It is a marvellous day.
It is raining outside, and it is cold.
Despite these climatic deficiencies, I am in a very happy mood, because Life is nothing at all like Art. Jane Eyre might have had thunderstorms and thick fog to reflect her inner turmoil, but I have not. I am feeling very pleased with the world, and the sun is beaming brightly in my soul if not in the garden.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first, and most important, is that we have finally, after a whole year of difficulty, managed to pay off our council tax bill and our taxi tax bill.
I do not mean last year’s bills that were overdue. I mean the ones that will be due when the Inland Revenue starts cutting up rough in January.
We know that we do not make very much money in taxis over the winter. This means that from November to March we will be struggling and scraping along to make ends meet.
We plan for this in two ways.
The first, as you know, is to have a chest filled with life’s essentials, so that we will not need to buy them in the scary months. Soap powder, washing up liquid, shampoo and nice things like hand cream and scented candles, are bought during the extravagant summer holiday months, and stored, prudently, for the rainy season.
Flour and sugar are bought in sacks, and piled in the dark at the back of my desk, and other costly but important groceries, like coffee, tea and yeast, fill the cupboards and shelves.
By the time the dark days crawl round, we are, like little squirrels, ready to face them.
The second thing that we do is to calculate the biggest, most frightening bills, and to pay them off, a bit at a time, every summertime week. These are the tax bills, as mentioned, and other horrors like the taxi insurance. Together, these run into thousands of pounds. The idea is that by the end of October, as we plunge into the winter gloom, we have paid for everything, and the meagre winter cash does not need to stretch so far.
This year, because of our beloved leaders’ policies of everybody being safe from bat flu but in danger of crashing headlong into pretty much every other depressing fate, we did not manage to clear everything in time. In fact, we started very late indeed, and every week’s cash has been very thinly distributed between lots of competing worries.
This caused us some very troubling moments this month. November is the start of the very quiet season, when nobody wants to come and have a holiday in the Cumbrian mud, and some of our bills were still lurking, darkly unpaid in the winter gloom.
This week, at long last, we have cleared them all.
The chest of winter necessities is full, and we have got enough coffee to steam our eyes open for weeks.
This morning, when we looked at our finances, for the first time in months we felt very cheerful about them.
We have got twenty five pounds still in the bank, the credit card is empty, and all of our worst worries are gone, paid off into the morning like a flock of birds.
There will be no more tax to be paid until the winter is over.
Of course there are still things to pay, still things to be bought and managed, but we will earn enough money even in the winter to pay for these now.
I feel so light-hearted that I could simply float away.
The second reason that I am feeling cheerful is that Mark has taken the dehumidifier apart to clean it out and service it so that it works properly.
We need the dehumidifiers in the winter. We cannot dry washing in the garden, and the house is so tightly sealed and insulated now that any water steamed into the air just stays there, like an indoor storm cloud. This is helped along by living in the wettest place in Britain, of course.
The dehumidifier has not been working properly for ages.
When we looked we were not surprised, because it was clogged with a horrible mixture of black mould and dust. Mark had to take it into the yard and hose it out with the power washer.
He is putting it back together now, before we go to work. When we come home the house will be drier and warmer than it has been for ages, and we will not have to spend any of the money we have earned on paying the credit card, or the Inland Revenue, or the council.
I am feeling very happy indeed.
