It is Friday, and we are expecting that we might be busy, largely because everybody has been paid.
By everybody, I do not mean us, obviously. One of the magnificent benefits to driving a taxi is that we do not have to wait until the end of every month before we have that blessed moment of financial relief. Our cash comes in roughly three or four times every hour.
This suits me really very well indeed. All taxi drivers have known those moments of desperation when they have rushed out to work for an hour or two in the morning in order to raise sufficient funds for the purchase of bread and milk, followed by going out again a bit later in order to finance a gallon of diesel.
We would have been in a terrible mess if we have been obliged to wait for the thirty first.
Fortunately we are not, and hence never have to exercise that terrible self control necessary when there is a bank account with an awful lot of numbers in it, coupled with a desperate longing for beer, cigarettes, a takeaway curry, and possibly a small bag of white powder.
Of such choices are weeks of milkless tea and bread and margarine made.
Fortunately this never happens to taxi drivers, or at least, almost never. One of our number has got himself in some difficulty with the officers of the law when he discovered that the car behind him as he hurtled back from Newby Bridge at seventy five miles an hour was in fact a police car.
The rest of us told him it was his own fault for not recognising the shape of the lights, and that in any case he had been doing a ridiculously under-priced job because the girl was pretty, and so it absolutely served him right.
We have not seen him since but he has got another job as a hotel night porter so I don’t suppose he will starve to death.
In other news, Oliver has been going to the gym and is eating his head off, in a determined effort to become stouter. He came with me on the dog-walk again this morning, even running for bits of it.
If you wish to become dispirited about your own sixty-year-old fitness I can highly recommend taking daily exercise with a teenage aspirational Army recruit. Even carrying a rucksack full of bricks he still outpaced me with ease.
When we got home I made ice cream, with egg yolks and condensed milk and thick cream. Then I made milk shakes, with peanut butter and bananas and egg whites. Then I cooked a chicken. Then I filled dates with peanut butter.
He had cheese on toast for his breakfast and started on that lot. Then he went to the gym.
I made him a chicken and chilli sauce wrap to take to work, with a pile of sausage rolls, meatballs, chocolate and fruit.
I think this weight-gain shenanigans might turn out to be a bit costly.
We have visitors as well. Lucy and Jack have arrived this evening, their very helpful intention being to saw up the massive stack of firewood in the yard and to take it home. They did not start tonight, having had a busy week, but loitered sociably, catching up on news and drinking coffee. This almost ended in disaster when Rosie, who is far too short to get on the sofa with ease, took a desperate run at it and cannoned into the leg of the table, spilling coffee absolutely everywhere.
I told her she was a bonehead, and mopped it up, but her abject disgrace did not last long, and when I popped in at home this evening she was curled up in an armchair and snoring inelegantly, whilst Lucy and Jack ate chicken flavoured pasta and watched some costume drama on Netflix, which all looked very cosy and contented.
Oliver and I are at work.
We will have to make a start on the woodcutting tomorrow.
