We have had a short, but nevertheless difficult day.
There has been a very, very lot of bleaching and scrubbing and lighting of scented candles.
It appears that both the dogs now have the digestive difficulty which assailed Roger Poopy in the camper van the other night, so probably it was not merely the prawns.
They are both very unwell.
They have been so unpleasantly unwell that nobody is speaking to them. Indeed, after the last very horrible episode, they have both been dispatched into exile in the garden.
Do not waste your sympathy. They both know how to bark to go out. They bark to come in every single time.
In any case their exile is not quite the freezing isolation that it might sound, because Mark is in the garden as well.
Mark is sawing up firewood. He has not done a poo on the carpet.
I have told both dogs that if this continues to happen we will no longer be a family of dog-owners, but a family with a couple of extremely well-fertilised flower beds.
I think perhaps I am not feeling very congenial towards bodily fluids at the moment. Mark had a sicker in his taxi last night, and although of course he managed to get it all cleaned out, it spelled the end of his night’s takings, and he did not manage to get any money out of them either.
I think that I would probably have taken their phones, their shoes and their clothes in compensation. Well, maybe not their clothes, they might not have been very nice by then.
Actually I probably would not have taken anything. I am generally so repelled by customers that when one of them accidentally sat on the lid of my cup the other night, I could not bear to use it again until I had bleached it rigorously. This has got nothing to do with bat flu. It is to do with people who have been on a night out, drunk far too much beer and eaten something revolting in the Indian restaurant, are not very appealing.
You need to be careful around one of the Indian restaurants as well. I take the chef home and he smells worse than the kitchen did this morning when we got up.
I have come back from the Christmas holidays feeling fairly uncharitable about customers anyway. I took a group of people back to an hotel last night which could not have been more than five hundred yards away from the taxi rank, and possibly not that far. They were all very much on the portly side, and laughed gaily as they got in, telling me that they knew it was not very far but that they had a collective bad leg.
Taxi customers have always got a bad leg, it is the reason that they are too idle to walk around the corner to their hotel. Never get in a taxi and say that. The driver will instantly conclude that your knees have buckled under your twenty-five stone beer gut.
I did not laugh supportively along with the rotund customers. I merely nodded and looked a bit distant. This usually makes people stop talking, and they did, which is how I like customers best.
I am not yet at work this evening. I am writing this early because it is very tiresome to try and write sensibly on the taxi rank. I have got from six in the evening until three in the morning to make my fortune, eat my dinner, read the book for my course that I am supposed to have read already, and listen politely to the ramblings of any taxi drivers who happen to be feeling sociable. This is a tall order, and if I am trying to write in these pages as well it just makes me irritable.
Also I have got a superb book to read. It is one of the set books for my course so that I learn how to write seductively about crime and make people want to read more, but it is so splendid that I have forgotten to notice how it is being done and am merely tearing through it, gulping through the pages as I go. I already know what happens in the end because the tutor told us, which helps very much, but I am going to have to read it again when I have finished so that I can remember to look at how she did it.
It is a true story written by somebody called Ann Rule. She has written lots more so I have got those to look forward to, even though the others are not set as examples of perfect crime literature. Our tutor said that the others were just as good, and so when I have finished I shall think of some excuse and buy those as well.
It is my all-day course tomorrow, and I am looking forward to it very much. We have got a lady coming to talk to us who has just written some books and a film, and we are split into two groups to criticise our own criminal short stories.
Work first. Then when I get up tomorrow it will be writing day.
I wish it would hurry up.
