It has now become so very quiet on the taxi rank that my hourly rate has sunk to something that even our beloved leaders would find an embarrassment.
I am occupying this newly spare time in all sorts of ways. Mostly I am writing to you, but I have also spent some hours reading through and commenting on stories written by my fellow students. We have been having some occasional meetings to discuss our projects, and of course you can’t sensibly discuss somebody else’s masterpiece until you have actually read it, at least, not until you are a tutor and have had some practice.
The taxi rank is a perfect opportunity to do this. I have made one or two abortive attempts at composing my own gripping prose here, but it has been fairly unsuccessful because of the interruptions. Even if there are no customers, there is usually a bored taxi driver who would like to chat, or at the very worst, a drunk person who is completely incapable of working out by themselves how to find the Stag’s Head, because it is thirty yards away behind a tree.
Last night I abandoned all efforts at reading. I have got a book, which is an entertaining, if somewhat improbable book about Pakistani criminals, but it has got small print in a pale grey shade, and even with new glasses my elderly eyesight is not up to it in the gloom of the taxi in the middle of the night.
In the end I abandoned it and watched a film. It was not actually a film, as I discovered when it seemed to end at a peculiarly unresolved moment, but a serial on Netflix, and there is some more to watch when I have finished writing to you. It was called Capital, by a very clever writer called John Lanchester, and it was the story of a book that I have already read but forgotten, so despite frowning efforts to recollect it, I don’t know what to expect in the end. John Lanchester writes books about economics as well. They are interesting too, if you are looking for something to read on a night that is so dull that a book about economics sounds entertaining.
I can hardly tell you how much I enjoyed it, the film, that is, although the books about economics as well, even though they were ages ago.
It is a very long time since I have watched anything, probably last February, I think, if you don’t count going to the theatre, and it was an absolute pleasure. A whole story being played out right in front of my eyes, and all I had to do was sit there and watch. I didn’t even need to think about it, because probably the film makers will make sure they have thoroughly told me what they want me to think before it is finished, which will save me the bother.
Obviously I did think about it a bit, the pictures filled my head all the way round the Library Gardens when I took the dogs out afterwards, so much so that I even forgot to worry in case there was a zombie about to leap out at me from the midnight-black shadows behind the trees.
I am looking forward to Part Two later this evening. I do not know how many parts there are, but the book was not nearly as thick as A Game Of Thrones, so I don’t suppose there will be very many.
In other news, autumn is upon us in all sorts of other ways as well as the absence of customers. My walk this morning was cloudy and damp, and smelled of gorse and fading leaves, and I spoiled most of it for myself by having a lengthy text-message disagreement all the way round with somebody who couldn’t see my point, until I was grumpy and cross instead of feeling calm and restored in the usual way. This was my own fault for persisting instead of just sighing and switching it off, and when I got home I resolved to myself that I would not do that again, because my morning tranquillity had fled.
It has all been a bit autumnal. The washing would not dry on the line, and the fire was sooty and reluctant, and the insurance company could not see the photograph of my driving licence even when I sent it for the fifth time, and I spent another hour on the telephone to the Royal Mail, who have lost a parcel that we have sent, and who know where it is but are tiresomely disinclined to send it back.
It doesn’t matter. This evening I am going to relax into the semi-hypnotised, soporific state created by having a story to watch.
It is going to be lovely.
