It is Sunday, and I am having a tiresomely busy evening on the taxi rank.
Whilst I am perfectly well aware that the whole point of the exercise is not just to sit here, but to drive people from here to wherever they wish to go and hence to increase our personal fortunes, it is Sunday night and it is supposed to be quiet.
I like it when it is quiet. I can sit here with my cup of tea and my book and my taxi picnic, and feel contented, in an uninterrupted sort of way.
I have been interrupted a great deal this evening.
Three times people have banged on the window whilst I have been eating my lamb-and-date taxi picnic, and then gone on, pointlessly, about not having wanted to interrupt me whilst I was eating my tea.
This infuriates me in several ways. First clearly they did want to interrupt me, because that was exactly what they did and so there is no need to fib about it to make themselves feel better. Second, it is nothing to do with them what I was doing and I would rather they did not attempt to discuss it, and third – and this one grates every time – no meal taken after about four o’clock can possibly be described as Tea. Tea is at three o’clock. Or maybe four at the latest. At eight in the evening it is dinner.
They might as well call it Elevenses.
I will not go on about it, but I can jolly well tell you that it irritates me very much. Those are probably the people who call lunch Dinner.
They are clearly insufferable oiks.
I can tell you now that I responded to all three with my best pretend-to-be-deaf reply. I ignored them completely for the entire journey.
I am, however, pleased to tell you that I have had a happily productive day. I have got half of Monday’s horrible jobs done in advance, so that Monday is only going to be half as bad as it is supposed to be. I have mopped the floors and cleaned my taxi and watered the conservatory.
Please do not imagine that the latter is some twee little fiddling about with a watering can. It is not. It is a complete nuisance and takes ages. Usually about an hour. It involves a hosepipe.
It is a small hosepipe, connected to the outside rainwater tanks via a small pump. It also runs all the way around the arches and flowerbeds where it is supposed to drench them when the pump is switched on.
It certainly does this. The problem is that it drenches everything else as well, and water squirts all over the place.
The reason for this is that when we installed it we did not have the benefit of hindsight to know how leaky it would become.
Really the conservatory needs taking apart and re-installing. Not the actual conservatory building, obviously. I mean the arches and the flower beds. The arches need rebuilding with some new moss and some of that hosepipe that seeps water out, and the flower beds need us to remove all of the colossal monsters that our houseplants have become. I had no idea that Swiss Cheese plants could be so huge, but they are. They are squishing themselves against the roof, probably in a bid to shove it off and allow them to soar freely into the skies like the giant redwood in the Library Gardens.
We have got everything that we need to restyle the conservatory, but Mark is never at home for long enough and I can’t face the idea of trying to make it happen by myself. Some things are just too difficult.
Hence it is unreconstructed, and hence every week I have to make an arrangement of buckets and mops and spend an hour squirting things and then clearing up.
I have done that today and I am feeling very relieved. It is a whole week before I will have to bother again.
Also I have got a clean taxi. It smells florally fresh and lovely.
I wish all these wretched customers wouldn’t keep getting in.
They are quite ruining the ambiance.
