Outclassed

I have had my all-day university class today.

I have had a very happy time indeed. I do wish I had enjoyed being educated as a child as much as I like it as an adult, what a splendid start in life that would have been.

I suppose I might not be enjoying it nearly as much now if I were being obliged to write essays about the formation of the League Of Nations and the different types of sheep farming in Yorkshire, or learn how to multiply fractions for a test on Monday, so maybe it is not really a surprise.

It was not easy to get out of bed and actually start the day, because as ever on a Saturday, we worked late last night.

I do not think that I am a very nice taxi driver at the moment. I am being very short and impatient with customers. I do not know why this is, perhaps I have run out of Idiot Tolerating Fluid.

I was about to go home last night when a young chap jumped in who wanted to go to Kendal. He did not have quite enough money because he had misfortunately lost his jacket, with his wallet and his mobile phone, thus bringing the cost of his evening to well above a thousand pounds.

I was in a rush to go home, because of having to get up early for the university class, but I started off being sympathetic. Indeed, I would probably have taken him back to his house for the little money that he had, until he started telling me that it was a good deal for me, because I only had to pay for the fuel and would make a profit on the rest, at which point my sympathy withered away like a poinsettia once you get it home from the supermarket.

Nothing annoys me more than somebody explaining why I ought to be grateful to accept less than the fare. The phrases: it’s a good deal for you, or: win-win, irritate me so profoundly that he was fortunate not to be ejected before we had even set off.

I told him crisply that I would decide what was a good deal for me, or what constituted a win, thank you, without the benefit of his sage strategic advice, and in the end the taxi fare continued exactly until his money ran out. He got out then, bewailing my lack of understanding about how best to run my taxi business.

In any case I did not really believe him. I was the last taxi in town, and it was two o’clock in the morning. If he had lost his wallet at eleven, as he claimed, it was hardly likely that he had spent the intervening time wandering about cashless, gazing hopefully in pub windows and longing for a drink.

He had got no money left because he had spent it.

This is invariably the case, alas.

Anyway, this made me late home, and late to bed, and so I was gritty-eyed and a bit dense when the class started this morning.

We had a visiting speaker called Karen Dionne. She has written a book called The Marsh King’s Daughter, among others. I have not yet read it, but I jolly well shall, because it sounds ace and in any case, I can feel smugly as though I have a little connection to the author.

She was a really good speaker, and left me so inspired to jolly well get my finger out and get on with writing, that I have told Mark that I am not going to do any spring-cleaning this week. I am going to write a best selling novel.

This might take longer than a week but I do not know how long I ought to leave the spring-cleaning. There are dusty cobwebs everywhere.

All the same, I do not want to waste the wonderful learning that I am having. I am going to put it to good use and write something that people other than Mark would like to read.

I am going to go and sit in my taxi and contemplate this.

Just a footnote, the dogs are not yet recovered, and it appears that there is a dog-poo bug doing the rounds in Windermere. They have been put on starvation rations in the hope that they will empty themselves out, and last night we were going to make them stay in the kitchen because the floor is easy to clean in the event of a misfortune. In the end we could not be so hard hearted, and they were allowed to join us. This turned out all right, fortunately for them.

I do not even wish to think about their unpopularity if I had had to wade through puddles of vile-smelling accidents in order to get to my lecture this morning.

Fortunately I did not, although they did lie under my desk and hum for the day.

I am very glad the world has not progressed to the point where Zoom includes olfactory intrusions into people’s lives.

How dreadful that would have been.