I am back on the taxi rank. I am sitting quietly in the dark, listening the the incessant pattering of the rain on the taxi roof. It is late. Not many people are on holiday in the Lake District today, and I have been undisturbed for some time.
I do not mind this, although I might later on, when we count the takings.
We woke up in Yorkshire this morning.
This was lovely. It was nicer than I can tell you to have slept for as long as we liked, and to have nothing urgently needing to be done. We made coffee and sat happily in our camper van nest together, being contentedly aimless.
It wasn’t a holiday, because we had got to come home for work, but it felt like one.
It made me feel ridiculously contented. We have put lots of roof windows in the camper van, so it is daylight even when the curtains are closed. We can sit in the sunshine and not need to worry about getting dressed. It was brilliant to be quiet and unhurried and not at all weary, because we had slept for ten whole hours.
In the end of course we had got to get up and get dressed. We did not mind this, either, because we had got the Game Of Thrones story on CD, and we knew that it was there to listen to all the way back. We were looking forward to this. We have both read the books, and watched some of the television programme, but there is nothing better than to listen to a really well-told story, and especially I like the kind where I know what is going to happen in the end.
I know that we do not know what is going to happen in the end of A Game Of Thrones, because he has not written it yet, but we know what happens next, so there are no nasty surprises and no troubling suspense.
Also it is brilliantly read by somebody called Roy Dotrice, who manages to do hundreds of different voices for the characters. The tiresome thing is that he was ninety six when he recorded it, and has misfortunately died whilst we are all waiting for George Martin to write some more. That is a desperately sad thing, now he will never know what happens in the end. Also they will have to find somebody else to record the last few books, which will not be the same at all.
We will worry about that when we get there. We are still only on Book Two.
When we got home, with our heads full of images of ravens and battlefields and wildlings, we cleaned the camper van and refilled the water so that it would be ready for next time. I wish that this could be tomorrow, although I know it can’t. Then we had a cup of tea with Number Two Daughter and she told us how cross she is feeling about the police.
She has got huge scratch marks on her face, which might even scar. Number One Daughter, who used to be in the police with the Army, said that this means that the girl who did it has done Actual Bodily Harm, not Common Assault, which is what the police have said, and they have let the girl off with a caution.
We all agreed that the police do not seem especially enthusiastic about investigating complaints made by taxi drivers. We think that this is because most people consider taxi drivers to be a scurvy collection of rogues and vagabonds who are only operating within the narrowest whisker of the law anyway.
Even if this is true, and I suppose that I am prepared to accept that it might be, we all thought that Number Two Daughter should not have to put up with people scratching her face and pulling clumps of her hair out.
We thought that we would make a complaint. We do not usually do this, because the police can make a taxi driver’s life very difficult if they feel like it. It is embarrassing to be repeatedly stopped and breathalysed when you have got customers in the taxi, which happened to one driver. I do not like this, but suppose that I would feel exactly the same in their places, it cannot be easy to be polite to somebody who is trying to get your friend into trouble.
Number Two Daughter is going to Australia in two weeks, so it does not matter.
She can complain if she likes and nobody will be able to do anything to make her wish that she hadn’t bothered.
In the afternoon Mark started roping ladders together to do things to the guttering. The next door neighbour, who is a bit nervous about things like that, thought that he would clean his shed roof whilst he had company aloft.
They were not up there for very long, because the rain was dreadful. We did not mind, because it was forecast, and we know that it will stop tomorrow morning. Really Mark just wanted to get everything prepared and in place so that he can start in the morning.
We are looking forward to this very much indeed.
It will be almost as good as going on holiday again.
