It would appear that our beloved leaders have decided that some Christmas tenterhooks are the best thing they can give us this year.
The Christmas message seems to be You can Do Everything You Like But Don’t Book Anything Because We Might Change Our Minds. Love from the Government.
This reassurance does not seem to have done very much to improve the current lack-of-tourists crisis in the Lake District, and so once again we are sitting on the taxi rank, gazing out at empty restaurants and twiddling our thumbs.
I am not really twiddling my thumbs. I am glad to say that I have finished my dull book about the swamps. This was helped along by skipping over all of the most tedious bits, which made the ending a bit incomprehensible. Also the bit about somebody abducting a baby was over and done with in about three paragraphs, and even they were rendered moderately uninteresting.
I am reading another book now. This is one that I was supposed to have read last term, and though I pretended that I had, I hadn’t. Hence I thought I had better do it now, even though I do not think that the tutor noticed. There is no point in having an expensive education and then skipping bits out.
I am not entirely sure about it all the same. I avoided reading it last term partly on purpose, because it is about a haunted house, and it might turn out to be scary. I do not like reading books that scare me. Nothing is worse than tiptoeing around the Library Gardens, alone in the chilly depths of silent night, emptying the dogs and wondering if the murderer/vampire/undead corpse about which I have just been reading, might be hiding behind a tree, about to shuffle into my path and smile its deathly smile as it clutches me into its hideous embrace.
Obviously no matter how many scary books I read, this never happens. Once I bumped into the old chap from the Chinese restaurant, also emptying his dogs in the dead of night after work, and we both jumped as if the other had been Voldemort disguised as a White Walker, but then we just said: Good evening, and of course it was all right.
That was a reference to popular culture, just so you know that even though I do not watch television, I keep up with happening events and understand the buzz on the streets.
Anyway, I am now reading a ghost story. I would like to say that I was reading it in between customers, but I am not, because there are not any customers. I am reading it in between being talked to by other taxi drivers.
It is now midnight, and I am pleased to tell you that I did get a customer in the end, two in fact. One was the son of a daytime taxi driver, who was quite surprised to discover the extent to which I was acquainted with his adventures, and even then I thought I had better not tell him everything I knew, he might have been embarrassed. I have known his father since before he was born, and could probably still give details of his nappy rash.
The other was a sensible, respectable sort of chap, who confessed that he had got in my taxi when he was a youth and been ejected halfway home for being an idiot. Apparently I had relented and picked him up again later, after a couple of miles’ walk had restored his sobriety a little, and he promised that he had learned his lesson. This sounds uncharacteristically charitable for me, so maybe he was thinking of somebody else.
By the time I got the second customer it was eleven o’clock, and there seemed no point in hanging around on the off-chance of any more, so we gave up and came home.
We are going to have an early night in order to get a good run at a busy day tomorrow.
I am hoping for a haircut.
That will be a relief.
