I am sitting on the taxi rank hoping that the undoubted nutter a few yards away does not decide to want a taxi.
He is clearly both intoxicated and completely bonkers.
His trousers are falling down, necessitating a continuous, complicated little dance to keep them up. He has a filthy rucksack which he has balanced precariously on the wall and is trying to reorganise, but the straps are turning out to be far more puzzling than he can manage, and he is waving his arms as if he were having an inland swimming lesson. He has a tin cup which he occasionally bashes against the wall, as if in response to some inner rhythm, and I am really hoping that he has drunk away his cash and is intending to walk.
As I wrote those words a helpful lady crossed the road to him, a look of virtuous concern on her face. She tried several times to engage with him, presumably planning to take him to the vet and put him in a cage, but his animation became rather worse, involving more saliva than one wishes to encounter in most conversations. Eventually she decided that she was not that desperate to go to heaven, and sloped off, trying to look as though she had always intended just for a brief chat and a spot of face-wiping.
I got a job then, to my massive relief, and the consternation of the other taxi drivers behind me in the queue, and by the time I got back he had disappeared. I do not know what happened, maybe the vet turned up in person.
Lucy has gone home now, taking her kitties with her, and the house is astonishingly silent. Obviously Oliver is still in residence but his life carries on largely inside his computer, emerging only occasionally for pizza.
He came with me into Kendal this afternoon, the purpose of which was to purchase some clothes suitable for vacationing in the Far East, meaning nothing that he has already, since it was all bought with the North of Scotland in mind.
We went to TK Maxx, which obviously you know because I told you we would. Oliver does not much like shopping, and bought the first handful of T-shirts that he reasonably could, followed by the first shorts that fitted. Then both of our eyes were drawn to the most magnificent pair of trainers imaginable.
They were bright red with pictures of Father Christmas all over them.
They had one pair, in a Size Eight, or I would have bought them for myself.
Once Oliver put them on nothing else that he was wearing mattered at all, because the attention-grabbing garments were on each foot.
We thought that nothing could be more appropriate for a couple of weeks in Korea, and also for going back to school. A shopping lady shoving a trolley patiently around us agreed that they were wonderful, and added that he could take them to smart places and put them on when his smart shoes hurt him.
Oliver said that these would be his smart shoes.
Obviously we bought them.
When we looked on eBay later it turned out that they were selling at twice the price we had paid for them, so we felt very pleased with ourselves.
After that we went home, and I made some fudge and some coffee chocolate before I had to go to work, which is where I am now.
I have occupied most of the evening sewing name labels into T-shirts, which is a task as seasonal as making mince pies in December.
On a final note, I have just had a chap in my car who has been telling me of a problem currently suffered by the local council, who have just merged, for some inexplicable and almost certainly utterly profitless reason, with the next door council, to become Westmorland and Furness Unitary.
Regrettably this means that parking ticket payments made to them are showing on people’s bank statements as Westmorland F U.
I thought that this summed up the sentiments of everybody concerned rather admirably, but they are casting about for an alternative.
I am going to write to them and suggest Westmorland Up Yours.
