It is entirely quiet in Bowness. There is nobody here except for a handful of unemployed taxi drivers, staring forlornly at one another across the expanse of empty taxi rank.
I do not exactly mind this. I have had a busy few days, because to my extreme irritation Mark has decided that this weekend, just before Christmas, with a thousand unfinished tasks yapping at my ankles, he would like to dismantle and redesign part of the new heating system.
It has taken him two days, and has occupied him entirely in a contented passion of creative contemplation, along with dust, and fragments of steel wool.
I do not know how he has survived.
He has also made another massive mess, but he cleared it all up this afternoon when he realised that leaving it all over the house was very likely to prove fatal. Mortality rates in husbands are quite closely linked to plumbing tools and plaster strewn all over the stairs for prolonged periods of time.
Whilst he was engaged I cleared up everything else, cooked and cleaned and cleaned out the taxis. Mark usually does this, but he was busy, and in any case he was brought up on a farm in the nineteen seventies, and only has the most rudimentary nations of what a clean car might be expected to look like.
I cleaned them thoroughly.
I didn’t have much choice about this really, because some disgusting sub-human had chucked half of a kebab all over the back seat of mine. I am not great admirer of our customer base at the best of times, but this particular discovery filled me with a loathing of the human race, at least, that portion of it which gets in taxis.
This loathing was not cured until late last night, when I was flagged by a party of dishevelled, but extremely exuberant Liverpudlians.
Obviously I stopped, because the nature of this job is basically not to discriminate against people for being intoxicated drugged idiots, but actually they were reasonably civilised.
They wanted to go to an hotel which was about three hundred yards away.
I explained this and pointed to it, but they were undeterred. Every one of the three hundred yards was on an uphill-facing slope, they explained, and they did not wish to walk, so I sighed and took them.
When we arrived they presented me with a fifty pound note and told me to keep the change. They wished, they said, to be remembered with goodwill.
They most certainly were.
I shall take the fifty pound note to the Post Office tomorrow in order to be certain of its provenance, but it looked and felt real enough, and I am something of an expert. It hadn’t even been rolled up and covered with traces of white powder, which lots of them are. It was a very happy event.
It was such a splendidly cheering moment in the night that I almost, although not quite, forgave Mark when we got home and I discovered that his plumbing modifications had caused a flood in my office. He had not tightened something up, and water was dripping down out of the light fittings on the ceiling.
Everything was sodden, and I was not very pleased. He was guilty and apologetic, but I was not mollified and have told him that plumbing is about to be on the list of Banned Activities. Frankly I think I would rather he took up drug abuse.
He was so busy clearing it all up and fiddling with his pipework this afternoon that I had to go and clean the camper van out by myself. It just got dumped, still filthy, on Ellerthwaite Square when I got back from Cambridge, because it was the middle of the night and I had just had too busy a week. Mark had promised that he would help me with this, but he had been overtaken by his yearning for plumbing, and we might be going to Ripon in it tomorrow, and so this afternoon I bit the bullet and did it myself.
It took ages, because I couldn’t bring it home to clean it, and so had no hoover. Also it had been neglected for so long that the fridge had developed black mouldy bits, and the bathroom had developed crusty bits, and the whole thing was revolting. I had to drag the loo back to empty it, and it leaked.
It was not my finest hour.
Mark thought he would greet me with am cheery smile when I got home.
He may have been disappointed by the response.
Sometimes plumbers just have no mates.
