I am on the taxi rank.
I have been here for three hours and so far I have earned six quid. This is a rubbish hourly rate but I have occupied the evening very contentedly by drinking several cups of strong tea, reading my book and gassing to Oliver on the telephone, and so I don’t mind.
There might have been rather a lot of cups of strong tea, it has been very quiet. I am going to have to go home soon.
It has been a good sort of day for catching up with my offspring. Number One Daughter has had some horrid surgical adventures related to kidney misadventures, all of which are hideously painful and more so since the NHS has cut sympathy out of its budget. Sensibly she lied about having somebody at home to look after her so they let her out without complaint, otherwise she might have been either a bed-blocker, or worse, denied access to any of the sort of useful pain-killing drugs that actually work.
Number Two Daughter called to explain that her dog was barking, in the being mental sort of sense, not in the won’t-shut-up sort of sense, and was skulking in her basket refusing to interact with them after being disappointed when Doggy Daycare was shut due to some Canadian weather.
She has called the dog’s basket Azkhaban, to my amusement, the dog is obliged to slink off there when she is in disgrace. Note to the Harry Potter non-compliant, Azkhaban is the prison where naughty wizards get sent. I am sure almost everybody knows this and for those who don’t, really you need to keep abreast of modern intellectual trends, you can’t expect explanations of every wit-laden literary reference, get with the programme.
Lucy called in a tizz this morning to tell us that her car had failed its MOT and so she will be coming home for the weekend. We have ordered the parts that it needs from Autoparts so that will help Mark to manage his boredom nicely over the next few days. She had a very unpleasant couple of hours being obliged to change a wheel by herself. They did not teach them how to do this at princess-school, and although Mark had shown her before she left home I think she had hoped to have a live-in boyfriend before one went flat.
You will be pleased to hear that she managed it in the end, although it left her hands dirty.
Oliver rang to discuss his short-term career prospects. The lower sixth are being obliged to apply for the prefectural roles of their choice at the moment, he has had to choose from a wide range of functions from being Head Of Car Parking to being Head of St Christopher’s Sound Box.
No, I do not have the first idea who St. Christopher is nor what he is doing with a sound box, nor even what a sound box actually is, etc etc. Schools are always peculiar places.
We discussed it this evening and I made several amusing suggestions for comical things he could include in his letters of application. This made me laugh very much indeed but Oliver rejected all of them out of hand and pointed out that there was a good reason I had finished up driving a taxi instead of being Head Of St. Christopher’s Sound Box.
I did not even make it to being a prefect in my own school days, one of about six who failed to make the grade where the other two hundred and ninety four candidates succeeded. I was mildly relieved about this at the time, since being a prefect meant an obligation to stand in doorways at break times and refuse admittance to younger children who sought shelter from the rain. They were supposed to go and wee in the flower beds presumably, the younger children not the prefects, obviously. In the end some other youth gave me a prefect’s badge which meant I got the best of all worlds, being given the dignity and respect of that not-very-exclusive band without any of the doorway-standing responsibilities. Certainly I could never have hoped to rise to the dizzy heights of being responsible for St Christopher and his Sound Box.
According to Oliver I still couldn’t rise to it now.
I don’t care. I am self employed and independent.
I still haven’t earned anything else.
