It is ten o’clock, and I am very late starting to write in these pages.
This is because, to my complete astonishment, we have actually been busy at work.
We have not been frantically busy, I will not be struggling to lift my cash box off the floor of the taxi when I get out, but certainly busy enough for me to get a job practically every time I thought that I might just start writing.
Not only that, but once Mark telephoned to tell me that they are having productive good times on their oil rig, and then once Oliver telephoned to tell me that Guffy had gone missing.
She is only a tiny helpless kitten so I went rushing home.
We knew that she had not been run over, like a tragic hedgehog in the alley the other night, because there were no forlorn cat corpses lying about anywhere, but we did wonder if she might have been stolen. This happened to another cat we had once, long ago. We stopped thinking this when we remembered that Guffy does not at all like being caught, and when you try to stroke her she leaps away like one of those little rubber balls that you had when you were a child, and which used to break things on the shelves even when you were being careful.
Fortunately she comes back when I shout her, so after a few minutes of frantic yelling there was a subdued mew, and she strolled in out of the garden, looking mildly irritated to have been disturbed.
I do not know where she had been or what she had been doing, but in any case I was rather pleased, because in the end she is going to be the sort of cat that stays out at night, hunting rats, and then sleeps peacefully in front of the fire for the rest of her life.
She seems to like that idea already.
I came back out to work, pleased still to be a cat owner, and something nice happened.
One of the other taxi drivers, who I don’t know very well, but who I have tended to avoid, came across to my taxi.
I have tended to avoid him not because he is Kurdish, although he is, but because when he first started driving taxis he was startled to find a woman employed in the same manner. He disapproved, and then was even more surprised to discover that the woman in question is treated with a good deal of caution by the rest of the drivers.
This last is because of my tendency towards grumpiness and my record of having been driving a taxi for many years longer than everybody else.
I was driving a taxi when several of them were still at school, and have got no truck with any ideas that it is not a job for a woman, although lots of passengers seem to think so as well.
Lately he has been trying to engage me in conversation, and I have learned some interesting things about life on the borders of Iran. I am interested in this, and in his stories of his family, who are employed in military activities there. I tend to think that I know things, because of following the stories in the august Daily Telegraph, but of course I don’t, not compared to the people who are living in the middle of it, and I have been listening with rapt attention, and admiring the photographs, what a beautiful place it is.
He has got a new baby at the moment, here in England, not in the rather more troubling situation of the Iranian border.
Anyway, to my surprise, he came over tonight with a pizza box.
He had bought a pizza, he explained, half for him and half for me.
I was very touched indeed.
I should not have eaten it, of course, since I am trying not to be fat at the moment, and I looked at it with the greatest of concern, but of course it would have been the height of ungrateful churlishness to refuse, or even to secretly waste it, so I ate it, and made sure that I appreciated it.
It was a very generous lovely thing to have done, and I have basked in the glow of such thoughtfulness for the rest of the evening.
Sometimes life is just lovely.
Have a picture of a whale underneath Mark’s oil rig
