Late starter

I have been on the taxi rank for ages and not written a word of my diary.

This is very reprehensible of me, because it is Saturday evening. I am hoping it will not be very long before I am so busy that it becomes impossible to write in between people knocking on the window and requiring to be taken to their hotel, which is not very far away but they have a bad leg.

I should have started ages ago.

I did not for a couple of reasons. Firstly I popped back home for a while, to help one of the Eastern European drivers fill in some paperwork which her bank had sent and which she was finding incomprehensible.

I am a native English speaker, and at least functionally literate, and I found it incomprehensible as well. She had, as it turned out, completed it all perfectly, but I have no idea how she managed to do it, and I was deeply impressed.

I stared at it for a little while and eventually thought that he best thing I could do would be to report them to the Campaign For Plain English.

She had brought me some grateful wine and chocolates, which made me feel guilty, because she had already done everything herself, rather splendidly, and I felt a bit of a fraud.

I did not feel quite enough of a fraud to give them back, though, and they will cheer the weekend up when we get home.

The other reason that I have not been writing is that I have been utterly immersed in the adventures of Harry Potter.

I have been reading these on the taxi rank for several weeks now, and am enjoying them very much. Of course I have read them already, but not for ages, in fact I found a bookmark in one of them, in the form of a taxi discount card left over from a company that we were running in 2012. This suggests that it might have been some time ago.

Obviously I have not forgotten what happens in the end, but I had forgotten what various magical twists and turns he took to get there, and compared to the bitter reading currently available in the Daily Telegraph and other similar Gothic horror stories, they are an enormous pleasure to read.

I am almost at the very end of the last one, which for some reason I had misremembered was called Harry Potter And The Forty Thieves, although it isn’t. Actually it isn’t the last one. There is a play on in London, or at any rate when we have a revolution there will be plays on in London again, probably along with knitting at the foot of the guillotine. Anyway, it turns out that you can buy the script on Amazon and read it at home yourself.

I do not know if I would like to do this in case it spoils the surprise if ever the theatres come back and we win the lottery and manage to book tickets. I would like to see it very much, but since it does not look very likely that I will, I wonder if reading the script might be the next best thing.

I will have to think about it.

I have not been reading Harry Potter all day. I have been doing that in between customers on the taxi rank. During the day Mark went off to work and I painted the new living room.

I know that it is Saturday and not usually a day for going to work, apart from taxis, but we are saving up for lots of things as well as a television, and so work it had to be. In any case, Number One Son-In-Law was working in his house in Barrow himself today, and Mark enjoys being with him, presumably to talk about manly things like boilers and steel toe-capped boots and welding rods, so I made him a bacon sandwich and he buzzed off.

I stayed at home and pegged the washing out and made picnics, after which I could paint the birthday present living room.

I have finished the painting now.

I have even managed to make a start on cutting out and sticking the gold stripes.

This is making me feel very contented indeed.

It is going to be beautiful in no time at all.

The picture is Number One Son-In-Law in the house that they are building. They are doing a brilliant job. It will also be beautiful in no time at all.