It is Friday night, and the weekend is about to start.
It is our last weekend of cash-creation before we buzz off to the south to have a week of cash dispensing. I suspect that there is going to be a very lot of this.
Of course, this is entirely dependent on whether there is a south left by then, it appears that most of it is ablaze in a terrible globally-warmed inferno brought about by the wickedness of people who do not recycle their plastics and persist in switching on their central heating even before their toothpaste freezes in the tube.
That last has happened to me, and was one of the incidents which inspired me with a passionate devotion to central heating.
The south appears to have become so excitingly flammable that even the Government has noticed, and this evening an alarm went off on Mark’s telephone to tell him all about it. This is because he has not had the foresight to click the button which promises to disable any rubbish which emanates from the Government. I will show him how to do this later, we have got quite enough worries of our own without having to listen to their determination to look caring in the newspapers.
It was a completely unnecessary alarm in any case, because although Cumbria is drier than usual, that is not at all the same as being dry, and this morning I did the Cumbrian thing of hanging my washing outside because it was only raining a bit. Indeed, I went over the fells with the dogs and came back so very wet I had to change my trousers.
I lit the fire, in defiance of all Government guidance, because it was chilly, and hung my trousers in front of it. Really we are becoming a two-tier country, us and the desiccated southerners.
They can all jolly well buzz off when it comes to wanting our water, that’s all I can say. I see no reason why the south should get all the joy of full-time sunshine and then want the contents of Windermere delivered in a lorry. We have suffered for that water. It has certainly not been much like Ibiza up here.
After a cool, and depressingly grey start to the day, in the end things became a little more cheerful, and eventually the sun put in an appearance, once it had got bored with stalking the southerners, and Oliver and Mark went outside to put the finishing touches to Emily’s car.
When I say Finishing Touches, I do not mean that they washed the windscreen and put a bunch of flowers on the seat. I mean they took the wheel off and bashed things about until they found a bit that they thought had been rattling, and then tightened it up. They were pleased with this, although I thought secretly that probably I would have preferred the flowers if I had been Emily. Mark drove my taxi last night and said that it has a rattle, and I nodded wisely, but actually I have never noticed.
Emily is with us now. Oliver was working this evening, so I collected her from the station. I had been helping Oliver to insure the car, and so I knew all about it and occupied the journey back telling her about the intricacies of legal cover and windscreen cover and breakdown cover, none of which she has got. I am not exactly sure that she was very interested.
She has gone to join Oliver at work, and Mark and I are on the taxi rank. I am writing to you and Mark is polishing his new taxi. I can see that it is gleaming even though it is dark. He is very pleased with it. It does not have a cloud of blue smoke and the boot does not burst open when you put the windscreen wipers on.
He says that he is really going to look after this one.
Of course he is.
