Pooh

I am on the taxi rank extorting double time fares from everybody.

It isn’t very busy, because of course the whole world is going back to school and work tomorrow, and so most people have repacked their suitcases and buzzed off. This does not matter, because we do not need very many customers when they are all paying twice as much.

In fact this is turning into the happiest night I have had for ages. The sun is shining, there are not many customers, I will still make some money anyway, and best of the absolute best of all, I have not got any name labels to sew.

I have not exactly finished. I have just given up.

I have been trying to sew on at least ten labels a night. On average, by the time I have unpicked all of the itchy labels and peeled off prices, each garment takes me about ten minutes.

That is a lot of minutes in between customers and writing to you. It makes a night at work a jolly busy sort of event, I can tell you.

In the end I finished most of the thermal underwear last night, but of course we are leaving tonight, so today I had got to pack it into the suitcase.

I found an indelible marker and wrote the names on the last few vests in big, black letters. Then I gave the marker pen to Oliver and told him that when the names started to fade off in the school’s hard boiled vests washing arrangement, he needed to write over them again.

It will just have to do.

I could probably have managed a few more this evening, but I wanted to make sure the suitcase was properly packed and finished.

I can hardly tell you what a huge relief it is. I am sitting on the taxi rank with nothing to do except write in my diary and read my book and drink tea.

It feels like having a night off.

I keep getting a pang of inactivity-related guilt, and then remembering that there really is nothing else that I am supposed to be doing. Being at work is quite enough.

It is like being newly free.

I shoved the last things into his cases this morning, and we dragged them down the stairs. There is lots and lots of stuff, and it practically filled the whole conservatory.

We took the dogs out with the Peppers after that, and wasted a happy half an hour in the sunshine playing Pooh Sticks off the bridge over the beck. This was less successful than it might have been because the dogs were in the beck at the time, and Pepper kept splashing off with the sticks, which she crunched up and then lost. This was because she did not understand that when she put a stick down in the water it would not stay where she left it.  It would buzz off all by itself. She galumphed about excitedly in the water, being barked at by Roger Poopy and bellowed at by all of us, searching frantically for lost sticks that were probably halfway to Windermere already.

Afterwards they  came round for a cup of tea. They were having a difficult morning. A very shouty lady had telephoned them and accused them of being discriminatory about disabled people. This was because she had booked to stay in their guest house, but unfortunately had neglected to read the Booking Information section on the website first.

When she did eventually read it, she discovered that their guest house has got all of its bedrooms upstairs. She wanted a bedroom to be downstairs, and there was not one, so she rang up to bellow her indignation down the telephone.

The Peppers apologised mildly, offered a full refund, and explained that having bedrooms upstairs is not an unusual feature of most Lake District cottages, but the potential guest was not to be soothed. She shouted that she was jolly well going to come anyway, and they had better sort it out.

This left them feeling a bit concerned, because there will not be time to build a downstairs extension before next week, and so now she is going to come and not have a happy stay because of being upstairs. The Peppers said gloomily that probably she would write a bad review on Trip Advisor.

Dear Trip Advisor. The bedrooms are upstairs. How could they? The Absolute Rotters. I am Affronted. Love from The Guest.

I would have made her a bed up in Pepper’s dog basket, and probably left Pepper in it as well, which is why I would be rubbish at running a guest house. 

Have a picture of Roger and Pepper spoiling a game of Pooh Sticks.