I am having a very difficult night.
It is not nice.
I am in Mark’s taxi.
My shiny new taxi has packed up. It is parked at the side of the road, going nowhere.
The problem is the same problem it had some weeks ago, when it broke down on its way to getting the meter fitted. We got a new bit, but it will keep breaking down until we fix the problem which broke the bit in the first place, possibly related to the accelerator pedal, we are not yet sure.
You might recall that it stops whenever the driver accelerates really hard. Mark fixed this by shoving something underneath the accelerator pedal so that it can’t be stamped down to the floor, however, when I took it to the garage to have the tracking fixed the other day, the mechanic took it out, drove it like an idiot, and broke it again.
Ever since then it has kept stopping, and tonight it stopped three times in the first three jobs.
I restarted it by disconnecting and then reconnecting the battery, but it is not a good look with customers, and in the end I was obliged to bail out and dumped it at the side of the road and took Mark’s taxi instead.
I do not like Mark’s taxi. Everything is in the wrong place, I don’t understand the radio or the meter, the seat is too low even when it is pumped up to its highest possible volume, and even though I have wiped the steering wheel and the handbrake and the surrounding bits, it is still unpleasantly grubby.
Mark does not seem to feel the imperative to polish the dashboard or to chuck out his old biscuit wrappers and all the disgusting rubbish left behind by customers.
I am not enjoying my evening.
Rubbish left behind by customers was in fact the starting point to my whole day, when some completely tiresome muppet banged on the door at ten o’clock this morning.
It was the new ten o’clock, not the old one, but I did not go to bed until after five, the new five, that is, and I was not impressed.
He had left his wallet in my taxi at some time on Saturday night, and had spent the morning ringing round taxi companies, until one of them presumably got cross at being disturbed in the middle of the night and told him where I live.
I staggered out to the taxi in my dressing gown and unearthed the wallet, without anything that might have been described as enthusiastic customer service, although I don’t think the bloke noticed. He didn’t tip last night and therefore did not merit exceptional middle-of-the-night civility.
I got dressed when they had gone, because I had to get up anyway, as we were expecting visitors.
One of Rosie’s poopies was coming to see us. The people who adopted her were visiting Windermere, and wanted to show me how wonderfully well she had grown up.
The poopies are almost a year old now. The new owner told me that they were planning a birthday party for her, with doggie birthday cake and party bags for all of her little doggie friends.
I forbore to comment. Some events are better left unremarked, and in any case I was torn between horror and sympathy, because the lady can’t have children, and her need is so great that it bleeds out of her every word. It is a tragedy, because they would have made gentle, loving parents, and a child would probably enjoy them more than a dog.
Not that the dog seemed to mind, she had grown into a first class buffoon, bouncing about and barking interminably and infuriatingly, despite being unsuccessfully bribed to shut up with dog treats, which Rosie helped her eat anyway.
Rosie and Roger remembered her, although without any great enthusiasm, which was just as well because the poopy had forgotten them completely.
We went out on the fell afterwards, and they did some charging about and barking of their own, relieved to be out in the chill morning.
It was dreadfully cold. There was an icy wind, and I had not put a jersey on.
When I got back I was so cold it took me some time before I could be certain that I still had fingers. It was supposed to be my day for not eating anything, as you might recall has happened on the last few Sundays, but it felt as though my very core had turned to ice, like Kay in the fairy story, and after a little while I decided that I did not want to be thin that badly, and warmed myself up with porridge.
After that I was in the very happy position of having completed all of my usual weekend tasks, and set to painting the Advent calendars.
Advent is barrelling down on me like an irritable Aberdeen Angus on a steep slope.
I had better get on with them.
