Enrichment

It is the first truly busy weekend of the year.

It is a miraculously sunny bank holiday, and the Lake District is so full that you can barely drive down the street because of people spilling off the crowded pavements. 

It is hot, and still, and it is double time in a taxi.

This is all a magnificently enriching thing, and I am on the taxi rank, magnificently enriching myself.

Foolishly, I started the day with a trip into Asda in Kendal. This was not because I was seized with a longing to wander round staring at tomato sauce and kitchen rolls, but because I had ordered some underpants and jeans online for Oliver. They wouldn’t deliver until next Thursday, by which time he will have gone back to school, so I had to go and get them.

This turned out to be a retail nightmare.

Asda was full of people. They all had a trolley and most of them had some children. They were all cross, or confused, or in a rush. Trolleys clashed and crashed, children bellowed and shrieked, everybody was hot, and sticky, and Asda had run out of everything. 

It was superlatively horrible.

Just as a bonus feature, I could not get the Collect Your Orders machine to work either. It had a touch screen, on which I pounded fruitlessly for ages, and when it did work, it required my order number. 

Obviously I did not have the first idea what this might be, and the machine turned out to be indifferent to shouting, so I was reduced to asking an overworked lady dressed as a limp sort of Easter bunny, who told me, wearily, that I would have to wait.

I am going to stop telling you about Asda, because the memory still makes me shudder. Suffice to say that eventually I got the order I had gone in for, and some of the things that I had thought I might purchase in the shop. It was so awful that I stopped shopping before I got to the end, because there are worse things than not having any couscous in the cupboard.

We will draw a veil over the ghastly melee at the self-serve checkouts.

We will not go into detail about the baking heat and nose-to-tail traffic all the way home, as people poured excitedly into Windermere ready for the holiday.

When I got home Mark had cleaned his taxi and was making dinners. He stopped to make us a restorative cup of tea and sympathetic noises, although not sympathetic enough by half, a lie down in a dark room with a bottle of gin would barely have served by then.

He had done a jolly good job of dinners. There was cottage cheese with apple and celery, and honey yoghurt with blueberries. There was sliced mango and home made peanut butter sandwiches, and a splendid salad. Also there were home made chocolates and a bag of nuts.

Eating is one of my favourite things. I am having a very happy night in my taxi tonight.

I did not clean my taxi, because I wanted to paint a bit more of the dragon’s eye on the garden gate, a picture of which is attached. It is not quite right yet, but it is getting there.

It was so wonderfully sunny that the paint was drying faster than I could paint it on. I was not wearing a vest or a jumper, or even my usual sheepskin boots, but I was still hot. It is only a week since we were wearing scarves and thermal underwear, and now we are sweltering in the dry dust of our building-site garden.

Mark cleaned my taxi for me whilst I painted, which was kind of him.

We thought that we might have a sleep before we went out to work, but the lure of double time was irresistible, so we didn’t. We showered away the dust and the sticky, and went to work.

We are at work now.

We are making our fortunes.

Happy, happy Easter.