It has been a Day, and frankly I am not sorry that it is almost over.
I am on the taxi rank, and so it is not over, there are many misadventures possible between now and bedtime. I am hoping that none of them happen.
It started with the tiresome realisation that Lucy’s cats had got fleas. It is flea season, and they were covered.
Our dogs had picked up fleas as well, despite heavy-duty carcinogens purchased from the vet, so they will be in the carpets and everywhere.
Mark has got too many MOT related problems to care about fleas. He made apologetic noises and buzzed off to spend the day lying in a puddle underneath the camper van, where, incidentally, he discovered that the chap who ran into the back of the van in Scotland some time ago had jammed the bike rack into the spare tyre and punctured it, so we are going to have to spend tomorrow getting another. Two, actually, because one of the real tyres is beginning to lose its patterned loveliness as well. We were sanguine about this, it would have been a terrible discovery to make halfway up the A9 in the middle of the night in a snowstorm, so perhaps the Gods were feeling benevolent.
I flea-sprayed the carpets with the moist noxious poison I had, and I will have to have another thorough hoover and another spray tomorrow. Then I took the cats to the vet.
That is such a simple sentence. It does not do justice to the trauma of hunting, and capture, and wrestling two extremely sharp, savage creatures into an unappealing box.
When I got them to the vet they would not come out. One of them was pretending to be dead, so convincingly that for a moment I was actually worried, but it turned out that it was a ploy so that I would not notice her, and she wasn’t dead after all.
The vet gave them some of her most lethal flea-destructant and gave me some more extermination spray, and charged me enough to have bought some new carpets, and we went home.
After that I took some of Lucy’s books to the second-hand bookshop. This took ages because it is miles away, but the small sum they gave me knocked the price of a doormat of the vet’s new-carpet charges.
I had to go to Kendal anyway, because of collecting the new taxi plate from the council. They have made their office as inaccessible as humanly possible, being at the wrong end of a long one-way system, with no parking anywhere near it. One of the roads leading up to it was closed, the car park was full, and there were dismal queues of traffic everywhere.
I parked in a car park underneath a sign which said BARCLAYS BANK PRIVATE IF YOU ARE GOING TO SEE THE COUNCIL BUZZ OFF AND PARK SOMEWHERE ELSE, so probably I will burn in hell. It was raining.
It was raining so hard that even though we had all of the new livery for the new Westmorland FU council, we did not stick any of it to the taxi. It can wait until the rain stops, probably in spring at this rate. I have left it on the conservatory table and there was a cat asleep on it when I came out to work.
Incidentally, talking of one-way systems, I have just taken some customers up to Windermere who asked me how long it would take them to walk from their hotel to the Indian restaurant. I pointed out the Indian restaurant, which was about two hundred yards away from their hotel and opined that probably it would take about five minutes, given that they were on the portly side.
Ah yes, they said, but there’s a one-way system. You can only go in the other direction.
Patiently I explained the application of one-way traffic systems and their relationship to pedestrians, ie, none whatsoever, and they looked astonished.
When I thought about it afterwards I was surprised by their portliness, given the amount of unnecessary walking they must have done in the course of their lifetimes.
Sometimes it is a very good job that one is not required to pass an intelligence test before being allowed into the Lake District.
We would never make any money at that rate.
