I am pleased to be able to tell you that I have made a gratifying discovery this week.
I have learned that out of the whole population, taxi drivers are the people least likely to be affected by Alzheimer’s Disease, and other types of losing-your-marbles disabilities. Least likely by quite a long way, apparently. We are fifty six percent less likely to get Alzheimer’s, because of having a bigger hippocampus than everybody else.
Taxi drivers, in short, do not go barmy.
This announcement has provoked some dispute, not least the observation that this might simply be because taxi drivers generally live such unhealthily rubbish lives that they all die young. Hence they never get to the state of advanced decrepitude where your brain cells wither up and drift away out of your ears like leaves in autumn.
The authors of the study refuted this, snootily, explaining that they had already factored this in. No, they insisted, with conviction, taxi drivers do not go mental. They have to keep remembering where Aphrodite’s Lodge is, even though nobody ever knows how to pronounce it, and not running over Japanese tourists. These factors, along with their prolific abilities in sign-language and filtering out the conversation of idiots, help them to maintain their youthful vigour.
I was pleased to hear this, although not entirely convinced. Lots of taxi drivers of my acquaintance could be said to be a bit mental already, perhaps it happens to them at a very young age and never gets worse, and hence nobody notices any difference when they get to the walking-stick-and-attitude-problem age.
All the same, it was a happy discovery, and one that has cheered me up considerably. It is quite nice to think that very probably I won’t need to worry about writing letters to myself a couple of times every day to tell me that I have already had my breakfast but have not yet emptied the dog.
I did not need to worry about emptying the dogs this morning. Oliver very kindly did it for me, so that we could dash off to the camper van and get on with the reconstruction project.
We did indeed dash off, but we were tired and slow, and did not achieve very much.
Of course we all worked last night, because of the football. England’s World Cup ambitions are an important consideration when you are either a taxi driver, or a doorman on one of the pubs where it is being shown. The match did not start until ten, and did not finish until long after midnight, which gave us a very quiet evening with a couple of hours of desperate lunacy at the end.
I do not mind this. It is a long time since we have been quite so busy, and it was quite nice to add a sense of high-speed urgency to the night.
All the same, it was just after four when we all crawled into bed, and I was not at all pleased when the telephone rang just before nine this morning.
It wasn’t even anything important. It was another taxi company who had forgotten that I had been working the night shift and who hoped I might cover a job that they were getting desperate about.
They had to stay desperate, but I was awake then, and fidgeted sleeplessly until eventually Mark woke up as well and tottered down the stairs to make coffee.
We sat in bed with our coffee. This has become a crowded affair since there are now four dog-guests hoping to join us every day, although today was an improvement on yesterday, when Poppy was sick.
Nobody was at all sympathetic and all dogs found themselves unfairly ejected to the back yard in unjust consequence.
They had been forgiven this morning, and snored peacefully whilst we contemplated our current bit of project, which is the installation of air conditioning.
We are not actually installing air conditioning at the moment. We have merely been inspired to think that it might be a good idea, see the last entry about the Hot Tin Roof.
This has led to some research, the discovery that it is going to be very expensive, and also that we will need another hole in the roof.
We are contemplating the roof very thoughtfully at the moment. It is going to be a crowded sort of place, with four enormous solar panels, four windows, and now an air conditioning unit. I have been worrying about the roof, quietly, for ages, and it is a relief, in an anxious sort of way, to be actually making it happen. I have spent much of this week rebuilding the joists to provide support for the windows whilst Mark has been on the outside welding panels over the places where the old windows once were. This is a difficult and exciting sort of task for a person with a large void in the place where their spatial awareness is supposed to be, and Mark has been kept busy correcting some of my more humiliating mistakes.
When we went to the van this afternoon, the first thing that we did was to pick up the tape measure and start doing sums.
Windows and air conditioning units take up more space on the outside of the roof than they do on the inside. The solar panels do not take up any room on the inside but have got to be squeezed on to the outside and firmly battened down with a gap underneath them so they don’t overheat.
After some considerable scowling and pencil chewing we worked out that it will indeed be possible, with bare millimeters to spare, and considerable caution and accurate draughsmanship.
We are going to have a go.
I can hardly wait to apply my lack of skills to the task.
Such a pity it doesn’t need a hippocampus.
