Seasoning

It is not even nine o’clock, and it has gone dark.

I like this, because it means we are approaching the time of year when it is not necessary to clean out my taxi quite so often. Nobody can tell if it is dirty in the dark.

Since we have not yet quite reached that splendid moment, I did actually clean it out today. This is one of my unavoidable, but much-disliked jobs. When Mark is home I try and shuffle it off on to him, which is disgracefully idle but one of the happy things about being married.

It does not take very long, especially if I do it quite often, but still I hate it. Every trodden-in muddy footprint, every cigarette end, and today, some popcorn dropped by a child whose parents would not insist that she did not eat it whilst sitting in the taxi – all of these things fill me with a loathing of the travelling general public, most especially the ones who are only travelling five hundred yards out of Bowness because they have got a bad leg.

They are not so bad really. They have the enormous benefit that I do not need to talk to them for very long.

Mostly I don’t talk to them at all anyway. There are only so many times in one lifetime that you can agree that the Lake District is a lovely place to live, and explain that you have not been busy.

They all ask this, and I never tell anybody the truth. Partly this is because I have no wish to announce that I have worked my socks off and have a sack of cash under my seat, but mostly because I just don’t like talking to people. I think I must be one of the world’s least sociable citizens.

I like talking to other dog-emptiers when I go on my walk, and I like talking to people whom I know a little about, and in whom I am interested, but fat drunk taxi customers with bad legs are uninspiring company.

I suppose the problem is that the summer holiday season is almost over at last, and we are all getting to the end of our joyfulness at the sight of the tourists. They have been here for a long time now, cluttering up the parking spaces and dropping their ice creams all over the pavements, and we are beginning to look forward to the endless wet dreary nights of winter, when there will be nobody, and we will be living in bucolic, if impecunious, tranquillity.

There were lots of them on my walk this morning. In my opinion the maximum number of people to take on a walk with me is none at all, or one if they promise to be very quiet. I do not know how you can expect to notice anything at all if you are endlessly yakking to somebody about the ingratitude of your employer or the unreasonableness of your spouse all the way to the top.

Bringing your children is an act so breathtakingly stupid I do not understand why anybody thinks it would be a good idea. Nobody could possibly imagine that children like being taken for walks, when every shred of the available evidence suggests the contrary. The only time we ever took ours when they were small was when they were about to attend a school at which lengthy walking expeditions were compulsory, and we thought we ought to make sure it was not too much of a nasty shock.

Children do not like being taken for walks. The conversations I have overheard whilst passing wearily bedraggled families this morning were more than sufficient evidence for anybody. I heard one disheartened little girl saying, with conviction in her voice: I hate you, Mummy. When I looked at her mother, who was the sort who gives her children a raw carrot when they are hungry, I was not surprised.

Fortunately, they were dragging their feet so determinedly it did not take me very long to leave them all behind. You can’t hear anything if you are listening to your children wittering. The wind, the occasional cries of the birds, although not many now, the swifts are all gone and the larks are silent, and the clattering of the beck, are more than sufficient background to my own thoughts.

Tomorrow the weekend is over and they will have buzzed off again.

I am looking forward to that moment.