Having dashed about for the entire day it is rather pleasant to sit in front of the computer and do nothing.
Well nothing much. Obviously I am writing to you.
I am not at work, for the same reason as yesterday, which is that there are no customers.
However I am pleased to tell you that I have achieved my target for the day.
The object of today was to renew both Oliver’s about-to-expire passport, and our taxi licences for another three years.
Obviously this involved a lot of form-filling, but even more complicated was the impossible task of arranging photographs.
In the olden days, if one needed an Official Photograph, one used to go to a photograph booth in a shopping arcade somewhere, where you would pay three quid to have a sensible photograph taken with a white background and proper lighting. You had to queue up to do this, usually behind crowds of teenagers who were trying to cram six people into the booth all at once in order to take photographs of themselves with their tongues sticking out and their fingers waving around their ears in a humorous sort of way.
You do not need to trouble yourself about such amusing teenage pranks any more, for they have become unthinkable in our current anxious climate. Obviously nowadays extreme caution is called for, and six responsible teenagers would not even consider the prospect of assembly in any indoor space smaller than the Albert Hall, and then only if they were masked, gloved and gowned, and preferably wrapped from head to toe in cling film as well. These modifications make it difficult to wave one’s hands about and stick out one’s tongue.
These days one has to arrange the photography part oneself at home. The Passport Office send you complicated and illustrated instructions about how not to do this. There must not be too much light, or too little light, or excessive shadow, or hats or smiles or intrusive bits of other people.
Oliver was two weeks old when we applied for his first passport. Fortunately they were less fussy in those days, certainly in the British Embassy in Paris where they processed it, because the only photograph we could manage, after lots of costly expense and hanging about waiting for giggling French teenagers, showed a small, crumpled, red-faced creature being held up with its eyes tight shut. It could not only have been easily exchanged with any other baby on the planet, it could reasonably have been exchanged for some of the uglier sorts of pug dogs, and nobody would have been able to tell the difference with any certainty.
Even I might not have recognised the squished-looking infant as my own.
Also there is the difficulty that you have got to be standing in front of a white background.
You have seen pictures of our house. A decorator’s manual might describe it as Fifty Shades of Orange, and probably decide to ignore the dozens of stick-on flowers and acres of gold vinyl.
We had to hang a sheet in the conservatory before Mark and Oliver went to work.
They were getting late and so we had to hurry
Oliver stood in front of the sheet. I took a photograph and decided that it was too dark. We moved the sheet and took some more. Then we took some of Mark.
After that they made their excuses and sloped off, leaving me to tidy up the morning debris and upload the pictures on to the computer.
I remembered then that they had buzzed off before we had taken any pictures of me.
I uploaded the one of Mark pulling a ridiculous face by means of revenge, and went downstairs to faff about with the sheet and work out how to make the telephone take pictures in the opposite direction.
I did it in the end, although was not exactly delighted with the results, which made me look cross-eyed, and also like a more elderly and scowling version of my grandmother.
My glamour modelling days will never get off to a decent start now.
Having completed the forms, and printed the photographs, and copied our driving licences, and remembered what I had done with our medical reports, I put Oliver’s passport in an envelope to post, and rushed off to Kendal to hand the whole bundle over to the council.
They accepted it without interest, and I rushed out again because I had been too tight to put any money in the parking meter.
It had taken all morning.
I went to Asda and cleaned the kitchen and helped the Peppers with their camper van rebuild after that, but all of those things were too dull to relay here, so I won’t.
Instead I can tell you that our taxi-driving careers are secure for another three years.
How very useful that will be.
