Rebooting

Once more I have had a day at a run.

I have dashed about, squeaking with anxiety, desperately trying to get everything finished before six o’clock chimes and I turn into a pumpkin.

Of course I don’t really turn into a pumpkin. Actually the inverse is true, because at six o’clock my carriage awaits me, and I have to dash off and empty the dogs before I shove everything into the said carriage and belt off to work.

There doesn’t seem to be very much day between getting up and that frantic moment.

This morning I was up by ten, which was later than I would have liked because of enthusiastic late-night drinkers still ambling about at midnight, looking for taxis.

After that I am sure you will have remembered that it was Clean Sheets Day, which is always a rush.

It was not raining, but warm, and damp, and I splashed up the fell with less good cheer than usual because one of my boots has developed a large and depressing ventilation crack. The boot has started to come away from the sole, and every time I go through a puddle, which is often because this is the Lake District, my socks get wet.

I am going to have to get some new ones, boots, not socks, obviously, my socks are fine although beginning to look a bit grey because of their constant immersion in muddy water. I have been looking at New Boot Shops in between customers and discovered, gloomily, that they are going to cost me a hundred and fifty quid. I know what boots I want, they are exactly the same as the ones I have got, only without the big crack. Also I was astonished, looking at pictures of the beautiful new ones, to remember how lovely my own boots were in their now long-distant youth. They were not the grim and elderly deep oxen brown colour that they are today. They were golden brown, and magnificent, and I am torn between a vague feeling of loyalty to my long-uncomplaining, much battered old boots, and a longing for some glorious golden new ones.

I have worn the tread off them anyway. They are not going to last much longer.

I shall think about it a bit more.

Once home and my feet dried off, although irritatingly my socks were still wet when I put them back on for work, I resolved to address the pressing problem of the day, which was that I have got visitors coming tomorrow, and I had nothing with which to feed them.

I am excited about the visitors. It is an old, old friend, from when I was about nineteen, and his wife. In those days he was called Pukey John, although I imagine he has changed that now he, like me, is nearly sixty. He has been married for thirty five years, and I have not seen him in the whole of that time.

I do not know how we have managed that, because when we were youthful teenagers he was very probably my best friend, and we got ourselves in and out of some very exciting scrapes together, and I can hardly tell you how much I am looking forward to a whole day where all of the conversation goes Do You Remember..? because it will all be funny and lovely now that we are at a very safe distance.

Almost everybody else that I knew from that time is dead. It will be lovely to meet another survivor.

Anyway, all of the excitement had to be set aside whilst I resolved the very practical issues arising from imminent visitors, which was, as reported, related to their continued nourishment during their stay.

As you are aware, I am still in the throes of a determined attempt to become thinner, an attempt which I might add, is producing almost no results whatsoever, and has had the effect of leaving nothing interesting to eat in the house anywhere. I am living, with surprising if somewhat bovine, contentment, on watermelon and raw carrots, but one can hardly offer these to visitors with their cup of coffee, so today I baked biscuits.

It is so long since I have baked anything that I had almost forgotten how to do it, but in the end they turned out all right. Then I made fish pancakes, of a low-carbohydrate nature, and some chocolate caramel biscuits for when the children come home.

I did not quite finish either of the last two, and I am going to have to do the last bits after work.

After all of that I rushed round dusting and hoovering. This was not really because of the visitors, although it is nice to think that somebody will be coming to admire my dust-free bookshelves, but because it is Monday, and dusting and clean sheets go together like dog accidents and disinfectant.

I did not even have the time to write anything in these pages before I dashed out to work, and I am on the taxi rank. I am going to have to stop writing anyway, because I have got some other things that must be written before I go home.

Fortunately it has been peaceful. I have not been overly disturbed by customers.

I do not mind this because today I paid the troubling Autoparts bill.

My conscience is clear.

PS. I have spoken to Mark. He said to buy the boots on the poor credit card, which is nearly as ancient and battered as the boots. He said he would pay it when he comes home.

All the same, my conscience is no longer clear.

Ah well.