I have been filling in the gaps between customers, last night and again this evening, by reading the long-ago pages of this diary. These can be found on the Days Gone By thing, at the side of the page. You just click the box with the date in it and go back to the month that you want. Then you can just keep going backwards to look at Older Posts.
It will not let you start at the beginning of the month and work forwards, which is irritating.
Despite this, it has been a very happy experience, and indeed it was hard work to drag myself away from daydreamy reminiscences in order to get round to creating some more.
I do not often think about these pages as a whole, but there are a very lot of them, 1,825 to be exact.
I dug my phone out, and tried the sum of dividing that number by 365, to see how many years it added up to. To my satisfaction, the answer was exactly five.
It is not quite that simple, because some days there are two entries, because Oliver writes as well, but nevertheless it is close enough. I have been writing a diary for five years.
I try and make each entry around seven hundred words. Obviously some go on for a lot longer, especially if I have had an interesting adventure, others are brief, because I can’t find anything interesting to say, but taking seven hundred as an average, that is a total of 1,277,500 words.
That is an awful lot of whittering. Small wonder that my computers wear out.
Anyway, it made for a very peacefully contented evening, sitting on the dark taxi rank, lost in bright recollections of summers gone by. It was all there, saved for me, lots of moments that I had forgotten, like the time when the dog had a nightmare and came to hide in our bed, and the time when the Indian taxi driver made us a curry, and countless happy times with the children. I think it is the first time when I have actually felt pleased that I have taken to writing it, because of course I do not usually read it. It was an unexpected joy to have so many memories to be rediscovered, just there at my fingertips.
I wonder if Samuel Pepys used to re-read his, and think with happiness about all the times when he hit his servant with the broom handle and when his constipation meant that he had to sit for ages on top of a bucket in his living room.
I have had a lot of time for reading, because Sunday evenings are quiet at this time of year. I do not mind this. It is nice not to be interrupted.
We have had a very short day at home, because last night did not finish until almost four, and when we got home Mark poured us a glass of wine to help us count the takings. This was magnificently wicked, because we do not usually drink during the working week, still less at five o’ clock in the morning, when plenty of people are just thinking about getting up and going to work.
Worse, we found that we had only drunk a very little bit when we both started to feel very pleasantly light headed. This made the cashing up process a rather giggly affair, and I think probably I would be wise to count it again before I take it to the bank on Monday morning. It would not be the first time that alcohol-fuelled calculations have led to wildly inaccurate conclusions. This is not helpful when I am trying to decide whether or not I can afford the Autoparts bill yet.
The inevitable consequence was that I had a headache when we woke up, and so we started the day slowly, propped up on pillows and steaming our eyes open with tarry black coffee.
Outside the window it was raining hard, and so we did not think we wanted to rush about. We sat in bed contentedly for ages, wrapped in our dressing gowns, talking and thinking and holding hands, and looking out at the February chill.
I am sorry to tell you that it was two o’ clock in the afternoon before we finally surfaced, and so there was not very much day available for activity before we had got to go to work.
Mark thought that he would cut the work surfaces, and I thought that would paint pictures.
I finished the first couple of the flowers on the stairs, and the picture is attached.
Mark did not cut the work surfaces after all, because he could not find the grinder that he wanted, which probably he has left in the camper van.
This turned out to be fortuitous, because he was so frustrated at not being able to find his grinder that he has started to tidy his shed, which has turned into the most shocking mess whilst he has been busy over the last few weeks.
He can see his work bench again now.
He did not find his grinder. Instead he has taken another grinder to pieces so that he can fix it, so when the first one turns up again he will have two.
He is feeling pleased to be newly organised. I am pleased as well. I like things to be tidy, and his shed upsets me whenever I look at it.
It has been a happy day.
