Earning a living

As the summer is coming in it is suddenly possible to earn a decent living driving a taxi again, which is such a joy.

We worked late last night, which hasn’t been worth bothering about on Friday for ages, but there were lots of people around and it was too wet to walk home comfortably in high heels, so we were really quite pleased with the world by the time we got back home.

We took the dog for a walk and counted our takings, which is a highly competitive activity which I won this time: and at half past three in the morning we were sitting comfortably in front of a bright fire in our rocking chairs with our stockinged feet on the hearth and a glass of wine and thinking how lovely life was and how glad we were to be so busy living it.

Saturday is another full day, of course, which is splendid from a financial point of view, but a bit frustrating in every other sense. We work on a Saturday from lunchtime right through until the early hours of the morning, which is very useful indeed for paying the school fees and the mortgage, and nobody could say that trundling cheerfully round the Lake District trying not to run over Japanese people is not an entirely pleasant way of earning a living: but of course, as I suppose I am not the first to observe, the terrific nuisance about being at work is that there are so many other interesting things that you can’t do whilst you are occupied in doing it.

Mark is still designing his hydrogen engine, and every now and again pops over to the scrap yard and comes back with some bits that he is going to put in it. He is very enthusiastic about this idea and it has kept him occupied for ages, every bit of scrap paper seems to have some sort of engineering diagram on it and I get in trouble if I throw them away. There is no point in asking him the coy question: “What are you thinking?” at the moment, because the answer will probably be: “About how I can solve the difficulty with the fuel ignition, I think I might put put three cells in,” at which point my brain automatically clicks into standby power saving mode.

Also whilst he is at home he wants to take all his drills and power saws apart and service the motors and recondition the batteries: and we want to build the bottom of the kitchen window into a trough where I can put plants so they get lots of light but don’t cut all the light out of the kitchen, where it is a bit dark; and we are rebuilding the loft and tiling the kitchen and he is still on with his shed building, and this is all after he has filled the log store, put some more brake pads on my taxi and put the new gearbox in his taxi and the new clutch in mine.

I have also got things to do, like feeding him and cleaning the bathroom and hanging out washing and writing to the children. When I have done those things and transported the children backwards and forwards over the North Yorkshire moors, and planted things in the garden, and made our lives beautiful and lovely, then I want to make some new clothes.

There are lots of lovely clothes to be bought in the world but they are all made for somebody who is not shaped like me, because I have got lots of rounded bits which squash about all over the place and are tiresome to have to squeeze inside underwear, imagine trying to put a balloon full of water into a baked bean tin and you will get the idea.

Mark likes this and I am used to it but somehow when people decide to become dress designers they never seem to say: “Hey, let’s make a nice round comfortable dress for a squishy person, with a bit of extra give in the front for bad times of the month and overindulgence in good dinners.”

I have got absolutely no intention whatsoever of changing my shape and so I am busy thinking again about my clothes. It is abundantly clear that if I want a dress like that I am going to have to make it myself.

Mark also likes the idea of having clothes that fit me properly and that I like, and has got plenty of ideas of his own about what I might make, all of which I have ignored as being not at all appropriate for a person of my age and dignity: but mostly because he thinks that it will be cheaper, which it probably won’t.

I have got fabrics to hand, and lots of ideas, and most excitingly of all we have got a dressmaker’s dummy, and he has painstakingly built it up into the exact shape of me.

This took ages because of the peculiar shape and made him laugh a lot and have lecherous ideas about which I had to be reproving. In the end we rebuilt it completely using some of my underwear and lots of pairs of old socks and one of Lucy’s old T-shirts and some gaffer tape: so now bulge for bulge it has my exact dimensions and is standing on the landing thinking about a diet.

I am not thinking about a diet, however, because we have got some visitors coming for dinner on Tuesday, and I do not want to be on a diet at all, because I want to make a shepherd’s pie and a salad and a smoked salmon mousse starter and some home made ice cream and a lemon cake for pudding and some biscuits to have with coffee.

I am very excited about all this and am looking forward to it, because I like cooking very much when it is not just shoving chicken nuggets in the oven or buttering toast. I have made lots of lists already, which is the only thing you can usefully do when you are sitting in a taxi thinking about cooking, and the thing is, I am absolutely dying to go home and get on with organising it.

…but today is the day for earning a living…