Well, it has been a Day.
I woke up from a truly horrible dream in which I discovered that the council had come into our back yard and demolished both the shed and the conservatory on the grounds that it was not fair that anybody had more things in their back yard than their poorer neighbours. In their place there were a lot of stinging nettles and some empty beer cans, rather like in the back yards of some staff houses just up the road.
I must stop reading strident political newspapers before I go to bed, I think.
After that, of course, anything that happened in the real world had to be an improvement.
The day started, almost before I was dressed, with a flurry of emails from Mark’s next job. He is going offshore again on Monday, and of course there is always a ton of paperwork to be done. He has got to declare himself fit and insured, competent and properly organised with the tax office.
He was taking my car to bits in the alley so I declared all of that on his behalf.
I am sure I would have noticed if he was not.
He is going to the Bleo Holm, He has been there before and says that it is a nice oil rig. It had never previously occurred to me that one might have such a thing as a favourite oil rig, but indeed one can. There are all sorts of differences between oil rigs. Some have night shifts and day shifts sharing a bed. You just turn it upside down when you have finished with it and the other person sleeps in the bit that was underneath. Mark does not mind this except that there is nowhere to go if he wants some peace and quiet because his bed is upside down with somebody else snoring in it.
He is frantically rushing to get my car fixed before he disappears, which will be at some time on Sunday. His mother is coming to visit us on Sunday morning, so there will be no time for last minute adjustments. It will have to be done.
He has gone out to sit on the taxi rank now, because my car is full of spare bits from the scrap yard and of all of his tools. I am not working, although I dived out briefly at half past ten to collect a customer whom I rightly supposed would not notice the clutter in the back. As it turned out this was a happy journey, because the customer had also run taxis in the village for forty years, and by a peculiar chance of fate, had lived in the house next door to ours. We exchanged taxi stories, and he warned me sagely to get out now before the horrors of it killed me. Since he was almost a hundred years old I did not feel in imminent danger, but we were entirely in agreement about the difficulties and pitfalls of a taxi-driving career.
He decided to desist after a misfortune with the Inland Revenue. I sympathised wholeheartedly.
It is very cold. Since the heater is still not working in my taxi I felt no great inclination to carry on down to the taxi rank afterwards, and came home to warm up my feet by our newly-lit fire. The clocks have ticked on and the time of year is upon us. The sky is bright and clear and burning with ancient stars, and I am sorry to say that the firewood-sawing season has begun.
It has been nice to have a night off, even if it was just caused by a taxi malfunction. I have curled up in front of my computer and written some more of my story. It is lovely to get back to it after so much summer spent charging about doing other things.
I might just have another five minutes at it before I go to bed.
