I am on the taxi rank exercising my attitude problem on irritating customers. It is Sunday evening and Windermere seems to be occupied entirely by people for whom the concept of ‘get in the first taxi, tell them where you are going, pay the fare, get out’ seems to be too complicated to be managed.
I have just explained to some customers that their ability to comprehend explanation seemed to be inadequate for a sensible conversation. They had not got a clue what I was talking about and got out, wondering, crossly and fruitlessly, who I worked for.
Further to that, in the gap between the last paragraph and this one, a small gentleman came to my window and began to shout abuse at me for being parked on the taxi rank. He felt that taxis should no longer wait here, since he has bought a flat overlooking it.
I was interrupted in my fairly pithy Anglo-Saxon response by a customer getting in who wanted to go to the first three syllables of Aphrodite’s Lodge, and so was obliged to desist.
When I got back to the taxi rank I discovered that he had shouted at another taxi driver as well. This is a small village, and a brief discussion between of all of us revealed that the gentleman in question is from Bradford and his wife left him shortly after they move here, because he persisted in watching pornography in the middle of the night.
I consider myself well armed for my next encounter with him.
I have taken Oliver back to school this afternoon, and we are just two again.
I am feeling rather pensive at the realisation that this will be almost the last time we will be child-free before September.
Lucy will be home on Friday, her exams over, and apart from occasional brief festival-related absences, and a couple more days at school, that will be it, she is home for the summer.
Oliver has got another couple of weeks to go, but very soon he will also be home for the summer.
Of course I like having the children at home, but it does change things.
One of the things it has changed today was that we thought perhaps we ought to take Lucy’s bedroom floor up to lay the new water pipes whilst she was not living in it.
Mark’s solar panel will be mounted on the wall outside Lucy’s room, and the pipes need to snake underneath her bedroom floor to reach the hot water tank, which lives below the staircase to the loft.
Today he has levered the floorboards up and made a hole in the outside wall.
Taking floorboards up is a lot of nuisance when you have been very keen on insulation.
Below the carpet was underlay, a layer of fibre board and a thin layer of polystyrene blanket, all of which had been firmly tacked to the floor. Mark had to lever all of that up before he got to the floorboards, underneath which all of the gaps had been filled in with expanding foam, for the same purpose.
This is how we manage to keep our entire four-storey house warm with only one small fire.
The result of these activities is that we will be spending our last week together doing plumbing, and still not having a holiday.
I am sad about this, although I know that the plumbing needs to be done. I would like to leap airily into the camper van and trundle off, without a care in the world.
Appleby Fair finished today, and the roads to Oliver’s school were full of departing gypsies, trundling off without a care in the world. There were caravans of every kind, from the shiny modern ones to the brilliantly-coloured horse-drawn vardoes, and carts and trucks and vans, heading in every direction. It will be a whole year before some of their families meet up again.
Small blackened marks where their fires had been, and pale grazed patches in the verges where their horses had been tethered, were all that remained. I have heard people complain about gypsies and litter, but there was none.
I was sad to see them go, because I am not a member of Cumbria Police force, and bare-knuckle fighting and missing bicycles and fraudulent purveyors of tarmacadam are not my problem.
I will not see them very much next year, because I will not need to go through Appleby very often.
I will miss them.
The picture is the breakfast that Mark cooked for us. It is patriotic cheese on toast.
