It is half past two in the morning and confronted with an empty page and the need to write seven hundred words on it is not filling me with excited inspiration.
Really I should have started earlier, and indeed I meant to, but customers kept getting in the taxi, and other taxi drivers kept coming to talk to me, and somehow it just did not get done. Then it was eleven o’clock, and we were madly busy, and somehow now it is the middle of the night and I am longing to go to bed.
It is not as much the middle of the night as it used to be when we had nightclubs. It is still an hour earlier than I would even have turned off the engine in those days. In the olden days we would have had the dawn chorus and the daylight before we got to the dog-emptying-and-counting-money stage of the night
I am cross about not having nightclubs because I think it is a sad loss for the young people, who used to like them, but quite pleased for me. It is much nicer not to have to bother. Also people are not quite as drunk at one o’clock as they are at three, which makes life very much more tranquil.
One drunk youth wanted a taxi tonight and tried to stop me by standing in the middle of the road with his hand held up. This is one of my pet hates, so I drove around him and picked up the people hopefully waiting on the taxi rank behind him. He was very cross and came and shouted through my window, so I explained that it was because he was an idiot and wound the window up.
I did not say idiot. I was much ruder than that, which I think he had not expected from an elderly lady. The other people were so pleased to have been picked up first that they gave me an enormous tip, so that I felt completely vindicated and drove back feeling pleased with my world.
Really I do not have anything of great interest to report anyway. I did all of the household things myself today, so that Mark could carry on filling in the holes in the camper van. I have attached a picture, which I am aware is not an exciting picture, but it is very pleasing if you are me. It means that instead of an alarming hole and some rusty bolts, there are some shiny new bolts and a lovely solid floor. Everything else has been drenched in magical wood-hardening fluid, and we no longer have to worry about everything falling through the collapsed floor of the back locker.
I know you were not worrying about that, but I was. It has been an ever-present danger for some time, and we have spent several motorway journeys with half an ear cocked for any changes in the familiar clanking and rumbling noises that might mean that the toolbox had unexpectedly vacated the locker
I emptied the dogs and made picnics and went to work early. We are trying to earn some money because we would like to set off a day early when we go and get Oliver. This will be happening in a couple of weeks, the summer holidays are almost upon us. We would like to travel up slowly and look at things, but it will mean that we have got to take some extra time off work, so we need to save up.
Also it means that we have got to get the camper van glued back together. This is something of a race against time at the moment. Mark has got two days off next week, we will have to hurry up.
We are going to spend tomorrow getting on with it. Probably I need to go to bed.
I am sorry that this is short.
It was fairly dull as well.
Ah well.
