I am in the taxi.
I have just distinguished myself by trying to finish my tea too quickly when some customers bashed on the window.
You spill your tea when you are driving on windy roads, and so I tried to drink it in a single mouthful, and inadvertently inhaled half of it instead.
This resulted in a dreadful fit of coughing, which discomfited the customers no end, and they looked around wildly to see if there were any other taxis which might be less filled with flying viruses.
I tried to explain, through coughs, but they looked very doubtful, and squashed themselves anxiously into the corners of the back seat as far away from me as they could, with their shopping bags over their heads and everything.
It worked in my favour in the end, because when they got out they just shoved a tenner between the seats and into the front and belted away without waiting for any change. I thought that this was a happy ever after, for me, at any rate.
There are not many customers anyway, because it is raining. Nobody wants to come and sit outside pubs in the rain. It is all very well for Boris to be cheerily positive about outdoor drinking. Quite clearly he has never visited the Lake District.
It has not quite rained for the entire day, and I am pleased to report that today I won the Washing Game. I had a spare moment a bit earlier than planned, and thought I would pop outside and bring it all in.
The heavens opened as I unpegged the last sock, and I escaped into the house with fortunately dry washing and a small sensation of victory.
Hurrah.
I am sorry to say that this has been the most exciting event of the day, however. It is weekend, and so Mark is building the Barrow house, which, incidentally, he thinks that he will finish tomorrow. This has neatly coincided, rather improbably and miraculously, with the re-opening of hotels and guest houses, and so we will not be without income. There will once again be taxi fares to be had.
I do not know how I feel about this. If I am busy driving a taxi I will have hardly any time left for knitting and drinking tea. I have become used to a few hours of enforced leisure every day, it will be irritating to be endlessly interrupted.
I was glad of the enforced leisure this afternoon. I seemed to have had a very busy day. There was the usual morning chore of sawing up the endless pile of firewood. This is turning into the sort of task given to dead Greek kings who had rashly managed to upset the Gods.
Maybe it is related to some of my recent successes in the Washing Game. I might have been doing too well for too long.
After that there was a great deal of clearing up, mostly of sawdusty footprints, and getting a taxi picnic ready.
I had a troubled half an hour searching for a lost tea towel. It was the one that had come out of the camper van to be washed, and I could not find it anywhere.
This bothered me for ages, and I hunted all over the place. Of course I have got dozens of tea towels, well, about eight of them, anyway, and any of them could go into the camper van, but I did not at all want to do that. I always have that pattern of tea towel in the camper van, and a different one would have been wrong.
In the end I got into such a state I had to ring Mark at work to see if he could throw any light on the subject, and of course it turned out that he was responsible.
He had used my camper van tea towel for wrapping a loaf of bread, in the house, and that very morning shoved it into the washing machine.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I dug it out and dried it lovingly.
It can go back again tomorrow, before any more misfortunes befall it.
That was pretty much it, really, apart from some hoovering-and-dusting. I have no idea how it managed to occupy the entire day, but it did.
Not only did it occupy the entire day, but by the end I was doing everything at a run, hurling things into cupboards and glancing frantically over my shoulder at the clock.
I was very glad to get to the taxi rank, and peace.
Have a picture of the conservatory.
