I am having a quiet night in.
It was a sensible thing to do after last night’s happy debauchery.
Tonight Mark went out to watch films on the taxi rank and I stayed at home to do the ironing.
This job has been hanging over me for quite some time, it was our smart clothes from our last exciting adventure, the one where we went to Yorkshire and then on to Bath. We had a lovely time. I would like to do it again next year, all I need to do is save up a small fortune and get all of the Christmas jobs done early and it will be easy.
Next year I really am going to start in June.
I cheered myself up during the remarkably tedious clothes-flattening process by putting on an Audible book about Harry Potter, and so actually it was not nearly as dull as I had been dreading, in fact, by the time an excited Harry was on the train for his first term at Hogwarts I had nearly finished, and I had barely noticed. The shirts positively flew past, as if I had been on the Hogwarts Express myself.
I have not packed it into cases for our Manchester trip yet, because it will only get creased. I have left everything hanging in the attic, pristine and flat and looking respectable. One of the nice things about just having had a week away is that there is no flapping necessary. All agonised worrying about what might look all right with what has already been done, and I will just recycle everything we wore last time. I do not know if it looked all right last time or not, but nobody actually pointed and laughed, so it can’t have been that bad.
It is another job crossed off the endless List, though. It would be nice to think that this was getting shorter but it isn’t. Every day there seems to be something else newly written upon it. I am getting very fed up of it. If I can’t make it go away soon I am just going to put it in the bin.
Today I made fudge to go inside Christmas chocolates. I made lots of it so there will be plenty left over, and it is in a tin in the fridge, into which I am trying hard not to dip, because fudge is just a chocolate button by another name really, it makes you just as fat, possibly worse because it is full of cream and butter and sugar, and I bet Mr. Cadbury fills his chocolates with emulsifiers and powdered milk and other such horrors. I have got no idea what an emulsifier is but I imagine it is not as good for you as an apple.
I am going to have to start making the chocolates very soon, over the weekend really, and I have cleared everything off the big table in the conservatory, where it is cold, in readiness.
I have just had somebody telephone for a taxi job which Mark has gone off and done. He has taken somebody to Carlisle, even though it is the middle of the night. They want him to wait for them and bring them back. Usually when people want you to wait for them and then come straight back it is because they are buying or selling drugs. There are several addresses in Windermere which young people visit in this way. They explain to the taxi driver that they just need to see their mate about something quickly and then go back again. It is aways funny to ask them what, conversationally, and to hear them tying themselves into deeper and deeper fibs.
I do not think this is a drug dealing job, though, the chap sounded sensible and grown-up, and assured me that he was a regular customer, which he must have been for him to have my telephone number, although I did not have the first idea who he was. I am utterly hopeless at remembering customers. They get in and say cheerily It’s Us Again, and I have to pretend that I am pleased to see them. It always disappoints them when I can’t remember where they are going. Some of them get in and say Goodness, what an amazing coincidence, we got in your taxi last year, do you remember us? Of course unless they have given an exceptionally generous tip, and I mean exceptionally generous, like a hundred quid or something, it does happen, or unless they were sick, then they have made absolutely no impact on me whatsoever.
My customer services are truly rubbish.
Mark is going to be absolutely ages. It is already after midnight. I am going to go and empty the dogs and chuck some wood into the stove, after which I am going to go to bed. There is no point in both of us being up all night.
Still the cash will come in very useful indeed.
It is nearly Christmas.
PS. Mark has just called. They were going to a strip club. He has declined to go with them and is going to have a sleep in the taxi until they get bored and come back. He does not think it will take very long.
