The thing that we have done more than anything else today is sleep.
We got up late, emptied the dogs and then went back to bed.
It was not even easy to rouse ourselves for work. The alarm went off, and off, and off, and we just lay there, trying to summon enough willpower to leap into action.
It turned out that even between us we did not have very much willpower at all.
Of course we managed it in the end, and we are here on the taxi rank now.
We were late.
We have been a bit rubbish today.
Apart from our day of underachievement I only have one small adventure to share with you, which happened when a chap was jolly rude to me last night.
He sat in the front seat making extremely familiar suggestions until I stopped the taxi and requested that he desist.
His companions in the back seat, who were, astonishingly, his girlfriend and another couple, assured me that he would stop, and we continued on our merry way.
Of course he did not stop, and a few minutes later I turned the taxi round and explained that I was going to return them to Bowness, where they could all get another taxi.
The chap opened the door, despite our speed, and started yanking the gearstick between gears, and so I stopped.
When the chap got out he grabbed my mobile telephone from the dashboard and hurled it over the wall into a neighbouring field.
I was cross about this, and when I got back to the taxi rank I borrowed somebody else’s phone to call the police.
I do not like doing this, because the police take ages to turn up, and then avoid doing anything at all for which they might have to fill in a form later.
I waited for the police, grumpily, because of not earning any money, and when Mark came back to the taxi rank and heard the story he went off to see if he could find my telephone.
When he got up to the field the chap was still there, having somehow lost his own telephone in the process, and was wandering around looking for it.
Mark, who was very cross by then, told him that he had come to be avenged on somebody who had thrown his wife’s telephone into a field.
The chap realised that Mark was at least a foot taller than he was, and noticeably enraged. He denied all knowledge of taxis and telephones and ran away in a little scurry of undignified haste.
Mark did not bother to pursue him. Instead he rang my telephone, and followed the ringing noise to a small tuft of grass underneath a sheep.
The police went off to pursue him instead, but when they knocked on the door of his hotel room you will not be surprised to learn that nobody answered, and in the spirit of not having too much paperwork, they tiptoed away in a burst of haste presumably similar to the chap’s own.
On the whole I felt contented with this outcome. I have got my telephone back, which hardly smells of sheep at all. The chap had a troubling scare, and nobody had to fill in any inconvenient paperwork to facilitate this.
I was never very anxious about it all in the first place anyway, because it is a terribly rubbish telephone. I gave mine to Oliver, who might need one at school, and took his old one. This used to belong to Number One Son-In-Law, and it has reached the end of its functional life.
I will have to hope that somebody leaves one in the the taxi.
