I have spent all day writing my dissertation and now I am not going to go to work.
I am beside myself at such idleness, but I read in the august Daily Telegraph last night that stress makes people fat because of a thing called Cortisol, and that the best way to become lean and unrounded is to be idle and contented.
I am sure there is a flaw in that argument somewhere but I am most certainly not going to look for it. It is a much nicer argument than the tiresome one which simply says: don’t eat so many chocolate buttons. Also it has got a medical word in it and so it must be true.
I did not quite spend all day writing my dissertation. When I got up I pludged wearily up the fell through the bemired ground, and took the dogs for a prolonged charge-about-with-emptying. Not that they did much charging about. The ground is much too sodden and muddy for that, like trying to hold the hundred metre sprint on a grass pitch which has just hosted all of the matches in a particularly wet Six Nations Cup.
We got very wet. I had to take my trousers off when I got home, and I thought that I would clean out my taxi, but I didn’t, because it has not stopped raining once in the entire day. Perhaps tomorrow.
I am not going to go to work. I texted one of the other taxi drivers and told him that he had better go, because I was not going to bother, but he did not feel like it either, so together we leaned on the weakest-willed taxi driver, and he is going to do it. He is the one who always gets stuck with the groups of young men who promise that their incoherent mate is not going to be sick, because he has not yet grown sufficient backbone to tell them to get lost. He finishes up spending a lot of time cleaning his taxi out. I suppose he will get wise in the end, but at the moment he is a useful way of disposing of nuisances.
I had a nuisance the other night. He was an irritating chap who announced that he had no intention of paying the fare that I had just quoted, and so I stopped in the middle of the road and reversed back on to the taxi rank, where I compelled him to get out. He wanted to know why, so I explained, reasonably, I thought, that it was because I didn’t like him. He got out in the end, yelling that I was an ignorant peasant. I yelled back that he was an ignorant pedestrian, which made me feel very pleased with my capacity for witty ripostes.
Anyway, it is important that one of us goes to work tonight, because there are some taxi drivers on our rank who have just appeared from somewhere else, and we do not want them thinking that they can make a profit. They need to go broke quickly so that they buzz off back again.
I will never go to Heaven.
I have told Oliver that we are going to stay in and have a Chinese take away. I am looking forward to this, it will be an antidote to my catering-related stress and help me to get thinner. I have spent days and days worrying about providing Oliver with adequate nutrition, and now I don’t need to bother.
I am also going to have an early night. I have been contemplating my sleeping patterns lately and concluded that I am not helping myself by making my bed-time routine so horrible that I am probably subconsciously trying to avoid it. After I have swept the kitchen, washed the pots and filled the stove, all in the middle of the night, I go upstairs for a shower, followed by an ice-cold shower, then I give the bathroom a thorough clean, and stand on one leg for a minute before I go to bed.
I do not stand on one leg for the whole of the minute. I stand on each leg for half a minute at a time, with my eyes shut, because of another piece of medical advice in the august Daily Telegraph, which explained that it would make me live longer. I have shown no signs of dying young yet, so it must be working pretty well so far.
It is such a good thing we have a reliable press. I do not know what I would do without them.
I would be fat and dead in no time, I expect.
