We have not been at work.
It has been the most splendid evening.
Our friends Kate and Kevin came to visit and we went out for dinner.
I was supposed to be cooking, but it snowed last night, and when we got up it was so cold in the conservatory, which is where we usually eat when there are a lot of us, that it was all just too difficult either to heat up the conservatory, or to organise myself into the thoughtful preparation of things that could be eaten with our fingers in the living room. Mark listened to me agonising for almost ten seconds before he decided that we would eat out, so we did.
We haven’t seen Kate and Kevin for ages, and they have had so many exciting adventures in the intervening time that we were positively agog listening to them. They had been to Egypt, and after dinner Kevin cleverly persuaded our television to show their photographs, which were utterly stunning, tombs and carved stone and breathtaking artistry, and the sun setting over the Nile, and I have determined that one day we will go to Egypt.
That day might be some time away at the moment.
We have had something of a holiday ourselves today.
This was rather unexpected, and really quite splendid. As it happened, it had snowed, so the day already had something of a holiday feeling, snow is every bit as good for feeling like that as sandals and unfamiliar alcohol served with a straw. We were woken up early – more of that in a minute – and realised that for the first time in as long as we could remember,. we had nothing whatsoever to do.
We couldn’t do any more to the camper van before its MOT. Mark hauled so much firewood yesterday that we have no room to stack any more, and I had cleaned the house and done the hoovering whilst the dogs were out from under my feet. There was no cooking to be done, because we were going out for dinner. In short, it was a day of complete shirkiness.
This was wonderful.
We dug out the camper van drawings and spent the entire day having cups of tea and obsessively planning and re-arranging, deciding and then changing our minds, until the whole thing was drawn exactly to our satisfaction, including the placings of the solar panels, the windows, the water tanks and the inverter, and we were surrounded with lots of snipped-out bits of squared coloured paper with things like Fridge and Washing Basket scribbled on them.
After that I needed to do some mending.
This was why we had to get up early.
I had an Adventure last night.
My last customer, in the snowstorm very late last night, was a very drunk girl, who turned out not to have any money.
After a very great deal of handbag-emptying and drunken mumbling, she said that she had got some cash in the house and would go and get it.
I have had experience of this sort of customer before. They disappear into their house and are never seen again, no matter how much you bang on the door, so I said that I would go with her.
I followed as she staggered into the house, and stepped on to the doormat before she could slam the door. Then I leaned on the doorframe and waited whilst she realised that she still didn’t have any money.
I suggested that she transferred some to my bank with her phone, but she had lost her phone. She staggered about telling me that she would pay me in a minute, and then, to my surprise, swung round and caught hold of handfuls of my clothes.
I was wearing dungarees, so she had got hold of the straps.
She started trying to bash my head against the walls, and then tried to drag me outside.
She was thirty years younger than me, and rather bigger, but I was not drunk, and I fought hard. She would not let go, and eventually fell over the doorstep and collapsed into the snow, dragging me on top of her, still clinging on.
I grabbed a handful of snow and rubbed it in her face, which did the trick. She let go of me, and I jumped up. I went back into the house and wrote my phone number on the back of a card with her eye pencil, and told her that she had better call and pay in the morning. I knew she wouldn’t, but I knew where she lived, and usually written demands with threats of court action work quite well.
Then I left her to it and chugged off through the fast-falling snow. It was time to go home by then anyway.
My trousers and cardigan had torn badly.
I was upset about the cardigan, which was a glorious cashmere production from Johnstons of Elgin, warm and splendid for snowy winter taxi nights, but these things happen, and one day when we have got a clear credit card I will buy another.
We were woken up this morning by the doorbell ringing at nine o’clock, and when Mark crawled out of bed to answer it, it was her.
She had lost her phone, and its self-finding system had tracked it to our house.
She had dropped it in the taxi.
Mark had some sharp words with her about the irresponsibility of robbing and then assaulting elderly ladies, and she was suitably horrified, because such was her state of intoxication that she had forgotten she had done it.
She was, she said, a nurse.
Hurrah for the good old NHS.
She apologised, and gave me the taxi fare plus thirty quid towards the cardigan, which was not even the tiniest fraction of what it cost, but I am resigned. These things happen, and I have almost finished mending it during our holiday today. It will never be beautiful again, but it will not matter.
It will still be warm on snowy nights in the taxi.
