It has all been very busy. I am not at all sorry to be sitting on the taxi rank at the end of it all, doing almost nothing and drinking a cup of tea next to the lake.
We have been entirely occupied.
Obviously there has been the whole bank holiday thing, with full-scale taxi driving in every available minute. Also there has been the children at home, and getting Oliver ready to go back to school. On top of all of this there has been poor trafficked Rosie and her sex-working trauma.
In the end she did not go until Friday night, when she was dragged from their quiet basket in the middle of the night and dumped in a car with a stranger.
Her little face was a mask of silent tragedy. She stared at me out of enormous, beseeching brown eyes, but I was unmoved, and she was whisked away into the night.
Poor Roger Poopy was utterly heartbroken. I have attached below a video, if you can get it to work, of his sadness, taken a little while after her precipitate departure, when he had retreated to Lucy’s bedroom to tell her all about his unhappiness.
I am sorry to say that it made us all laugh, if it makes you laugh you can consider yourself truly heartless as well.
The other taxi driver showed us a photograph afterwards. It was taken shortly after Rosie arrived, and was of Rosie having discovered that there were dog treats in their house. I do not suppose she had forgotten Roger Poopy, but most certainly she had not lost her appetite.
We do not know if they have Done The Thing, but she is home. She was returned to Roger’s joyful embraces this evening, after the other taxi driver had left them to get on with it in the garden. Shockingly, when he came to let them in, he discovered her seducer whimpering piteously and crouching in a pool of his own blood.
We do not know exactly what happened to him, but it appears that it has rendered him temporarily impotent, so we are back to the drawing board.
Honestly, this sex-trafficking thing is not as easy as it looks.
In the rest of the time, I have just been busy. Really, truly, flat-out busy. Shopping and feeding people and packing to go away tomorrow, sewing labels in uniform and trying to leave the house clean and tidy. It is not as clean and tidy as I would like but it will do.
We were going to take the camper van to Manchester, but in the end we are not. We are going to stay in the Midland for a night. This was just easier than car parking and dogs and feeding ourselves and everybody being crammed into a tiny space. The camper van is too small for four of us to make ourselves look middle class without a great deal of squishing past one another and elbowing somebody else in the eye whilst trying to clean our teeth in the kitchen sink. We realised that we would have to go home after the theatre in any case, because there is no way that the camper van can accommodate all four of us plus sufficient luggage for a term in Scotland, and so in the end we decided just to leave the camper van where it was and go in the car.
I liked that decision very much and suddenly felt very much more cheerful about the whole thing, which promptly metamorphosised into a rest and an adventure instead of just a huge nuisance.
Today we packed all of Oliver’s luggage into it so that the second we get back to Windermere we will be able to leave again. Then we packed cases to travel to Manchester and packed a bag full of dog food for the dogs to take with them to the lodger’s house.
There are two of them again now so I suppose they will be happy wherever they are.
