I am at Lucy’s.
It is almost eleven at night. Lucy is at work, and Jack is cooking dinner.
I am nicely stuck into a bottle of rum and thought it might be a sensible idea to write to you before I have become completely stuck, in the sense of being so far plugged into it that the world becomes a blur.
I can feel this moment approaching with some speed.
I am having the most idle weekend.
I have not worked at all.
The other taxi drivers are clearly not working either because they keep telephoning me hoping that I will cover taxi jobs for them because they do not want to go to work and somebody wants a taxi. Disappointingly I am not going to do it because of being a hundred miles away and intoxicated, so there will be a lot of walking people tonight.
Sometimes the world is just brutal.
I have been at a party. It was a sixtieth birthday party.
All of my year from school are sixty this year, by which obviously I mean the school sort of year, which obviously runs from September to September for some arcane educational reason that nobody ever seems to question, probably because the new school year starts after harvest or something, in which case it is really too early because lots of things don’t get harvested until September or even October.
Anyway, we are sixty, which is peculiar because in my head really we are all still fourteen. I went to a sixtieth birthday party for one of my old school friends which was stuffed full of old people who looked very much like some teenagers I used to know.
Once upon a time we would have been wagging our heads about to Status Quo and leaving cigarette burns in the carpets, but we have all become very dull now that we are all grandparents.
We were obliged to dress up as people from the nineteen sixties. I have grown out of everything I wore in the nineteen sixties, which is sad, because there are still some clothes I remember with great affection, especially a little pink dress with a pleated skirt. I cried when I grew out of it, maybe I should consider making another one now that I have stopped growing apart from rounder, in the usual post-menopausal way of women.
Hence on my way to the party I stopped at my mother’s house to borrow some nineteen-sixties fashion, although for some reason she did not seem to have kept very much of it. All my requests for mini-skirts and long boots were met with head-shaking, and in the end I borrowed some beads, which I wore with a brilliantly coloured shirt and a scarf tied around my head. I thought that I looked splendidly retrospective, but at the party it was dark so it did not really matter anyway.
I had a terrible flap to get there, because I was staying at the Travelodge conveniently sited just opposite the party, and the satellite which was explaining to me how to get there did not seem to know that some roads were one way going the other way. After that the online parking thing did not work, and kept insisting that I needed to contact Customer Services, who were closed, so by the time I arrived I had worked myself into a terrible flap and was very pleased indeed to drink wine and not be in trouble with the cyber-universe any more.
It was a lovely evening, although noisy, and by the time I staggered back across the road at midnight my voice had become hoarse from yelling, and I collapsed into my tidy hotel bed with some relief.
This morning started very nicely with the Travelodge Unlimited Breakfast, which I decided to take so literally that I was still not hungry when I took the beads back to my mum at four o’clock in the afternoon.
I am staying at Lucy and Jack’s house tonight, because Mark telephoned to tell me that he has finally escaped from his oil rig and will need to be collected from the airport tomorrow morning, and it just seemed to be too difficult to trail back up to the Lake District only to drive back again tomorrow morning.
Lucy is home now, having finished her shift at midnight. We have all eaten, and I am in bed. Jack cooked a splendid dinner which was going to be steak and ale pie but he did not get to the pastry because of the rum, so it was just steak and ale.
I am afraid I have got to go to sleep, because of getting up for an aeroplane tomorrow. It is almost two o’clock.
I will see you tomorrow.
Probably I will be back on the taxi rank by then.
