaves again.
He is off to the North Sea on Sunday. It feels as though he has only just arrived but already it is almost over.
We are going to have a night off tomorrow. Tomorrow night there will be nothing taxi-related. We are going to loaf about the house with a home made mango butter chicken curry, because we can’t quite afford the sort in the Indian restaurant yet, it is still only January.
We might even watch a film.
