Of a different orientation

Everything is new today, and it is peculiar and disorientating.

As you can see, these pages are Not What They Were.

I have not yet finished tiddling about with them. The difficulty is that the website design for WordPress, which is the programme I am using, will not let me save a design and then come back to it later. I can either put it online or just scrap it, there is no option to put it on one side for a couple of hours. Much of what you are seeing at this moment will have changed by the end of the week, I hope.

The picture at the top is an early attempt at a logo. It might still be here tomorrow if I still like it.

Even the changes that you are seeing now have taken hours and hours of convoluted messing about, and left me cross-eyed, with a headache. Computers are wonderful when they do what you want. Trying to persuade them to do something unusual is a different thing altogether.

I had got so sick of it that it was an actual, real relief to stop because I had got to go into Kendal.

I had got to collect a taxi licence plate and the ashes of Mark’s dead father. This illustrates the rubbishness of my computing activity. Collecting an incinerated dead person was the best bit of the day.

The young gentleman at the undertaker’s was pleasingly un-whispery, which I like in an undertaker, although there was an older one who came close to whisperiness when he told me gravely that he was sorry for our loss. The young one gave me a large purple box, and then faffed about for a few minutes making sure that it was the right one.

I said that he really need not worry, because I did not think this would matter very much, and that we were unlikely to open it and notice an error. He promised me that it was the right ashes anyway, and I said that I was grateful, even though one box of ashes was, to me, pretty indistinguishable from another, and correct identification must be one of those tricks of the trade things.

He agreed, with some pride, that it was, that it was down to the predictable weight of an individual, which intrigued me. Then he asked what we were going to do with them, which stumped me a bit, because I don’t think Mark had considered that far ahead. I have never been responsible for anything as grown up as somebody’s ashes before, and did not want to accidentally say something illegal, so I said vaguely that I thought perhaps the compost heap.

This turned out to be the wrong answer. He looked a bit stern, and said that their company offered supportive advice about scattering ashes if we wanted it. This absolutely astonished me, because I had no idea that it was complicated, so of course I asked for some.

He showed me some illustrated cardboard tubes with scoops which he said we could purchase for digging out the ashes from the original, plain cardboard box, and sprinkling them about the place.

The pictures were not very exciting, sunsets and mountains and things. If they had had one with a skull and crossbones on it I might have been tempted, but they didn’t. I explained that I didn’t think we needed to spend ten pounds on a specialist Ash Disposing scoop, because I manage to empty the ashes from the fireplace every single morning without difficulty in the winter, even on windy days, and presumably it was much the same sort of thing.

The young man snorted a bit at this, and went hastily into the back office and shut the door. The older one recognised that I was unlikely to spend any cash on further ash-disposal paraphernalia, and bid me a frosty good day.

It turned out in the end that what Mark intended to do with his father’s ashes was ‘leave them on the coffee table’, which short of sprinkling them on the carpet was much the most irritating outcome he could have come up with. I left clear instructions when I departed for work this evening that he was to telephone some relatives and consider an alternative. If they are still there in a fortnight then it will be the compost heap, which I suspect the man in question would have preferred anyway, he was a practical sort of chap.

Work, of course, was yet another difference, because I am in my new car.

This is both exciting and awful, because everything is ever so slightly wrong. It is the same car, but it isn’t at all, and I am being obliged to drive like a normal person instead of a taxi driver.

When you are a taxi driver the car becomes an extension of your own self. You know it so well that you can drive at speed through gaps with centimetres to spare. I drove thousands and thousands of miles around Windermere in my old taxi, which is of course why it was worn out and blowing out black smoke, and the new one is totally different.

Everything responds differently, everything jerks in different places because it is worn in different ways, and clunks at unexpected moments. It is a troubling learning curve.

I am sure I will get used to it.

Just like we will all get used to the new look of these pages.

Probably.