I have just had a very long, if somewhat gloomy taxi fare.
I took a customer almost as far as Lancaster.
It was not a happy taxi journey. She was terribly drunk and miserable and kept talking about how she would like to die.
Obviously I suggested that she consider some of the range of attractive possibilities offered by living as an alternative. She explained that she could not go on holiday or go swimming or indeed do anything happy for herself because of the responsibilities of having a family to look after and explained that she would have to die instead.
She did not seem to have noticed the rather obvious flaw in this line of reasoning until I pointed it out, and I hope that she remembers it. In any case, she might feel considerably more cheerful when she is sober, at least once the headache has calmed down.
I will never know if I have helped or not.
The whole thing took a couple of hours, and hence I am terribly late starting to write this. What is more, we are just getting to the busy part of the night, the bit when people have eaten their dinner and are starting to feel sleepy, shortly to be followed by the bit when everybody else is chucked out of the pubs. Both these events have a positive impact on taxi trade and are not optimum times for the thoughtful composition of powerful and insightful prose.
They are not good times for writing these diaries either. It is hard to concentrate when I am being interrupted every few minutes, lucrative as that might be.
However I am pleased to tell you that today Mark has largely finished making our conservatory watertight. One roof panel is missing, partly because we do not have it and partly because we will still need to hoist the solar water heater up on to the wall one of these days.
He has replaced the absent panel with a temporary sheet of board. I do not know how long temporary is, probably until one of Oliver’s children comes to help us put a sheet of glass there in its stead.
This means that although the conservatory is by no means usable yet, since there is nothing resembling a floor, or heating, or power, nevertheless it can quickly become a very handy repository for everything that I do not wish to have cluttering up the rest of the house, like, for instance, the spare kitchen.
I am very relieved about this. We are almost at the point of the year where we have got to pop across to the reindeer man and exchange the two pound coin collection for a Christmas tree. If the ground floor space is obliged to house two kitchens, a living room, a dining table and a Christmas tree, we will not be able to get in at the back door.
It is a tiny space at the best of times. When we went to collect Oliver from his friend’s castle, we noticed with some amusement that we would have been able to fit the entire downstairs of our house into their entrance hall. We do not mind this, it makes hoovering less onerous, but it will be very useful to have some extra space.
We are going to put some plastic on the floor tomorrow and move the kitchen into it tomorrow.
I will be very pleased to get it out of the way for a while.
Have a picture of the Lake District morning.
