I am pleased to announce that my headache has subsided below the line above which drugs are an unfortunate necessity.
It has crumpled to a dull, background thudding, the sort of percussion that you might expect to find on a CD entitled Blissful Relaxation For Meditations, rather than the kind you would get on Queen’s Greatest Hits.
I am pleased about this, although it is still mildly irritating. I expect it will have disappeared by tomorrow.
I will be glad about this, because I have had a very busy day, and the background headache-pulsing has not been helpful.
My taxi is not working properly.
I do not know what is the matter with it. It is not running properly. Mark says that it is only running on two cylinders and talked me through an anxious fifteen minutes of unplugging a plug, squirting stuff into it, and then plugging it back together again. This did not fix the problem because the next thing that I need to do is to wipe the fault code off the engine. You do not do this with a cloth and some bleach. You do this with a diagnostic machine.
We have got two diagnostic machines. One is in Bath with Oliver, the other is in Mark’s car in Aberdeen.
Jack has one as well but he is busy rescuing people who have paid the RAC for the privilege, and he will not have the time to come racing up to the Lake District to be the fourth emergency service for his common-law-mother-in-law.
Mark ordered me a diagnostic plug today, so that I would have a tiny diagnostic machine of my Very Own. You plug it into your car and download an App on to your telephone. You switch it all on and it tells you what is wrong with your car. After that you explain that there is nothing to worry about, and tell it to wipe off the fault codes. Probably they all come back again half an hour later, but if you just keep the machine plugged in then you can keep wiping them off and manage to run your car reasonably well for ages.
I hope it arrives soon. My taxi is chugging embarrassingly. I am ignoring it and pretending that it always sounds as though somebody has emptied a bucket of spanners on to a drum kit. So far all my customers have been too unobservant or too polite to comment.
It started chugging on the way out to Asda this afternoon.
I was going shopping, obviously. I have had a grim day doing the rounds of various establishments trying not to forget soap powder and coffee, and wondering if my taxi would manage to get me back home again, along with some vaguely anxious speculation about what I might do if it didn’t.
Fortunately it kept going, because there are not many potential rescuers at the moment, and I managed to clunk back into the alley to unload it all in the rain.
It has also been Clean Sheets Day, which meant a last-minute scramble of sheet-replacement and shopping-unpacking before I came out to work. I had spent so much time faffing about with the taxi that I have not managed to hoover or dust anything, although I did manage to fling the sheets back on to the bed, so I will not have to sleep on the sofa tonight.
I have been at work ever since then. It is almost eleven o’clock, and I have not had a customer since half past seven. I do not really mind this, because of the extremely dubious state of the taxi. I have been at work and my conscience is clear.
I am going to give up very soon and chug off home.
At least I will have clean sheets.
