I have been a very busy bear today.
I say bear rather than bee because I have not been anywhere near as busy as a bee, unless you perhaps count the boy bees, which basically hang about doing absolutely nothing for most of their lives, apart from eating their heads off and wondering how long until they get laid.
I have been busy as a bear, probably a wintery sort of bear, the sort that has just crawled out of hibernation, yawned and stretched a bit, and then noticed that its hole was a bit smelly and hairy and full of general winter dung.
After that probably it went for a walk and wondered about just finding another hole.
I do not want another hole. I like the hole that I have got, actually. I know this because we went to Morecambe a couple of weeks ago, for the interview for the funeral place, about which, incidentally, I still haven’t heard anything and so am assuming that Unfortunately On This Occasion You Have Been Unsuccessful. Anyway, we went down there and on the way back discussed what we would do if I got the job, and whether we would consider selling our tall thin Windermere house and buying something in Morecambe.
Morecambe is going to be an expensive sort of place in a few years, because of the Eden Project coming. It is as cheap as Poundshop bubble bath at the moment, and if I had any money at all I would jolly well be buying a house there, take note if you have got any spare cash.
Anyway, we talked and talked about it, and looked at houses, although only the ones out of the car window as we passed, and eventually we decided that really we like it very much where we are. We would be able to sell our house for a very, very, very lot of money, because of it being right in the middle of a tourist honey-trap, and then we wouldn’t have a mortgage, and if we liked we could buy something with a field and an apple tree and keep a horse and grow apricots on a sunny south-facing wall.
I like this idea very much, although, it turned out, not enough for me really to want to sell our house. When I came home and imagined getting up somewhere else every morning, and not knowing the postman and the other taxi drivers, and the bloke who walks down the back and remembers when the builders’ yard was a boxing club, I felt sad.
Hence I did not want to find another hole, and had to set about cleaning this one, it being Monday, of course.
As it happened by a peculiar chance of fate I had woken up early, at half past eight, which is practically having middle-of-the-night insomnia for me, the sort where you get up and drink hot chocolate with brandy in it and eat bananas and read your book for half an hour in the hope that it will distract you from thinking about your credit card bill.
I did not drink hot chocolate with brandy, and was not worrying about the credit card bill in any case, at least not until Mark rang me later on and said that he had had a threat from them because our balance was £13.40 and we had got to pay it today Or Else, so I did that in a bit of a hurry.
Instead I got up and went for an early, sprightly walk over the fells. It is nice to do this when there is a fresh breeze and the sun is shining, although it is not very warm today, so you will be relieved to hear that I have kept my thermal vest on after all.
After that I cleaned everything. I even cleaned my taxi, which has become surprisingly grubby in the very short interval since last I cleaned it. I squirted it with the lovely perfume and left it as a surprise for me when I came to work this evening.
After that I wrote my story.
I am really getting near the end now. Really really.
Just another few days.
