I have been feeling grumpy with the world.
We were supposed to be finishing work early tonight instead of staying until four and doing the nightclub shift.
The idea of this was so that we could get up early instead of sleeping until lunchtime, and then setting off to the hills just outside Manchester where some of our friends are planning to spend the day together on a long and happy walk.
The thing is, it has been a very quiet week and we realised unhappily late last night that we had not yet earned nearly enough money to pay our bills.
We knew that because of having recklessly wasted all of our money in the past and not having saved any for a rainy day, we just couldn’t afford to stop working on a Saturday night when it actually is busy, and people do want to spend their money in taxis. So we had got to bite the bullet and stay here and work instead of going for a long country walk.
The thing about rainy days is that nobody gets in taxis. They stay at home. Therefore when you have got a taxi and it rains you do not make very much money.
It has been a week of celestial cloud-emptying. Almost nobody in all of the country has looked at the streaming windows and imagined how lovely it would be to spend the weekend out of doors in the Lake District, splashing through puddles and looking at sheep on sodden fell-sides, even the people who live here.
I spent the evening being cross with myself for not being prudent and cautious and not having saved my takings in a jam jar under the bed. Instead I have frittered them on champagne cocktails and school fees and visits to the theatre, and now there was something I want to do and I couldn’t do it.
I knew that if I went over to Mark and said that I would really like to go, he would say straight away that of course it was all right and that we would manage things somehow. After that he would be quiet and distant and troubled for weeks until we had finally earned enough not to be broke any more.
Obviously I couldn’t do that.
I do not at all like not having enough money.
The day was just the usual Saturday rush of sleeping late and then hastily scrambling around trying to get out to work as fast as possible.
As you know, there is a great deal of catering involved in feeding us for twelve hours on the taxi rank, and leaving supplies of burgers and waffles and pizzas for the children at home. I dashed round doing all of that, and Mark took Oliver into Kendal so that he could trade in his PS3 games at the game shop. He traded in lots of dreadful looking old games that he said were rubbish and he didn’t play any more, called things like Dead Man Nightmare and Bloodbath On The Street Corner. I was not sorry that he did not want to play them any more.
He came back radiant with happiness having made seventy quid and bought two new games: which actually was almost the last we saw of him all day, since the new games, which were called things like Horrifying Undead Creatures and Nasty Criminals Behaving Badly, absorbed his entire attention from that moment on.
We went to work.
It was very quiet at work because of the rain.
I didn’t really mind because I have got a brilliant book that I am reading, which is written by JK Rowling disguised as a man and which is ace, and I don’t care if I have got customers or not when I am in the middle of it.
Late at night it started to clear a bit, and then Mark came over to my taxi.
He said that tomorrow is going to be absolutely rubbish here because nobody is here on holiday, and that it might be a happy thing to do to work through until the end tonight and make as much money as we could, and then go to join our walking friends late tomorrow after we had had enough sleep. He said that going for a walk was worth losing a bit of money for, and we should not worry but get on with it.
This is why we are always broke.
I thought that was a lovely idea, and wanted to phone all our friends up straight away and tell them that perhaps we could come after all, but it is two o’ clock in the morning so probably I had better not.
I am feeling very happy. We have made some money, and haven’t finished yet, and we are going to go walking tomorrow, and everything is all right.
I don’t even think it will rain.
