Bank holiday weekend. It is double time, which feels wonderfully like extortion, and I am sitting optimistically on the taxi rank. There are a lot of people milling about but probably they will all go home in Ubers so mostly they are just nuisances rather than welcome sources of pots of holiday cash.
You will know if it has got busy, because this will suddenly become considerably abbreviated, and very probably you will have to wait until Tuesday for any sensible communication. I am not such an enthusiastic diarist that I am going to write frantically in between muppets banging on the window and gurning hopefully at me.
I have just picked up a couple of customers, actually, whom I like very much. Usually I don’t talk enough to customers to find out if I like them or not, but these two are lovely. They are from the North East somewhere, and the chap drives a taxi up there.
He has just discovered that he has got a shadow on his lung. The doctors have not told him what it is. He will have to wait until after Easter to find out.
I imagine that will put something of a damper on their much-longed-for Easter holiday. It gave me a cold chill of horror when they told me, and they are just taxi customers.
I am hoping with all my very soul that it is all right. He is far too nice to become sick.
I do wish that wishing like that made a difference. I know you can call it praying, it really doesn’t matter what you call it, because it doesn’t make any difference, if that is the path someone has got to walk, then they will walk it and you can wish yourself cross-eyed longing for it to be different.
It is worth wishing for courage to get on with it, that usually works, especially if you believe it does.
I am cross with the Gods. Of all the customers they could have dropped that on, I wish they hadn’t chosen him.
But onwards.
Mark is home, which is splendid, and we started the day with a comfortably idle cup of coffee in bed with the dogs. I don’t shirk about like this when I am at home by myself, of course, what a shocking waste of the day that would be. When there is just me I get up, so it is one of the small joys of Mark’s presence, along with somebody else cutting up firewood.
The dogs were beside themselves with happiness. Being allowed to lie on a large towel on our bed for half an hour every morning seems for them to be the ultimate in indulgent bliss, and they stretched out joyfully.
The dogs don’t drink coffee, obviously.
After that Mark took his mother to the station and I took the newly-shorn dogs out over the fells. They hate having their fur cut, but it has cheered them up a great deal, and they bounded around and barked at everything with newly-cooled-down enthusiasm. It is hot and uncomfortable to dash around when you are wearing a heavy, greasy old coat, and they bounced through the mud with a great deal more enthusiasm than I felt. It might be Easter, but the weather was rubbish, wet, windy and cold, and I was not sorry for my own heavy, greasy old coat.
When we got back, to my own great excitement, Mark volunteered to help with the bed head. This was hugely welcome, because it is an enormous, unwieldy object, and shockingly difficult to manage by myself. Also Mark can understand three dimensions all at once, which made life very much easier.
We manhandled it and put right some of the earlier mistakes. Then Mark made a cross with chalk on the places where he could see that the buttons ought to be, and we tufted lots of buttons before deciding that we would stop and have a cup of tea before work.
There are only four buttons left to go.
It is not a very perfect bed head, although that is not Mark’s fault. It is a lot closer to being perfect than it was when I was doing it by myself. The bits that he has helped with are almost completely perfect.
I do not mind. I am very used to being a bit dim, so it was not surprising.
It is a wonderful, exciting bed head, and it is going to look beautiful even if we have to put pillows in front of some bits.
I might not get time to write in here on Sunday.
I am hoping that it will be busy.
Tonight was not, although it is so expensive to get in a taxi that it doesn’t matter, every job is a tenner.
Hurrah.
