It is Monday night, and I am sitting on a very quiet taxi rank.
It has been very quiet all week. There are not very many tourists here, and the ones who are here do not seem to have any money. If they do have any money it is firmly buried in their High Interest ISA accounts and not being gaily shelled out to impecunious taxi drivers.
It is so quiet that today we have been considering finding some supplementary methods of earning a living.
We talk about this quite often, whenever the taxi business is not being terribly lucrative or when it gets a bit overcrowded with too many drivers. This happens sometimes, and everybody is broke and cross with one another for a while, and then some people get fed up of being broke and unpopular and go and find other jobs. This means that there is enough work to go round, and once again we are all solvent.
There is no point in me trying to find another job. We know, as indeed you know, that I am completely unemployable, and so probably it had better be Mark.
Last year Mark worked in business with his friend Ted, and they installed lots of rural broadband for people. This year, though, Ted has scaled down their operations a bit. This is because they have got a new baby, and Ted wants to play with it and help to change its nappies instead of going to work for a while. I think this is a nice thing to do, it is very modern and fashionable. Also Ted is welcome to it, the thought of having a new baby now makes me go completely cold with horror.
We do not have a new baby, fortunately, and we could do with an improved cash flow, so after a bit of thought, Mark rang the company that he used to work for in Aberdeen.
He last worked there about five years ago, and was made redundant, partly because the oil industry collapsed, and partly because he had had enough and wanted to come home.
The oil industry has not collapsed any more and once they remembered who he was, the company was moderately interested in offering him a job.
He has got to send them his updated CV and if he wants to go offshore he has got to renew all of his safety certificates. These are horrid to do. You have got to practise escaping from a sinking helicopter. This is terrifying even in a swimming pool. I do not think that I would like it at all.
We were not expecting this outcome and have been thinking carefully about it ever since. I am hoping very hard that it will not stay quiet in the Lake District for very much longer, in which case we will not need to worry about it. Quite often we find that a few days of sunshine encourages people to come and walk up mountains, it even worked for us yesterday.
All the same we decided that it would be nice to have an exploratory finger poking at pie crusts, in case it is really true that the Lake District is not fashionable any more, and this time our careers in the transport industry are over.
He is going to ring them back tomorrow.
In the meantime, whilst Mark was pondering some career diversity, I took Oliver back to school.
In fact I took Oliver and his bike. He already had a bike at school, but it was an almost-adult-size one that Mark had saved from some dustbin fate somewhere, and restored to life in time for the summer term.
Oliver rode the new bike for a week or two, but decided that on the whole it was still a bit too big, and he would like his old one back, so this morning Mark went over to the farm for his old bike, and spent the afternoon with it upside down in the yard, spinning the wheels round and fiddling about with spanners.
I ironed his uniform, which I had forgotten to do yesterday, and cleaned his shoes.
This seemed to turn into an endless task. His shoes are beginning to show end-of-school-year signs of fatigue, and the polish just sank into them like handfuls of sand into a bucket of water. I used almost half a tin before it started to settle on the top of the leather, and finally I could polish them to their old dull gleam.
We were among the first handful to arrive back at school, and boys were just starting to bounce about the yard, organising games of cricket and yelling cheerfully to one another in the mellow evening sunshine. Up in the dorm we stacked books in his locker and Son Of Oligarch, who had beaten us to it, announced excitedly that Actual Head Boy has been awarded a scholarship to his public school, which was brilliant news, and a suitable reward for his virtuous efforts.
We loaded the rejected bike into the car and hugged one another goodbye.
It wasn’t a terribly agonised goodbye, because we will all be together again at weekend.
All the same we will miss him.
Have a picture of the sunset.
