Last night finished unexpectedly early when my headlights went out.
Mark looked under the bonnet without much enthusiasm, and said that it was unlikely that all four bulbs would have popped out at once, and that it was probably something more exciting.
The police are all up in Appleby at the moment, where we have got a gathering of gypsies, so I drove around for a bit with the fog lights on, but it was not an especially successful arrangement, and eventually I had to give in and go home.
This did not really matter, because we had to get up early this morning, and so an early night would have been sensible. Somehow it still did not happen, and by the time we had finished faffing about it was after midnight.
It does not help that we do not have a dishwasher any more. Washing up takes absolutely ages, how glad I am that I live in an age that has invented dishwashers, what a hard life it must have been in the olden days. We are going to go and get another one next week, but there is an awful lot of washing up between now and then. We will have collapsed from lack of sleep by the time we get to Curry’s.
We were dopey this morning.
Mark investigated the wiring in my taxi whilst I made sausage sandwiches, and discovered that it was not working because it had gone black and burned away, so he replaced it, and after that there was neither a small inferno under the bonnet, nor a dark spot where the lights are supposed to be, so legality was restored.
I am not so reckless that I do not prefer my life like this.
Once he had gone to work I scraped together our savings and went shopping.
This was a terrific nuisance, because of saving up for a dishwasher. We will never get there is we have to keep wasting our cash on soap powder and tea bags and sausages, and I felt cross with the world all the way round.
I was pleased to reflect that shopping has improved very much since the demise of the loathsome masks, although I did notice that a handful of the timorous were still hiding behind them.
This does not tend to happen in the taxi, where almost all customers have been only too relieved that this particular fashion accessory is on the decline. However, there is a tiny minority, who are nearly always people who have come for a holiday from London, who make a huge fuss about putting them on. Almost without exception they do not then bother about the seatbelts, which suggests to me that they are not safety-conscious at all, but determinedly displaying themselves as being people of advanced social loveliness.
This irritates me very much.
I do not wear a face mask or a seatbelt. You can all be amazed that I have managed to reach the advanced age of fifty six in these perilous times.
Vixi liber et moriar.
I had lots and lots of other things that I wanted to do today. Things, that is, that I wanted to do in the sense of I wanted them to be done. I would not have minded in the least if somebody else had stepped in and swept the kitchen floor for instance, which I regret to say did not happen, and the kitchen floor is still unswept.
A bit of it is swept, and the broom is standing by the back door with a small pile of dust and crumbs behind it. The rest is still dusty.
Worse, it is covered in bits of clothes peg now, because the dogs got bored whilst I was at work and chewed a hole in the peg bag. When they discovered the exciting sticks therein, they chewed them as well.
I think the peg bag chewing was Tonka. He does this. He drags up corners of towels and cloths between his paws, and worries and sucks them, usually until they disintegrate. Roger Poopy does something similar, and I think it is a sad hangover from having a mother who did not like suckling puppies.
I think the chewed pegs were probably the other two. It is dull to be left at home and not taken to Asda, and they were collectively sullen when I went out and left them behind.
They could have had a lovely morning in Asda car park with all of the windows open, barking their heads off at everybody.
What a rotter I am.
Once I got home there was no time left to be dallying about sweeping, and I had to rush about getting ready for work.
Tomorrow is another day.
Have a picture of some dogs on the fell. That is Windermere in the distance.
