We are having weather.
Actually, we are not really having weather any more. It seems to have stopped, but we have certainly had some weather.
First it froze. Then it thawed, and froze again. The consequence of this was some startling black ice. If your employment involves driving a taxi around un-gritted rural roads in the dead of night, this is a consequence to be ignored at your peril. I was all right, but several customers, despite warnings, got out and immediately fell over. One set of customers could not get up the steep driveway to their holiday cottage. I left them in a swearing heap at the bottom. I think they might have had to sleep there.
After this it snowed. It did not snow very much, just a couple of inches, and it was washed away several hours later by a monumental downpour of rain. This lasted all day, and was so spectacularly rainy that everywhere flooded and the roads closed.
This last was actually rather good for us, because it meant that any taxi driver who lives outside the village, which is most of them these days, could not get here, and we had Saturday night to ourselves.
We did not go very far, because most customers couldn’t get here either, but we went nowhere much a lot of times. Also we are very used to driving through floods, and carried on despite all the notices warning us not to. This worked out perfectly well, and goes to show that sometimes it is all right to be a smug know-it-all.
Of course if you live in England then you will know all of this already, about the weather, not being a know-it-all, obviously, and doubtless you have your own weathery stories to recount, but for those readers who hail from foreign parts, probably it is of interest, and really the preceding paragraphs are for you.
Yesterday was so wet I did not even go on my walk. I do not ever let the weather stop me, but yesterday I did, not least because when I tried to let the dogs out they would not go through the door, after which they did not go and wee in the yard but dashed over to the shed, where they stood, shivering accusingly, until I let them in again. Mark took them for a hasty emptying in the Library Gardens, and everybody had to be happy with that.
Mark went out, though, bravely. He went across to his trees and carried on cutting them up ready for the trailer to come next week. He thinks that he has almost finished, which is very good news, and when they have hauled it all across to the farm we will have a stack of firewood which will last us until Oliver has finished college.
It is Oliver’s birthday. It is nineteen years since that auspicious day in an ancient rural corner of France when Lucy missed the school bus because he was being born. It has been a very full nineteen years, for all of us.
In other news, I am slowly drawing to the end of the Advent calendars, another few days should do it now, which is just as well since you are supposed to start opening them on Sunday. If everything goes according to plan I will get them posted in good time and I might even have time to do the dusting before we go away next week. If everything doesn’t go according to plan then it will be a frantic scramble and everybody will have to pretend they don’t mind having to open the first week all at once.
Next year I will get organised properly and start in June.
Really I will.
