I have been occupying the customer-free hours on the taxi rank by watching Netflix.
Usually I read books, but somehow it has been just too difficult for the past week. Also there isn’t anything much that has caught my imagination at the moment, and so I have been gawping at the computer screen like a two year old who has just discovered the washing machine.
I never cease to be thrilled at the marvellousness of this modern life. I would not have believed it if somebody had told my twenty year old self that one day I would have my own portable computer upon which I could watch absolutely any film I wished, read any story I liked, talk to people thousands of miles away, and which contained a friendly advice-giving companion who would know absolutely everything about anything, and who would not hesitate to explain anything I wished to know.
It is a truly marvellous world.
Oliver, who is a child of this century, is scathing about AI. He says it makes things up half of the time, and I dare say it does, but that is not the point. The point is that it is not twenty five volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica collecting dust and going out of date every half an hour.
Anyway, I have been watching a film which is so long it has been made into a series of ten episodes. It is about cowboys and Indians, because not everything has changed all that much over the last fifty years, and it is called 1883.
That is not very long ago. It is only about eighty years before I was born. It feels like ancient history, but there will have been plenty of people whose lives overlapped both those of the characters in the film and mine. It would have been more than possible for one of the children in the film to have grown up to become my grandmother, if my grandmother had been born in the Wild West instead of Salford, which she wasn’t, although I don’t suppose the two places were terribly different really.
It is an interesting film, about a wagon train full of recently arrived German settlers crossing the prairies. Mostly it seems to be an opportunity for the script writers occasionally to go on about the wickedness of governments who spoil everybody’s glorious freedom, because everybody knows that freedom is much better than schools, hospitals and roads, and also to show how incompetent Europeans are compared to rugged Americans who can do everything. The Europeans keep dying because they can’t swim or fight Indians, but the Americans keep rescuing them, nobly.
Also you can tell who are the baddies because they are terribly bad at shooting. Everybody likes shooting very much, and they gallop about firing their guns in the air all the time, you never would have thought that bullets cost money. Fortunately the baddies never hit anybody.
I am enjoying watching it very much, and I am especially enjoying it because I am in my own taxi again at long last.
I do not like Mark’s taxi. Everything in it is in the wrong place. It is full of his clutter and he has got Radio Two on the radio instead of Radio Three. There is nowhere to put all of my important things, and both the window opening switches and reverse gear are in unexpected places, leading to some infuriating fumbling at times. Also I had the embarrassing moment of opening the boot to shove a dog in it the other night only to discover a couple of large axes had been dumped in it, making me look like an aspirational serial killer
To my great happiness that difficulty is now over, and I have got my own taxi back again. I am sitting comfortably in my own seat, able to see over the steering wheel with ease, and my life is restored to contentment.
He has repaired it. He finished it this afternoon, whilst I was baking. I was also contemplating speech making for Lucy’s fast-approaching wedding, and thinking that it was an appropriate illustration of the activities of being married.
Mark was outside fixing a car that he will not drive, whilst I was bending over the stove making chocolate biscuits that I will not eat.
I won’t be putting it in a speech but I thought you might like to hear it anyway.
I am going to go and see what the cowboys are up to.
