I had a little adventure last night.
It was very late, and I picked up a lone drunk chap who wanted to go back to one of the big houses at the side of the lake.
When we got there, it was a huge, newly-built place, through a set of electric steel gates at the bottom of a long drive.
The bloke paid up and got out, and I set off back up the drive, but the gates wouldn’t open.
They wouldn’t open at all.
I tried several times, and eventually reversed back down the winding drive and tried to find the bloke.
I couldn’t even find the door. It was pitch dark, I mean truly pitch dark, the sort you only get when you don’t have street lights and the half-moon keeps being obscured by little scudding clouds.
The house was vast, and dark. The chap had gone down a long flight of steps at the back, so I trotted down them, but no door was to be seen.
There wasn’t even a window.
I started to feel just a bit uncomfortable. I am not easily frightened, because of not watching television, so in my general opinion serial killers are in roughly the same category of probability as the Tooth Fairy. All the same, it was pretty horrid. I was creeping around this hideous stone monstrosity, full of corners and little dark alcoves, in the midnight blackness, on my own, a long, long way from anywhere, and I couldn’t get out.
I did what I always do when things go wrong, and rang Mark.
He told me to go up to the top of the drive again and try to pull the gate open, because some hydraulic gates have an over-ride, and that he would come and see if he could help me.
It wouldn’t open. I tried and tried, and Mark came and tried and tried, but it was having none of it.
On the other side of the gate, far out of my imprisoned reach, was a little intercom thing, so Mark pressed the button and tried to make the bloke hear him.
There was no reply.
He tried and tried.
We had just decided to get a spanner and dismantle the entire gate-hinge system, when a distant voice crackled on the intercom, and it was the drunk bloke, who had clearly arrived through his front door and expired from intoxication.
He grunted and mumbled, without the least apology, but after a moment or two the gates opened and I was free.
He won’t be getting a taxi again in a hurry, I can tell you.
I had another altercation with a drunk bloke very late at night, who completely failed to know in which guest house he was staying , and when we eventually worked it out, failed to have any money. I was cross with him then, and he said, haughtily, that I had an attitude problem. I told him that indeed I did, and it was brought out by people whose male anatomy was on their cranium, which was certainly him. He said that my customer service was very poor, so I took him to a far-away cash machine and obliged him to withdraw some money. He did this, and I extracted it from him immediately, before taking him back to his guest house. He was very cross, and said he was going to report me to my boss, which threat completely failed to distress me.
I made the comments about his anatomy again, and drove off.
On a more cheerful note, we have had the most magnificent day. We got up at lunchtime and climbed up the fell to take the dogs to pick blackberries. The dogs are rotten at picking blackberries, but like to charge about and bark at squirrels, so everybody was happy. It was the most glorious day, with the last of the golden autumn sunshine gleaming on the lake, and tiny sail-boats flapping along it in the distance. The trees smelled of autumn, and the grass was cool and damp, and we sat on a bench and thought that this was what happiness was like.
We came home with pounds and pounds of blackberries, and quinces, and even some wild mushrooms, which were splendid with garlic bread and cheese in our taxi picnic.
Obviously we had dawdled so much that we were late for work, but we didn’t care by then.
Mark has been picking blackberries whilst I have been away. We will have blackberry jam, and blackberry ice cream, and blackberry jelly, and puréed blackberry mousse, and possibly some more blackberry gin.
It is going to be a jolly good winter.
