I have spent the whole day, I mean practically every available minute, photographing clothes and parcelling them up to go on eBay.
I have parcelled them up so that when somebody buys something, I can just get it sent out straight away without needing to faff about, and it will not matter if I am already fully occupied doing something more interesting.
I have left too many of my own purchases to the very last minute not to have considerable sympathies for anybody else who is trying to look respectable at the eleventh hour.
I have not even finished yet. There are still several pairs of dungarees left to go. I have not put all of the dungarees up for sale at once because of a vague suspicion that I might flood the market. I will have another go next week.
I am feeling regretful about this. Admittedly almost everything that I am selling was purchased on eBay in the first place, but they are such gorgeous clothes, I will be sorry not to own them any more. It has been nice to feel like the owner of a beautiful wardrobe, even if none of it has been much use for quite some time.
People have bid on some of the clothes already, so I am optimistic that they will sell. They are in an auction lasting for a week.
It is quite a labour-intensive job. Everything needs to be measured and photographed, and then wrapped really carefully.
I have not sold the dress that has been my favourite. This was not because of any reminiscently emotional attachment to it, but because when I was looking at it I discovered it had a split in one of the side seams, and will need re-stitching if it is to go anywhere.
Perhaps I was fatter than I had thought.
It is a nice dress. I wore it when we went to visit Prince William at Windsor Castle. It looks a bit like offcuts from a nineteen seventies upholstery business, but I quite liked that, and Prince William did not laugh or anything, so probably it was all right.
I stopped not because I had finished, but because the day had run out, and I had to gallop around making dinners and taking the dogs to charge about in the Library Gardens for a last emptying before work.
One of the other taxi drivers came to talk to me when I got here, full of the exciting news that practically all of them are going to join Uber next week.
I was not in the least surprised to hear this.
Uber has utterly obliterated the taxi trade in Windermere. It has been as complete a squishing as if we had been Iranian women explaining to the government that we wanted to have a weekly parade modelling Californian beachwear.
Obviously it has not totally obliterated it, because I am still here, but our earnings have massively diminished. This does not matter very much for me, because Mark has got a real job, but for some of the others, who have got wives and little children anxiously waiting for them to bound through the door with a sack full of cash for dinner money and rent and new shoes, it has been devastating.
I am trying very hard not to become racist, but we are all starting to feel it. It is very hard to see your livelihood suddenly reduced to nothing by a host of non-English speaking incomers, because none of them live here. They are sleeping in their cars and eating sandwiches from the garage.
Everybody thinks that if they join Uber themselves, then at least the money will stay in the Lake District and maybe all of the outsiders will go away.
Also they are beginning to go broke.
I was glad to hear it, because it has been upsetting to see everybody getting increasingly desperate, but sorry, because it is the end of a way of life. There will only be me, and perhaps two others, left.
I have been driving a taxi for much longer than either of them.
It looks as though I will be the last man standing.
