I have started on the Christmas Advent calendars.
I am so impossibly late with this activity that there does not seem to be the remotest possibility that I will get them finished by the end of November, so they might have to sit in the cupboard and be saved until next year.
Somehow I do not seem to have been able to generate any enthusiasm for painting. I have not actually generated any enthusiasm now, just an impossible-to-ignore feeling of guilty underachievement.
I am feeling cross with myself about this, although really I would not have had very much time for painting even if I had been leaping across the desk with excitement shouting Let Me At ‘Em, which I wasn’t.
I am not feeling very enthusiastic about anything much at the moment. We are still plodding about in our feeling of Stuckness, waiting for the Gods to open the prison door and let us get on with life again. Somehow none of our efforts seem to be helping.
The car, as you know, is propped up on ramps, emptily. There is a great gaping hole where its engine resided, very briefly, for a couple of days last week, and the engine is once again dangling in the back yard, being denuded of its gaskets.
Also the oil industry still does not seem to have broken anything lately, and Mark still does not have any work.
We have considered this, scowlingly, over half a dozen cups of morning coffee, and had the inspired insight that the best possible use of an otherwise unprofitable deadly stuck time would be for him to finish fixing the taxi and then to get some more qualifications.
Mark can do lots of things with remarkable skill, but because he learned to do them a hundred years ago, he does not have any certificates to prove them to a wider, and broadly indifferent, world.
We thought we would make the very best use of the time by obtaining some Competence Certificates in things like hydraulic mechanics and plating so that he can wave them under the noses of his various employers and be considered for a wider range of work.
We have written to the various training boards requesting information and acceptance on to their Competence Certificate courses.
None of them have replied.
We have checked our emails every day, and even emailed again to repeat the request, but with no results.
Somehow we have not been surprised about this. It seems that no outward path is beckoning yet, and we are just going to have to stay Stuck for a little while longer.
It is not easy to generate enthusiasm when you are Stuck.
Of course we will not be Stuck for ever. Things will improve in the end. Sooner or later he will fix the taxi again, and we will both be able to earn money. I can’t tell you how much this will help the financial crisis which is currently squatting in the corner and glowering at us malevolently.
Actually I can tell you, and it isn’t very much really. You don’t earn very much in taxis in November in the Lake District, not even if you have got two of them.
At the very least if he can manage to fix my taxi I will not have to be at work in his horrible taxi.
We have been trying to think of some cheery things we might do to make us not mind about being Stuck quite so much. There are lots of these, and none of them are expensive. We could have a night off and watch a film, with a glass of gin and some pasta, which is one of our favourite things to do. We could go and glue some bits to the camper van, which is always sentimentally thrilling. We could take the dogs and go and have an evening in Blackpool, eating fish and chips and gazing at the wonderful Illuminations.
Except we can’t, because we are not earning enough to be able to stop and loaf about with our feet up. At least one of us needs to be sitting on the taxi rank, whilst the other one is desperately trying to get the taxi back on the road before the weekend.
This was looking hopeful until all of the replacement bits failed to turn up this afternoon. Autoparts rang us up to say that they might be here tomorrow.
Then again they might not.
We might be Stuck for a little while longer.
