I have got about five minutes left before it is time for me to go to work and so I thought I would make a quick start on writing to you.
It is a far less unpleasant way of filling the unforgiving minute than Kipling’s suggestion. He and Number One Daughter might have had quite a lot in common.
I have certainly filled my unforgiving minutes today. I have run around busily watering the conservatory and cleaning out my taxi. They are my least favourite jobs in the whole week, worse even than dusting, which at least doesn’t involve my getting soaked, and so I resolved to get them over and done with this afternoon.
I am going to have a far happier week because of it. It is always a good feeling to have done the things to which one is not looking forward.
I have invested in my future.
I am pleased about this, because Mark has gone offshore again, and so my future is looking a little grey. Not that I am going to have an unhappy time, quite the opposite, I shall sew Lucy’s curtains and write my stories and make a very belated start on the wretched Advent calendars, which are now hanging over me like that sword dangling from the ancient ceiling on a thread. When I was a child I always wondered why stupid Damocles didn’t just get up and sit somewhere else, since he was King and could presumably sit where he liked. That is what I would have done.
I am older now and understand about metaphors, which, as one of my friends observed once, is just another word for Fibs. I was speaking in metaphor, he used to explain, when accused of untruth.
In any case, my taxi-cleaning activities were considerably improved by the appearance of one of our neighbours, clutching a large bottle of single malt, which, somewhat to my surprise, he handed to me.
It’s a Christmas present, he said.
He is from London, where the population’s reasoning process is always a source of inexplicable mystification to me, and so I did not explain that even Asda has not yet put its Christmas decorations up, although Booths, to my horror, has already commenced its sale of mince pies. I just thanked him politely and made Good Neighbourly noises, and shoved it under the dresser where the children won’t find it.
Single malt for breakfast is one of our favourite Christmas holiday nice things. There can be no better way of starting the day than smoked salmon, cheese, bread, honey and fruit, all washed down with a generous serving of single malt. If I had won the lottery I would commence every day like that and deal with the inevitable consequences with the occasional visit to plastic surgeons to have my excess flab sucked away.
I am on the taxi rank now, indeed, I have been here for the last few paragraphs, and have just made the tiresome discovery that tomorrow I am going to need to trail down to Morecambe to replace my back tyre. It is uncomfortably low, and won’t blow up. This is because it has already been stuffed full of Tyre Weld, which seems to have glued the valve shut very effectively, although it has done nothing to fix the leak.
I am cross about this because tomorrow is Clean Sheets Day and I wanted to get all of the dusting done, along with all the rest of the trivial but time consuming household chores that encroach on my domestic tranquillity.
Still, such is a taxi driver’s lot.
I will just have to concentrate on earning enough to pay for it, which will not be easy because the tourist-rich summer season has reached its end, and we are reduced to a handful of winter-wedding stag parties and disconsolate kitchen porters for our customers.
No single malt tonight.
