I have been rubbish today.
There were so many things that I wanted to do and I have not done them.
It is the one thing that would be nice about being able to go back to my youth. Obviously I do not really want to go back to my youth, how dreadful to have all of those hormones and so little capacity for rational thought. All the same the energy was brilliant.
That is the bit whose passing I regret.
I remember once working all night on a theatre production crew for the third night in a row. It was heavy work, moving massive sets in and out, and we were sustained only by gulps from a massive shared flask of Irish whisky, passed round to revive us in the terrible cold moments of the wee small hours.
Now that I am halfway through my fifties I can’t begin to imagine missing even one night’s sleep without also imagining the terrible aches and gritty eyes and bad temper that would follow. Certainly the possibility of three days and nights of hard labour without much food but with lots of whisky would never make it on to my To Do list nowadays.
I loved it then. It sounds horrible now.
I have a vague recollection that we went on to a pub when we finished and drank until we passed out. The production manager was forty. I thought he was ancient. I think he thought so as well.
Youth is a marvellous thing.
Today I set myself a twenty year old programme of things to be achieved and forgot that I have a fifty five year old capacity for achievement.
That is to say, I didn’t do half of it.
I wanted to get all of my ordinary chores done, followed by painting the PVA on to the living room walls, followed by marking the walls out for the stripes, followed by painting the ceiling, getting Mark’s dinner ready, and then going to work at three o’ clock in the afternoon.
I was very disappointed in myself.
I finished the PVA, which was a start.
The thing was that I got distracted halfway through, which turned out to be my undoing. Obviously I would have finished everything had it not been for that.
I got an email from the councillor in charge of the taxi licences.
I have been arguing with the council lately, because I would like to have an increase in taxi fares, only to discover that the civil servants in the taxi office would prefer not to have to spend a massive amount of their budget on the paperwork involved. I knew this really, but the taxi fares have not gone up since 2014 and I think it is time that we did something about it..
The council pointed out that since there are three hundred and sixty taxi drivers in South Lakeland and only one of them wants an increase, it does not seem like a very pressing issue.
I spent the next two hours telephoning and emailing the other three hundred and fifty nine.
Obviously they all thought that more money would be a good thing, apart from one or two numpties who pronounced themselves contented with their Humble Lot, and they all promised, probably untruthfully, to write to the council and say so.
I tried at first to carry on painting with the phone tucked between my ear and my shoulder. After a while I had a stiff neck and PVA everywhere, and abandoned the idea in favour of sitting down with my feet up.
This was a wonderful way to spend the afternoon, but meant that I had a terrible rush to finish the PVA afterwards.
I should have got changed afterwards, because I am covered in it. I am splattered in PVA from head to toe. This is all right on fingers and bare feet and other bits of skin, because it is quite good fun to peel off, like a scab without the sore bit underneath, but all over my T-shirt and jeans and hair it is making me look as though I have been living in the wild for a month or two, like an unloved old dog that has gone a bit feral. I am sitting on the taxi rank looking distinctly scruffy.
Fortunately it will be dark in a couple of hours.
I took the picture from my taxi this evening, just before it did go dark. It really looked like that, I didn’t make it up.
