Microwave

We have a gleamingly new microwave.

We did not purchase it ourselves. It was a present.

We went to work last night and had a much better night. Last night we earned £23.30 between us. We are practically plutocrats.

Just so you know, you need not feel in the least anxious about us. November in the Lake District is always the most rubbishy of rubbish months, apart from January and February, of course. We know that we are going to have a shockingly impoverished time, and I would like to reassure you that we have budgeted carefully and saved for such predictable lean times.

Except obviously we haven’t, we have been spending cash with reckless abandon and at the moment there is none in the bank at all.

However, please do believe that we are entirely sanguine about this. After more than twenty years of driving taxis it is not the smallest surprise. We are entirely accustomed to this seasonal misadventure and do not feel remotely troubled, it is not nearly as worrying as it might be if we were the sort of people who had been used to salaries and pension contributions and PAYE. We have never known anything else and much prefer the freedom even if it includes some challenges. It will be absolutely fine. It always is.

Today we thought that we had almost enough for a microwave, especially when the card payment from the night before made it into the bank account.

We hesitated about this briefly. Mark has a slow puncture in the back tyre of his taxi, and has to keep blowing it up., Prior to the microwave debacle, a new tyre was high on our wish list. Well, it was high on Mark’s wish list. I think that new tyres are excruciatingly dull things on which to waste hard-earned cash, so it was very low on my wish list, somewhere underneath ‘get a takeaway dinner’.

We considered hard what we would do when we had made some more money tonight. A new tyre, or at any rate an almost new tyre, from the little group of Eastern Europeans working out of a garage in Morecambe, would be twenty five quid, and we very nearly had that.

All the same, without a microwave things had become tiresomely complicated. I had not realised how many times in a day I just shove something in there, not least the sausages for Mark’s breakfast sandwiches. I cook these en masse and then warm up a few every morning, to provide central heating for the breezy moments when he is climbing to the top of broadband aerials on windy mountain tops.

I warmed the sausages up under the grill this morning. This requires more concentration but works reasonably well.

When Mark had buzzed off I took the dogs up the fell, and whilst we were halfway down the phone rang.

It was Number Two Daughter, offering to buy us a new microwave as an early Christmas present, since at Christmas she will be in Canada. I do not know how much it would cost to post a microwave from Canada, but given that it costs me about twenty quid to post an Advent calendar and some chocolates every year, I thought it would be a prohibitive very lot.

She said that she would put some cash in the bank and I could choose one.

Obviously I accepted very gratefully, indeed, to say I snatched her hand off would be more accurate. Goodness me, I said, you couldn’t possibly do that, would you like my bank details and I can ring Asda straight away?

I floated back down the fellside, feeling liquid relief coursing through me.

We could go to work tonight and then tomorrow we would have enough cash for a new tyre.

Then in the afternoon something even more miraculous happened.

Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma turned up at the back door.

With her was a friend and a large box, so big that they were carrying it between them.

Inside the box was a microwave.

She was so inexplicably pleased at having her garage filled with kitchen, and newly-acquired tables and chairs filling her dining room, that she had conspired with Number One Son-In-Law and Number One Daughter to purchase a microwave by means of exchange.

I was astonished and delighted.

It is a glorious microwave, and I keep popping back downstairs to admire it. It is huge and shiny and powerful and so complicated that I have had to give the instructions to Mark. He likes things that do all sorts of interesting things, and is perusing the explanations and contemplating cooking some potatoes even as I write.

Obviously I rang Number Two Daughter and she said that it was perfectly all right. We have decided that when she comes home next week we will have some wine as our Christmas present instead.

I think that I might be among the most fortunate of people in the whole world.

New tyre tomorrow.