Getting More Opulent

We were intrigued to hear about yesterday’s riots in Bristol.

I have always thought of Bristol as being a fairly staid, middle-class sort of place. I have never been there, and hence have no evidence for this belief whatsoever, perhaps I am getting it confused with Bath, I am a bit hazy about the geography of the Deep South.

If riots can happen in Bristol they can happen anywhere, and we wondered, on our dog-emptying stroll this morning, if we might expect one in Windermere some time soon. I have never been in a riot, and would certainly be interested to see one if not exactly to take part.

I suspect they are fairly scary anarchic affairs. On the whole, probably it would be horrid if people rioted in Windermere. We all know that the police station is usually closed anyway, and I think in any case is probably a listed building, so nobody would want to bother rioting all the way down the hill to be a nuisance there. Instead people might decide to break the windows on the art gallery and the ironmonger and some of the nice gift shops.

Rioters would loot all of the Emma Bridgewater pottery, it would be dreadful.

I might loot some myself under those circumstances. Number One Daughter collects it and I can never afford any, this is her own fault for having her birthday in January.

We discussed it this afternoon, and speculated about how one might go about starting a riot.  The Peppers thought that you might put a notice in the post office, inviting potential rioters to meet outside the Co-op after dinner. Mark thought you would do better with the church notice board.

I ought not to take part in any case, even if it was about something very important indeed, because lawless rioting is definitely not fitting behaviour for the ageing parent of a police officer. Really I should just stick to writing strong letters to the Westmorland Gazette and complaining to any taxi customers who are going on a taxi journey which is long enough for me to fit in a decent rant.

In any case I do not suppose anybody would actually turn up. When I was helping to run the Taxi Association we practically offered free beer and picnics, and even then people just came up with rubbish excuses about doing something else instead.

We used to start meetings with a list of people who said they were not coming. In most meetings these are called apologies, but taxi drivers do not do those with any kind of grace. I cannot imagine any of them turning up to a riot. Certainly not until at least ten minutes after they were expected anyway.

It is nice to think about taxis after our long stretch of incarceration, because it might well be that it will all be over soon, and we will once again be able to spend our afternoons loafing about on the pier drinking tea. There is no point in doing this at the moment, since ducks do not get in taxis, and there is nobody else around.

It will be very odd to be back at work again.

Neither of us have worked today. Mark has had a day off, and we have tootled around contentedly building things into our conservatory. We thought we would have another go at the fairy lights. I found their box the other day, and discovered that it said, in courteous Chinese, Do Not Try Rewire Lights Please, but we carried on anyway.

We had another set of lights which I had once bought from Asda, and which have infuriated me ever since because of a terrifically annoying Safety Feature which programmed them to switch themselves off every few hours.

We cut the programming box off and Mark wired them into the other set to see what would happen, that will jolly well show Asda what we think of their Safety Features.

In the event some of them actually worked. We could choose between red and yellow fairy lights or blue and green fairy lights, but not all of them, no matter how we fiddled about with the wires. It is quite surprising how few electric shocks you get doing this sort of dodgy carry on. You had probably better not try it yourselves in case you blow yourselves to bits and your next of kin blame me, but Mark managed just fine, and in the end we settled on blue and green as being sage and mysterious and magical, and probably more opulent anyway.

We stuffed them into the glass base of an old hookah pipe, bought in Istanbul in the days when the world was still an oyster, and which has collected dust fairly uselessly ever since, and I can jolly well tell you they look truly ace.

I took a picture, which is rubbish because I should have done it whilst it was still daylight but obviously forgot, so you will just have to get the general idea. The bit on the top is an old perfume bottle that Mark found in next door’s garden. That has got coloured lights in it as well.

We are definitely on the road to opulence. Watch this space.