It is wet, and misty, and cold.
I am telling you this because my Creative Writing class has explained that the weather in our compositions ought to represent the mood of the protagonists, or possibly represent a fate which is lurking in wait for them around a stormy corner.
I am very definitely having a wet misty mood this evening, although obviously I don’t know if I have a wet and misty fate in store. I certainly hope not. I would be most downcast to think that the week did not intend to pull itself together and cheer up a bit.
I have not been on the taxi rank for very long at all, although it is late at night. All the same, I have been here for long enough to become so cold I can hardly feel my fingers, and keep clumsily hitting the wrong keys. Worse, I have hardly noticed the resulting linguistic peculiarities, because I am having difficulty seeing the computer screen. This is because the lenses of my glasses have been rendered completely opaque by a thick covering of steam.
I am not running the engine to keep warm. This is not related to any concern whatsoever for the climate, as far as I can see, if this is how it feels to be a polar bear then they might welcome some global warming. It is because diesel now costs about £16 for a gallon, and I do not really have enough of it merely to waste it on my personal comfort anyway.
My general mood of chilly gloom is mostly because we have spent too much money today.
This would not have mattered very much, except it is Monday, and I could not come out to work and earn any of it back again. Of course you will remember that Monday is the evening for my night class, which is interesting and enjoyable, but not at all lucrative. I rushed out to the taxi rank when it was over, but it is almost midnight now and I have only made a fiver.
It has all conspired to become a damp and misty-mooded sort of day.
We have been saving up to go shopping for some days now, and by the end of last night we had finally made enough money for me to feel justified in blowing a pile of it in Asda.
I am sorry to say that life has been a bit dull lately and so I was actually looking forward to it.
Things started to go wrong when Mark said that he would come with me, because he needed to put some new tyres on his taxi.
I expect you can guess what happened to the shopping money then.
Worse than that, instead of filling my taxi up with the peasant-grade, low budget diesel in Asda, which is a long trek away from Windermere, and hence a special journey, we took his taxi and filled that up instead.
My fuel tank is tiny, and holds about thirty quid.
Mark’s fuel tank was almost completely empty and it cost us seventy pounds to fill it.
My taxi does not have any diesel in it now.
After that we had a domestic.
This was because Mark suggested that we went into the town centre and had a cup of coffee in a coffee shop, and I said that we couldn’t because he had put the expensive tyres on his car instead of the cheap used Polish import economy tyres.
He said that they would last longer.
I said that this did not help leave us any spare money for reckless coffee extravagance, and it turned into the sort of domestic where everything becomes too dreary to have a nice day any more. We went into Asda anyway, because we were there, but we had to buy the shopping with the credit card, and came home.
I should not have been cross about the tyres, but I was. I do not see that any sort of tyre is superior to any other, they are not rounder or blacker or in any way more desirable. They all spin nicely at high speeds and go flat when they get a nail stuck in them.
How much more fun it would have been to have purchased an abundance of washing up liquid and tomato sauce and custard powder.
I am feeling cross, and wintry.
I hope that the sun comes out tomorrow.
