Knowledgeable

It is almost midnight.

Mark has taken the dogs for a quick empty in the Library Gardens. He has gone by himself because I have only just remembered that I have not written a diary entry today.

I am pleased to say that the bank holiday is finally over. It petered out, as these things do, with the damp squib this evening of double time but no customers. This was because of course everybody is going back to school and work in the morning, and felt, guiltily, that tonight at least they should get an early night after a weekend of carousing.

We did not feel like that because we have not had a weekend of carousing, and hence we had a glass of wine and forgot about my diary.

Last night was fairly uneventful. Mark refused a wicked rascal outside the night club because he was bellowing abuse and threatening to beat up all of the bouncers, all at once, by himself.

People do not usually feel inclined to issue this sort of challenge unless they have taken a lot of drugs.

I thought that he was unlikely to wish to beat me up, it is not cool to get into fights with elderly ladies, even if you win, and so I took him home. I listened sympathetically to his rant about being ill-treated and suggested that he went to bed to sleep it off. It turned out that Mark was following me, having been dispatched by the bouncers, who were feeling guilty, to make sure that I was all right, which of course I was, as Mark knew perfectly well that I would be.

We went back to the night club, and five minutes later the chap turned up again, this time in his car. He had driven back to the night club despite having filled himself with alcohol and drugs to the point where they were practically leaking out of his ears. He promised the bouncers that he would get them all, and then drove off.

We all drove very cautiously after that, just in case he was still around. This was one of the vanishingly rare occasions when it would have been good to see a traffic policeman.

Mark went off to the farm this morning, or perhaps I should say, in the early part of this afternoon, and I did the ultimately idle thing of going off to sit on the taxi rank instead of getting the house tidy. I could do this with a clear conscience because of double time, although it was very quiet and the result was that I came home with a tenner and all of the sheets still wet. Mark had hauled them out of the washing machine but by then it was late afternoon and just starting to rain, so it was not our finest laundry moment.

All the same, it was brilliant. I sat contentedly on the taxi rank and read the Ibsen and the Brecht that I had been supposed to read days ago, and was hardly interrupted at all.

I came home in great excitement when Number One Daughter rang to say that they were passing through and would like a cup of tea. This was lovely, we have not seen them for ages. They brought both Ritalin Boy and the dog, which made for a happy, although fairly minimally restful, visit, as four dogs and a talkative boy are not tranquil company.

It was ace to see them, I do wish we all lived closer to one another.

When they had gone, Mark went to do a turn with his feet up on the taxi rank, and I dashed round to do the neglected tidying up before my class.

After that I passed a contented couple of hours in my class trying to sound knowledgeable about Ibsen and Brecht. I am a bit knowledgeable, at least compared to most of the other taxi drivers on the rank, but possibly not knowledgeable enough to be able to speak with a tone of assured authority in a Cambridge lecture, although that did not stop me in the least.

One of the very best ways of convincing other people that you are clever is to sound quite sure of whatever you are talking about.

I am very good at doing that.