Saturday night was brilliantly, monumentally busy.
There were people everywhere, and we hardly stopped.
It is good fun driving a taxi when the night is like that, in my youth I absolutely loved it, a thrilling blend of hunting and good fortune.
I enjoyed it last night, actually, perhaps not with the intense joy I remember from my younger days, but nevertheless I turned the music up ear-blastingly loud and hurtled along the quiet lanes. By the late evening I was in that happy state where the taxi had become almost an extension of myself. It is a machine that I know really very well indeed, and just occasionally I can sink into the music and the celebratory feeling and the whole thing becomes splendid fun.
The dawn was coming up when we finished, and we walked round the Library Gardens, breathing in the heavy scent of the blossoms and listening contentedly to the dawn chorus and watching an owl hunting among the trees in the beautiful grey morning.
We ambled home to stack pound coins into neat piles, and thought how happy we are. We had our courtship in summer dawns just like this one, years ago, after busy taxi nights, staggering to an exhausted halt at the roadside by the lake when everybody had gone home, to watch the sunrise and hear the birds waking up the day.
It is such a fortunate life, we thought, here in this beautiful place, arranging our lives to suit ourselves, with children whose company we enjoy, and a lovely little house, and one another, how good it all is.
We had been talking on the taxi rank about having a bucket list, which is a list of things that you need to cram into life urgently if you find out that you have not got much of it left, and despite thinking quite hard about it, neither of us could think of anything that we might put on one except the things that we are already doing.
We realised that we like our lives exactly as they are, and although obviously there are lots of adventures we think we might enjoy having, we wouldn’t feel in the least deprived if we didn’t get round to any of them. Getting the camper van fixed is probably the closest we could dream up, which is not much of a bucket list really.
Of course it helps when the sun shines, which is has done, brightly and cheerily all weekend, it has been magnificent, we have soaked up Vitamin D like kitchen roll in the dog’s accidents, and like the kitchen roll we are just starting to change colour a bit, which making me feel happy.
Today followed the same pattern as yesterday on the whole, in that we slept for not nearly long enough, and then got up to reacquaint ourselves with the children and make ourselves a picnic before sloping off back to bed for a siesta.
When we got up for the first time in fact the house was mysteriously quiet, as Number Two Daughter had bullied Ritalin Boy into a hushed breakfast and then taken him swimming.
We replenished the fridge out of last night’s takings, and cooked two enormous pizzas to leave on the table for the children, along with a large bowl of strawberries, which we hoped might provide a distraction from the tuck drawer. We bought a bag of spinach, which we obliged Lucy to sample to help with her iron deficiency, not that she seemed to relish the experience especially.
We enquired about how she was getting along with her revision, whilst we were remembering to be virtuous parents, and she said drily that she was getting along with it splendidly, thank you, she and her revision had been sitting companionably next to one another in front of a Japanese film all morning. There seemed little point in asking Oliver about his, since his bag was still lying unopened by the back door and he was with Harry at the park, enjoying the sunshine.
We left them all to it and came out to work.
Another busy day…
