I am sitting quietly by myself on a very, very wet taxi rank.
I am going to carry on sitting here despite the very clear indications that I am not going to make very much money this evening.
Firstly, it is Double Time, so even though every single tourist has become cheesed off with the non-stop deluge and buzzed off home, it only needs one weary kitchen porter and I will have a tenner.
Secondly I don’t have very much else that I can do at the moment.
This is because I am once again by myself.
Mark has not yet gone offshore. He has got to go on a course in Middlesbrough tomorrow, and hence tonight he is going to stay in the Travelodge next door to it. He has not even gone to Middlesbrough yet. Lucy and Jack are having a car disaster and so he has gone down to their house to help nail a sub-frame back into its rightful place underneath Lucy’s Mini.
I am trying to feel benevolent and contented about all of this, but it is hard work.
It is especially hard work because I have got to take my car in for an MOT tonight.
Obviously nobody is going to do an MOT in the middle of the night, certainly not on a Bank Holiday Monday, but I have got to leave the car at the MOT garage in Kendal so that it is there and waiting when they get up tomorrow morning. They will then be able to fail it in fits and starts at their leisure during the day tomorrow.
This has meant that I have had to clean it. Regular readers will remember that a taxi will fail an MOT if it is dirty.
Usually cleaning dirty taxis is done by Mark, but today he had other things to do. Number One Son-In-Law has a house in Barrow which he rents out to people who inexplicably wish to have a holiday in Barrow. He called us last night to say that the shower had stopped working and that the current set of Barrovian tourists had become grumpy, and presumably grubby.
Hence when we got up this morning Mark went off to Barrow to rebuild the shower, leaving me to empty the dogs and scrub out the taxi in the rain.
I got soaked both times.
I swept it and hoovered it in the back alley as usual, but by the time I had finished I had become so fed up of cleaning things that I took it down to the garage and washed the outside with their splendid squirty jet wash brushes. This costs three quid, but is considerably more fun than trying to manage with a bowl of soapy water and a watering can, even though I had to fight my way through several hundred homeward-bound tourists to get back to Windermere afterwards.
The rest of the day was mostly spent doing laundry, because of it being Clean Sheets Day, and also because of having had a houseful of daughters, all using towels and sheets which also needed washing. I ironed everything with the enormous rotary iron afterwards, which I pretended to Mark was because of my unassailable above-rubies virtue, but was actually because I knew there wasn’t the smallest chance of getting it all dry before bedtime if I didn’t.
Not that Mark would have noticed, since he isn’t going to be here.
This leaves me with the problem of my taxi.
I have broached this subject, tentatively, with him several times over the last few days. Regular readers might recall that when he is away the other taxi drivers have very considerately made certain that I have been given lifts in and out of Kendal when my taxi’s woes have left me macarooned, however since he is here they are under no such obligation. Hence it has been an increasingly anxious issue for the last few days.
Unlike the other taxi drivers, Mark has no belief whatsoever in my vulnerable feminine incompetence, and was having no truck with the idea that I might need a midnight rescue from Kendal. I could, he robustly assured me, leave my car and come home on the late night bus.
This means a long trail in the dark, and the pouring rain, across the industrial estate, over the deserted railway bridge and through the town to the late night bus stop.
The late night bus is entirely likely to be crowded with late night drunks, most of whom I will probably have booted out of my taxi at some point in the past.
I hope they do not remember.
Of course Mark is entirely right, and I am more than capable of dealing with dark, wet bridges, buses and drunks without a backward glance.
All the same, I am not looking forward to it.
If these pages are mysteriously blank tomorrow night then perhaps somebody could pop across and have a look under the railway bridge.
